Johanna's+wiki

http://techintheclassroomedcos11.wikispaces.com/Johanna%27s+wikiHi, my name is Johanna and I currently work for the Acton Public Schools as a resource room teacher grades K-3. I got my Master's from Lesley College in '82, so I am fast approaching my 30th year of teaching..(A fact which never ceases to amaze me.) The vast majority of those years were spent doing preschool special education, which I truly loved. For two years, however, I lived in Montana and worked in the Bozeman Public Schools as their preschool special educator. That just about did me in... If you ever want to appreciate living in Massachusetts, go live in Montana for a couple of years. Very fortunately for me, a good friend said, "you may want to just take a leave of absence", as I was about to dive headlong into my new adventure and actually resign from the Acton schools. So after two years of complete work stress for no pay and no respect (perhaps I exaggerate a little here, but not much..) I came back and got a job back in Acton as the resource room teacher at Gates School.

If, by any chance, you are reading this and happen to be from Montana, please don't take offense. It is by far the most beautiful place I have ever been (except, maybe, Hawaii). I just couldn't live there, and I DEFINITELY couldn't teach there.

Anyway, I am extremely happy in my current position, and can totally imagine working in this job for another ten years. If you had asked me back when I was on year 27 of doing preschool special ed, I would not have been able to say that. Teetering on the brink of burn-out, I was... I think the thing that has allowed me to teach at all for 30 years is that I have been able to keep learning and growing as a teacher. That may sound corny but it's true, and it is something particularly true about the Acton Schools. They really encourage professional growth, and most of my colleagues seem to really embrace that spirit. I am surrounded by people excited by learning as much as they can, and getting better all the time at what they do. It has also made a big difference for me to shift my focus to the elementary grades (something I have often thought of doing but never gotten the chance to do), because I was a complete rookie when I started three years ago ("what's a digraph??"), and every day/week/year has been an ongoing learning experience. And one of the coolest things to watch is how much technology all the elementary teachers use in their classrooms. Next fall we will have Smart boards in all classrooms 1-6, and I have been totally impressed with how using the Smart boards can engage so many learners in so many different ways. I also use the computer a lot with my students because they all have a variety of learning and emotional disorders, and often the computer is the only thing that grabs them.

So here I am taking this on-line course about technology in the classroom... And right off the bat it's a learning experience, because I have never taken an on-line course before. This morning I Googled, "what's a wiki?"...Now I know. I'm looking forward to hearing from other folks about what they do for work and why technology is important to them in their jobs. Because truthfully, after years of wrestling with the reality of technology in our society (ask my kids: I was the VERY last person they knew to buy a microwave...), I am coming to really appreciate some of the wonderful things technology can do for us. (And, of course, I need the credit...)

I'm also curious to see what other people do with their Wiki pages... like, should I really be putting links or widgets in?? Clueless about widgets..

ASSIGNMENT TWO:

I work with all sorts of different students, ranging in age from 5-11, and diagnosed with a variety of learning issues. For this assignment I have decided to focus on one particular student, who is a very bright and VERY anxious student second grader (going into 3rd grade). He has a lot of enthusiasm for certain subjects, but really struggles with attention,organization, memory, and overall confidence about learning. He loves computers, and I recently decided to try doing an integrated long-term project with him (I tutor him during the summer) that would address reading, spelling, writing, and math, all using the computer. I am using the theme of Whales as the foundation for this project. In our last meeting I let him show me how he searches for information on the computer, because we had previously brainstormed some questions together (i.e. how long can whales hold their breath under water? What is the biggest whale?, etc.). He immediately went to "Ask.com", which was a reasonable strategy, except it was very linear in its response. I realized from this assignment that Google Squared would be an excellent way for him to use his questions as a way to __compare__ information, rather than get just one piece of information at a time. I created the following Google Square to show him how we could pick 6-8 species of whales, and in one view be able to compare size, habitat, etc.

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While creating this search tool, I found myself getting frustrated with some of its (or my?) apparent limitations, like that the amount of information for each added column I got back really depended on how I worded the column heading. For someone like Colin, I would like to have the search tool as complete as possible (with all the squares filled in with at least some information) before presenting it to him, because he would very easily get really distracted by the "searches within a search" that that blank squares presented. It turned out to be quite time consuming to do that (and I have in fact left some blank -- hope that's ok for the purposes of this assignment). For an older student, however, just trying to fill in the blanks would be an excellent way to become more literate with the web, how to evaluate reliable resources, etc. And a very big **positive** f or me was that as I created this search tool, I was really flooded with ideas about how to expand on this theme with Colin. For example, we could make a bar graph charting the relative sizes of whales form smallest to largest; we could collect YouTube recordings of different whale songs, and make a game about matching the songs to the species; we could make a geographical representation of where each species of whale might be found on the globe, etc. Google squared struck me as a very powerful tool for inspiring kids to think about different connections that can be made with information, and ways for teachers to integrate lots of different curriculum areas with this one theme. Very cool!

ASSIGNMENT 3:


media type="custom" key="10081817"

I've been trying to find a widget that is fun (like the one I picked) but without ads! Hard to do...

Here is my MAP! I decided to show the trip I took across country with my two daughters, partly to visit colleges, and partly to get back to New England from Montana. I discovered that S. Dakota is a really COOL state!

media type="custom" key="10076613"

Hi Johanna, Your map should be embedded just like your Widget.

Erin

ASSIGNMENT 4: Create a lesson plan using a website.

 I decided to use the website [] to do a poetry project with my third grade students with special needs. There are three boys who are extremely reluctant writers, and who also have a lot of difficulty brainstorming new ideas. In my experience, most writing projects rely heavily on being able to brainstorm some sort of an "idea web" on which to build the piece. This can be very difficult for some kids to do. They are also most often more motivated if they can use the computer and type their ideas instead of hand writing them.

1) First I would pull up this website on the Smart Board in the classroom, describe the concept of a shape poem, and demonstrate how the shape poems are written. I would pick a shape, and everyone would be encouraged to suggest some word or phrase that applies to the shape. We would then complete the poem as a class and print it out.

2) I would then have the small group of "reluctant writers" come to the Resource Room, and using my laptop, have them each pick a shape with which to start. I'm a firm believer in working together, so I would have all three boys help each other brainstorm the words and phrases. I think this would be good modeling and practice for them. I would then ask them each to compose their own poem on the computer, using the list of words and phrases they had brainstormed together.

3) Finally, I would have them each print them out, and read them out loud to the small group. We would also cut them out, mount them and then decorate them in some artistic way, to add another creative component.

4) Here is an example of the intended result: (without the mounting, decorating, etc.)



Assignment 5: Part !: For this assignment I made a tagxedo representing an essay on bowhead whales that one of my students wrote. I thought he would like the animation and artfulness of it... I was able to attach a link, but for the life of me could not figure out how to copy the html code to make it a widget, so it would just show up automatically. Believe me, I tried.  []

Part 2: First, I found the udtechtoolkit website a very interesting place, which I had spent some time exploring earlier. For this assignment, I tried the following parts: a) Readwritethink Story mapping graphic organizers. This is an interesting tool, because depending on the topic (i.e. character, setting, conflict) it prompts students with questions, which guides them towards creating a graphic organizer. I created one about whales (of course!) and conflicts, and had fun navigating around the page. The BIG downside was that I couldn't save it and do back to it!

b) This is under "math tools", called Number Navigator. I NEED THIS!!!! I have a student who is transitioning to all keyboard work because of his profound fine motor issues, and this would be perfect for him. Unfortunately, I tried to download the software, and this program thus far only works on Windows 95 and 98. I will keep searching to see if other math tools have something similar.

So then I tried Sumdog, which has a great selection of games that practice rote math skills. I loved it, got very engaged and started playing a lot of the different games. It (of course) took me a while to figure out how to navigate, but then it was a very easy, fun place to be. It is good because it has all kinds of different numeracy activities (operations, rounding, ordering numbers, etc). Another benefit is that it keeps track of a student's progress, which is always an issue for me.

c) Literactive: I have been looking for an interactive reading site that has beginner activities for my K-1 students, and this site has them. There are some really interesting phonemic awareness activities, like matching just sounds, etc. and also has some guided reading stories that give you lots of options (you can listen to the story, listen while the print/text is being read out loud, or just read without any sound, just print. I liked this site very much.