PD10-11GroupA

What do you hope to learn in this study group? Please try to make your goals specific, relevant and trackable. As your study group evolves, your goals might change as short-term goals lead to long-term goals. We will take time to refine goals about half-way through the year.


 * understand what web 2.0 actually is Ideas
 * find some examples of web 2.0 apps that other teachers successfully used with kids
 * figure out how and when we can learn these methods
 * choose 1 app and develop an appropriate project to use with our kids

These are terrific goals! Web 2.0 apps that NFS teachers have used successfully include Glogster, wordle, and wikispaces. A really cool app is VoiceThread. I haven't had a chance to do much of that with students yet but there are a bunch of resources for educators to help figure out how to use it. I even found a whole wiki all about it. I added it to your list of resources below! ~ ks

What resources can you identify to help you reach these goals?
 * [|Discovery Learning] has web-based classes on using technology with students
 * Bucks IU has workshops on using web 2.0 apps - [|schedule here]
 * http://b-7bobcats.wikispaces.com/ Traci B's awesome wiki
 * Voicethread 4 Education
 * Tony Vincent (web educator) has a wiki chock full of ideas & examples: [|Cloudy with a Chance of Learning]

Examples of what we have done or seen done
10/27/10

We talked about the difference between Glogster and Pixie, and what kind of projects we could do with kids. We played with Glogster and started some glogs to publish student's writing. Sean was excited about the 4th graders' recent project in Pixie around the Constitution Center. But he is also a bit frustrated because sometimes it crashes and doesn't save changes. The students weren't saving in the correct place or editing completely. He wasn't sure where they should save or how to make the slides into a movie to post on his webpage.

Courtney is thinking of publishing her student's personal narratives on a glog. She wanted to figure out how to use Audacity to record student work. It didn't work the way she expected so we played with that a bit.

Next time we will come back with what we have done in glogster and report how the project has developed. We will be thinking of what other apps we would like to practice with and develop a few new project ideas.

November 29, 2010

Jennifer and Courtney had lots of success using Glogster to publish audio-recordings of our personal narratives. Courtney shared her glog at her November writing celebration. Parents loved being able to listen to each student tell their own story using expression! Sean is working on a glogster at the moment!

We then discussed the idea of using Pixie to make digital story books/boards. Jennifer is currently using it with her class's 2nd personal narrative. 5th grade will use it when they do research projects on the civil rights movement in January/February. We're having fun and learning lots!

Andi will start using Quest Atlantis with 4th and 5th grade in January. She also continues to work regularly with all students on Pixie!