Judi

Hi, my name is Judi Gallagher and I've been an Instructional Asst. at the Cunniff School in Watertown for 11 years. I am currently working on my masters degree and certification to have a classroom of my own. I am very inexperienced in the use of technology and am taking this class in the hopes of building those skills. I am currently assigned to the 5th grade and would like to contribute more to the classroom in the way of technology.
 * [|www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypgjlLr3X9w]media type="custom" key="10138783"Assignment #1**

Since I don't have my own classroom I couldn't refer back to any lessons I'd done that could utilize any of these search engines. I did get on each one and check them out however. I wished I had talked to Erin (we work at same school) before doing all the research for my master's paper. As I've said before I'm woefully behind the times technology-wise and when I was doing research this past spring it was very cumbersome sifting through the multitude of possibilities that come up when you're doing a search. What I decided to look at for this assignment is books that have been turned into movies. When both my kids were going into freshman year they had to write a paper on a book that became a movie. Since you had to read the book and watch the movie, you wanted to pick a story you'd enjoy. We googled things and relied on our memories for suggestion which resulted in a very inconclusive search. The Google Squared search engine was unbelievable. In less than 10 seconds I had before me what probably took an hour to do the other way.
 * Assignment #2**

http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=Books+made+into+Movies#table/agv9JJxPd0cYv3nNR5hcqf6g


 * Assignment #3**

Hi Judi,

I dont see your embedded map here.

Erin

That's what I emailed you about. It was there, but not the map I created, it just brought you to my personal My Maps and you could click on the map; but I don't think that's how it's suppose to work. I'll resend my email--it had more info in it. Judi.---Erin: It shows up when I'm in edit mode (I assume you can go into edit mode on mine). I am stumped as to why it's not showing on the wiki; it did originally but it didn't show my map, it took you to 'my maps' in google maps and it allowed you to then be able to play around in my account. I'm going to redo it and make sure it's under my google account. One thing that I thought was great about the map function was that it tabulated your total mileage, which is very beneficial if you like to walk for exercise. Hope it works this time.

Assignment 4: I chose Glogsters as my tool to feature here. It reminds me of building an interactive scrap book page. I'm still quite a novice on it and my creation took many hours to make. I think with time I will get faster and hopefully more creative. I'm not as concerned about students' ability to navigate the sight because they just are so much more adept at figuring out technology. I'm predicting that I'll actually be able to learn some from them. This glogster will be part of my final project which will be a multi lesson unit on Halloween. We don't really celebrate Halloween in the public schools that much but it does have a rich history. Since the kids are all thinking about it during October I decided to put the emphasis more on a research project than celebrating a holiday. The unit theme will be the historical evolution of Halloween and one of the lessons will call for them to create a Glogster poster based on the Halloween symbol that they have chosen. There will be room for personal interpretation of what constitutes a Halloween symbol but they should be able to support their choice with sound research and reasoning. Creating a poster, whether virtually or manually, draws on various strengths. First you must have done thorough research on your topic. Then you must decide what point you want to focus on and why is that considered such an important aspect. Since space is very limited you have to evaluate all your material and decide how to portray it to 'get the most bang for your buck'. What I think is so valuable about the virtual poster is that you can 'layer' information and other resources under the main topics you have presented.

http://judig.glogster.com/Glog-3348/

Assignment 5
 * [|www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypgjlLr3X9w] media type="custom" key="10138783"**

Great example of a glogster. I've just started using that site myself and this is a good example of what you can do with it. All the tools were interesting and valuable. Some of the ones that I was most intrigued by was the Graphic Organizers, Multimedia and Digital Storytelling, and Literacy Tools (specifically In The Book). The graphic organizer had a lot of different graphic organizers for a variety of applications. They all required some joining or registering of some sort, but that would be ok, it's a lot simpler than building your own each time. The digital storytelling could be used for every subject, some more conducive than others. This would be a great idea to showcase students' writing and also have them report on books they've read. In The Book, under Literacy Tools, would serve well as a way to report on what a student has read. It's not always easy to monitor each student and make sure they've completed their independent reading; this would help out in that area.