Friday, March 26, 2010

Delicious

I was unfamiliar with delicious.com until now. It is a great site that allows you to store all of your bookmarks online. This is nice since teachers often use multiple computers. This way you don't have to memorize or write down long, complicated web addresses. I appreciate knowing about it since I may be moving this summer. That way I can retain all of my bookmarks easily. The one thing I didn't like was I had to create a yahoo web address since I didn't have one. I already use gmail, so I will never use the account, but not a big deal.

Here's the link to my account:

http://delicious.com/mhgm10

Podcasts

The first podcast I subscribed to is StoryNory: Stories for kids. I have never really considered using podcasts in the classroom before and I assumed I wouldn't find much for first grade use, but I was pleasantly suprised to find StoryNory. This is a free podcast that has tons of stories and poems that are read aloud. I will use this feature as a whole-group class activity by having students listen to a story during our literature time from StoryNory. I taught my students that good readers make a "movie" in their head while they are reading, or picture what is going on. This will be a good way to reinforce that skill. Another way I can use StoryNory is during our Daily 5 time, when the students are independently listening to reading. They can use headphones and choose a story to listen to during their time.

The other podcast I subscribed to is Grammar Girl. I like this podcast because oftentimes when I am writing a parent letter I will question the way I worded something and wonder, is that right? Grammar Girl is a great resource to help me figure it out. Also, my students were asking me the other day if "a'int" is really a word or not, and I've heard both ways, so I noticed Grammar Girls has a podcast to describe this. I'm excited to use each of these podcasts. There were many others that I noticed I would be personally interested in as well. Very cool!

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Final Project Proposal

Purpose of your Podcast:

The purpose of this podcast is to educate my first grade class about current content we are learning or will learn in science. This particular podcast will cover characteristics of living and non-living things. We cover this in one of our science units and I think the podcast will be a fun and interesting way to share our science content with my students.

Podcast Description:

My audience is my first grade classroom. I will broadcast this podcast to my classroom as part of our science unit. I will host the production myself. The length of my show will be around 5 minutes. The content of the podcast will be facts and information related to our science content standards presented through movie, photo, audio and music.

Give a detailed description…

I plan on combining movie, photos, audio and music using imovie to create an educational podcast over living and non-living things. I will describe characteristics for each that are appropriate for a first grade level, such as: Living things need air, food, water and space to grow. Non-living things do not need all of these same things. I will give examples of living and non-living things. I will explore in more detail characteristics of living things.

Include any state/local objectives this podcast will address:

Omaha Public Schools Science Standard 4:
Investigate and describe characteristics of living things.
01 Identify the basic needs of living things.
02 Summarize the characteristics of living things.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Living Things Animoto Movie

I created this animoto movie to teach first graders about what living things need. We are studying this in science right now so I thought it would be a neat way to reinforce the concept. I have never used Animoto before this and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy to use and efficient it was. I could definitely see myself using this in the classroom for a variety of subject areas as well as for school events such as open house and conferences.

The two images I edited using Picnik are the picture of the food, and the picture of the yellow plants at the end. To edit the food picture I resized it, used autofix and sharpened it. To fix the plant picture I resized it, used autofix and used the color fix.




Monday, March 8, 2010

Introduction

Hello, my name is Meagan Marion and I am a first grade teacher at an OPS elementary school in Omaha, NE. This is my second year of teaching. I went to UNL for 3 years of my undergrad and to UNO for 2 years. I graduated with my degree in elementary education in May 2008. The purpose of this blog will be to post class projects and provide relevant educational information.

I consider myself pretty comfortable with technology. Things are always changing, but I try to keep up as best as I can. I have grown up as a PC person, but since I started teaching I have only used and currently use a Mac laptop, and I love it. So I guess you could say I'm both a PC and a Mac person. In my classroom I do not have a smart board or Elmo, all I have is an overhead projector, so integrating technology into my class can be tough at times. I do have 3 student computers and I have students work on them once a week to take reading tests and then several times a week to listen to a book. I use Word 2008.

I decided to pursue my master's degree at Peru State College right now because my husband is still in law school, so we both wanted to get our education done at the same time. Also, it's a great way to enhance my teaching practice. I like the online format of the E-cohort program as well.