A league of their own: A history of women's baseball!

I chose to do my petcha kucha on the history of women in baseball. I grew up playing softball and admiring the women of the past. I think it's a great history topic that many people can enjoy learning about since most people have experience with baseball. Here is the link to my presentation.

Second Life

In week 10 we were to watch the video Orientation in Second Life.

Watching the video on Second Life was interesting. I had never experienced such a learning environment before in school. I think that maybe using this could really help with teaching cirriculum and maybe keep students more interested. Second Life seems like it could be a little bit overwhelming with the wealth of information that is contained within.

I have never used anything like this before in school. I think it could be great. I liked the idea of printing a guided worksheet so that students do not miss important information. Before I used second life I would like to do a little more research and experience it for myself before I used it with my future students. I think it would be hard for me to know what potential it had for my class room otherwise. I also think I would do my students a great disservice if I wans't familiar with the program.

Google Forms

Here is the link to my google form!

The results of the survey I posted showed that people applied to either a small number of colleges (i.e. 1 college) or more than 4. The common reason for selecting the university or college they are attending was because of proximity to home and the cost. One result showed that somebody had recieved a scholarship. Most of the majors fell into the Education field.

Create Yourself!

This week our video to watch was Digital Youth Portrait: Sam.

The thing that I thought was the greatest about this video is the attitude of Sam's parents. I thought it was so awesome that they really saw past just how much time Sam was spending texting or chatting on the internet or overall how much time she spent with technology. Her parents really saw all the benefits Sam was going to gain from all her time with technology.

For me, my family that I live with understands the importance of techonology and really encourage skill building. My dad on the other hand, while he thinks technology is important gets very annoyed with how much time I spend using it. Techonolgy is a huge part of life and is only going to continue to keep growing and I think people need to realize and understand this but we also need to learn how to balance our computer and cell phone and networking so that we still have time in the here and now and get to enjoy life.

I would really like to help my students see the importance of technology and begin introducing them to its many uses but with that I would also like to teach them moderation. I find it really hard to believe that 3rd grade and sometimes even younger students are already having trouble with this balance by disrupting their learning with having phones, ipods, game systems, etc. out in class.

Wikwiki!

This week our video was Parallel Play or Collaboration–Leveraging the Wiki Platform for High Quality Work.

I honestly feel that this video was a bit hard to sit through. It was full of great infromation on how to utilize wikis in and outside of the classroom but I was really having trouble getting this information. Not that I didn't understand the information but had difficulty actually getting the important stuff out of the video.

In highschool some of my teachers began using website similar to wikis. I loved that they used this even for basic uses such as to keep parents and students updated. I liked knowing I could go get notes and missed assigments and not have to get behind.

The idea of wikis are great! I just have to wonder just how mature my students will be and if they will be able to handle the responsibility of using a wiki and if parents will be a teaching partner and help teach their students these responsibilites. And as always there is the time factor.

The Wizard of Apps

This week we were required to watch the video "The Wizard of Apps". This video is one created by Joyce Velenza who is a school librarian. Her video was so full of information on different resources for different ways to really use the internet and how to leave a good digital footprint. The video was done as a parody to the "Wizard of Oz" which helped keep it entertaining. The biggest takeaway was that there are endless sources that instruct how to truly utilize the internet and how to do it safely. It is also important that we spread this knowledge and teach others how to use these resources.

I relate some of this information in this video to being in highschool and being taught how to use resources such as ebscohost to research for school papers. Unfortunately the information we were given throughout high school was nothing as great as the information Joyce has to give the students of her school.

As a teacher, I would like to have time to discuss some of these resources with my students and introduce them to how to apply some of these resources. However, I fear that this will be hard but it may also depend a lot on what school district I end up in.



Since I am an elementary education major I though looking at Boolify would be benifitial to me and my future classroom. One thing I have always had problems with was knowing how to perform a good search so I thought that if using a kid friendly search engine such as http://www.boolify.org/ I could start teaching children at a younger age how to find good research information. Boolify uses the Bolean Search method and puts it in a visual representation to help you see how to form a good search. The website also offers awesome lessons on how to evaluate a website, how to use the Bolean Search method and how to refine search options. This website would be great for beginning researchers. I would really like the opprotunity to incorporate this into my elementary classroom!

The miracle of Pregnancy

I decided that something I was really passionate about lately was the growth of me and my baby. I chose to tell the story of the progress of my baby in a story I like to call The Miracle of Pregnancy.