The Kids

Sign Generator

Sign Generator also a pretty fun tool my middle school students can have fun playing with. They can play with symbolism and can critique their artwork. This allows students to express their artistic capability even though they may not be able to create artwork using a paper and crayons mode. I really enjoy the freedom that technology gives our students and the outside of the box thinking that happens with teachers as well.

Spell City

Spell City will come in handy for my ELD intervention students. They really struggle with written language and do not have an appropriate spelling level for their age. This is a group that lacks motivation. I know that using computers and working on their spelling will motivate my struggling students.

Animoto

I have to say that creating a video through Animoto was a lot easier than I anticipated. It was very user friendly and only 3 easy steps. I can totally see my students including this into future projects. This allows for creativity without it being so overwhelming to new emerging technological users. Myself included. Now that I have done it, I can't wait to share it with my students. I can see my low motivated students become engaged with this tool and maybe inspire them to write.

Escape

2nd Technology Assignment

I am quite excitied to see the end result of our second assignment. Our focuss is on poetry and students will be creating a powerpoint presentation on various poetic devices and genres. We are currently on vacation right now and will not come back for another three weeks. I gave them some work to begin at home so that when we come back from we can hit the floor running. Some students were interested on starting their presentations at home. Again, I gave them step by step directions on how to start a power point presentation and how to save it on a flashdrive so they can download onto the server when they came back form vacation. I also reminded them they can use the library at our school site and save their work on the school server.

Student Surveys

After reading student surveys, I realized many students had already done word documents before. Nevertheless, an overwhelming majority expressed that the step by step directions they wrote for saving their work onto the server and creating a word document was very useful. I contemplated giving students a handout, but decided for them to write it down themselves. It worked out pretty well. I am really happy to see that students responded well to the first assignment and had a good time typing their papers. They truly are fast learners with small learning curves when it comes to technology.

First Technology Assignment

Well, I am quite happy to say that my students were able to successfully write their response to literature essays. I also had them save their work onto the sever on our school site. I had never done this before with my students, but it turned out to be pretty easy. I had one of our technology gurus come in and teach my period 1 the steps and procedures. I was then able to teach the other classes throughout the day. Like the nature of technology, there was a glitch in our server and had to wait a couple weeks so that our students were retrained with the new modifications. They were all able to save their work without a problem their second time around. From this project I was able to observe that there was quite an pendulum of technology skills amongst my students. Some had typed out papers before and others had never experiences typing on a computer before. It turned out that they are excellent technology coaches for each other. I am really glad that I was able to experience this with them.