Week 8: Online Communication and Security

As far as online security goes, when I am at school, I always use my school computer hooked up to the district network.  Working in this network definitely feels safer than using my own personal source.  Our district has different spyware programs in place to keep our network as safe as possible.

After taking this course, I see so many benefits to using online communication tools.  Although I often feel like my kindergarten students are too young to use this type of program, I know there are ways I could incorporate it into my classroom.  In my classroom, we have a Courdoroy bear that gets taken home with a different student each weekend.  The students are to take Courdoroy with them everywhere they go (if it works out), take pictures of their adventures, and then journal about their weekend together.  The parents usually end up doing a lot of journaling, with the kids' help.  I think it would be so neat to use a blog for this type of activity rather than just a paper journal.  The students, along with their parents, could create a blog entry each night of the weekend about that particular day.  They could post pictures, and even videos, to share with the class about their time with Courdoroy.  It would be fun to pull up our blog each Monday morning and share it with the class.  This is just one small idea, but I know there are lots of ways to incorporate online communication tools into my kindergarten classroom.

Currently, I rely heavily on e-mail as my major online communication tool.  I use e-mail to communicate with other teachers, parents, and administrators.  It is very easy to use, and I love the convenience of sending an e-mail.  For me, it is much easier than writing a handwritten note or making a phone call, although I often still use both of those when necessary. 

I am so glad we were required to keep this blog throughout our course.  It has shown me how easy it is, and given me lots of ideas to use in my classroom!

Week 7: Educational Software

When I first think of the word "software", programs like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Publisher, etc. come to mind. Granted, these are some of the biggest computer software programs around, but the options for different "educational software" programs seem almost endless.

There are so many great programs available to use as educational tools in the classroom. Most of these programs can be pretty pricey, so typically, school districts opt to purchase just the few that they feel will be of optimal use with students and teachers.

Our district has several great educational software programs, however, CompassLearning is one in particular that I really enjoy using with my students. CompassLearning is all research-based and assesses each students' understanding of various key objectives in math, language, and reading. Based on the results of the assessment, each student is given their own path of activities to help them grow at their level.


As a kindergarten teacher, I used CompassLearning with my students twice a week in math. We chose to focus on math this year because so many of our other programs, like Earobics, focused on phonics and reading.  My students absolutely loved when we got to work on Compass.  They were so engaged in the activities because of the great graphics and animations.  Most of the activities were set up like a game, so my students were learning so much, and didn't even realize it!

Another aspect of CompassLearning that I really love is being able to use it as a whole group instructional tool.  If my students were struggling with a particular concept, I could pull up some Compass activities to use whole group as a re-teaching tool.  This gave me the opportunity to take it step by step and really explain what it was asking the students to do.  This really seemed to help!

One of the biggest challenges I faced using Compass with kindergarten students was time.  We only had twenty-five minute computer lab slots, so we really had to use our time wisely.  My students really struggled this year with getting themselves logged onto the program and finding their spot.  By the end of the year, most of them had it down, but I was still walking around to a few students to get them where they needed to be.  I will definitely do more whole group modeling with this next year.  I think because some of my students were struggling readers, they didn't understand when I'd say log in and go to the safari section.  If they could not read the word "safari" they were totally lost. 

Week Six: WebQuests

I was very interested in this week's assignment because I was very unfamiliar with WebQuests.  I had heard a couple of my fellow teachers talk about them briefly a few years back, but never really asked a lot of questions as to what they were and how they were used by students and teachers.  I had no idea how many ready-made WebQuests were already out there.  I had a good time just searching through other WebQuests that I could potentially use in my classroom.  I found lots of good information that I hope to use in the future with my students.  There were lots of WebQuests created for kindergarten students.  Many of them required parent assistance, but some seemed that they would be used in the classroom.  If this is the case, there would have to be a lot of up front teaching and modeling on how to use WebQuests for this age students. 
I decided to create my WebQuest to be used as an at home project with parent assistance.  I am hoping to use my WebQuest with my students towards the beginning of the year since the objective is learning letter sounds.  This is something we work on all year in kindergarten, but using this WebQuest would be a great way to jumpstart this learning. 
You can find my WebQuest here : http://questgarden.com/127/66/5/110608193200/

Thank goodness Dr. Goldberg prepared us by telling us this would be a time consuming project, because I had no idea how much time it took to create a complete webquest.  Time and knowledge were definitely my two biggest challenges going into this week.  I had to read the websites on how to create a webquest multiple times to really get a grasp on what I was supposed to be doing.  Even then, it was somewhat of a trial and error process for me.  I did a lot of creating and then going back to edit what I had done to make things better.  I also thought it was a big challenging to find good, educational, online activities that were interactive for students to complete in the WebQuest.  After getting started and feeling like I had the hang of it, I enjoyed putting it all together.  I was glad we used the quest garden website because it was very straightforward and took you through step by step for what needed to be done in creating a complete WebQuest.  This assignment was a great learning experience for me, and I look forward to learning even more about WebQuests and creating more of them in the future to use in my own classroom.

Week Five: Online Communication Tools

Before researching the different methods of online communication for this class, I had no idea how much was available.  Some of the tools I had never even heard of.  One I am very familiar with and have used daily as a teacher is e-mail.  Although this is not something I have used as a teaching tool with my students, I use e-mail as a main source of communication with parents and co-workers.  Many parents would prefer to receive an e-mail rather than a phone call if I need to get in touch with them.  Also, in an attempt to "go green", I have started sending out many classroom documents through e-mail, rather than paper copies, to those who have a working e-mail account. 
When I taught third grade, I did get to use an online communication tool in the classroom with my students.  Instead of doing pen pals, we Skyped with another third grade class in Japan.  We had a Japanese lady come to our school and teach us different things about Japanese culture and their schooling.  She then made a trip to Japan, and while she was there, she got us hooked up with another third grade classroom.  My students LOVED it, and were so engaged.  It was so neat to hear the types of questions they wanted to ask the students in Japan, as well as the questions the Japanese students asked us.  I think it was a great experience for my students, and definitely something I hope to do in the future.  That same year, we used Skype another time.  For a persuasive writing piece, my students were trying to convince their parents to get them a certain gift for Christmas.  To show them what it meant to "persuade" we Skyped my husband, who teaches at another elementary school, and I did my best to persuade him to get me the gift I wanted that year.  They thought this was really neat, and it gave them some good ideas for how to convince their parents!
Like I said, Skype is a program I definitely want to use with my students in the future, but I also think it would be great to teach them how to use e-mail.  This is such a real life skill, and I think it would be a great learning experience for kids, even my little guys.  I think it would be fun to use e-mail in place of hand written letters to write to penpals at another school.  It would be kind of the same concept of how I used Skype, except each child would have their own e-mail buddy to write back and forth to.  This would give the students lots of exposure to writing e-mails, which is something they will all be doing in the future.  It would also be a good opportunity to teach appropriate ways to speak using the computer, rather than "texting" or "instant messaging" language that so many kids use today. 

Week 4: PowerPoint Presentations

Since I have become a little more familiar with PowerPoint and all that it offers, I was very excited to use this program with my kindergarten students.  I knew that if my lesson was going to be effective, it needed to include lots of graphics, sound effects, and plenty of opportunities for my students to get involved.  With this particular group of students, a simple slide show of information definitely wouldn't cut it!
With the end of the year approaching, we decided to do a unit on our five senses.  I thought this unit would be a great opportunity for me to use the PowerPoint program with my students.
The PowerPoint I created was used as an introduction for the unit on our senses.  I was most proud of the first slide.  Since most of my students weren't familiar with their five senses, the first slide included a person with no eyes, ears, nose, mouth, or hands.  As the students told me what was missing, I would click on those parts and there was a short audio clip explaining which "sense" each thing represented.  The students immediately wanted to share all of the ways they use their five senses.  We then did a sort of "nature walk", but on the PowerPoint.  As each picture came up on the screen, the students shared which senses they would use if they were in that location.  They really seemed to enjoy the presentation and were very engaged.  Their favorite parts were definitely those where there were graphics, sound effects, or games for them to play.  I really feel like they learned a lot about their senses because they were so engaged with what they were learning.
If I did this again, I would create it to not only be an introduction, but to be a presentation we could pull up all throughout the unit with games and quizzes to be used as short assessments.  After seeing how much fun my students had with this program, I look forward to using it with other classes in the future.  I was a little skeptical at first just because I always thought about PowerPoints being more of a "lecture" tool, but after learning about all of the neat options, I will definitely be using this program more often.

Week Three: Desktop Publishing

As a classroom teacher, I use both word processing and desktop publishing programs frequently.  Although I use both programs, I definitely feel most comfortable with word processing programs such as Microsoft Word, probably because of its simplicity.  Before I taught kindergarten, I was a fourth grade teacher and became VERY familiar with Microsoft Word through portfolio writing!  Our students used this program to type their pieces.  I loved how easy it was for them to check spelling and the built in thesaurus was a great resource for the students.  Now that I am in the kindergarten world, my students do not use these programs as often themselves, but I use them frequently, especially to communicate with parents.
All of the letters I send home (field trip reminders, requests for volunteers, snack day reminders, parent-teacher conference notes, etc) are created using Microsoft Word. Most of our weekly newsletters are created using desktop publishing programs because of the many options they offer. 

As I took a closer look at a recent newsletter, I noticed that there were definitely some aspects that were visually distracting.  Out newsletter contains a lot of information on a small amount of space.  For each "section" of the newsletter, we used different fonts to differentiate between information.  We thought this would make it easier to read, however, it may have made it seem to busy.  To correct this, I drew boxes around each section to clearly distunguish one from the other.  It made it much easier to read.  I left some fonts different, but tried to make them all more similar.  We also thought that having graphics for every section of the newsletter made it more interesting, however, I feel it created more of a distraction from the information we were trying to convey.  Because I do think that images can be very visually appealing, I left several of these, but removed the ones that made the document seem busy and crowded.  The color images make for good contrast in the document, however, most parents receive a black and white copy.  I have a few parents who prefer to receive the newsletter through email, and for those, the color images make it more appealing and interesting.
After this week's reading, I feel I will be better prepared to create more professional, visually appealing documents to use in the future.

Week Two

Going into this week, I was unsure of how databases and spreadsheets would apply to me as a kindergarten teacher.  These concepts seemed like something that would be way to difficult for my students.  As I did some research on how spreadsheets and databases can be used in the classroom, I quickly realized that these tools are not only intended for the "older" kids, but for all grades.  I was very surprised at the many ways people use spreadsheets in their classrooms. 
In kindergarten, we do a lot of simple graphs (how we get to school, our favorite foods, the number of letters in our names, etc.)  My students all have a magnet with their name on it, and a lot of times, we'll do a quick graph on the board where they put their name under the appropriate column.  We then talk about what we notice about the graph through questioning.  However, one website I found, http://www.alicechristie.org/edtech/ss/, talked about letting your students create a graph, and then transferring the data into a spreadsheet using a program like Excel so that they can see the information electronically.  I've never thought about doing this, but what a great idea!  The cool thing about transferring their data into Excel is that we normally create bar graphs in class, but if we input our data, my students will be able to see the same information in the form of not only a bar graph, but also pie graphs and pictographs.  What a neat idea!!  This would also be a great opportunity for me to introduce my students to programs like Excel and teach them to use it to chart information. 
As I read more about spreadsheets in the classroom, I found it very interesting to learn that you can use programs like Excel to create various graphic organizers such as Venn Diagrams, timelines, and concept webs.  I had no idea that you could do things like this using a spreadsheet program.  This will be very useful to me in my kindergarten classroom.
I realize now that I knew very little about using spreadsheets before this week.  At home, I have used spreadsheets to keep a budget and track expenses.  At school, I have used them to do things like track behavior and keep grades.  I have also used them at the beginning of the year to make a checklist of different papers my students needed to turn in, as well as at the end of the year to track inventory in my classroom.  I thought that was just about the extent of it.  After this week, I am very excited about integrating this type of technology into my own classroom!