Em's Ever Evolving Erudition

Video & Audio of this blog post Seesaw is an amazing tech tool. This platform will increase student and parent engagement to really create a vibrant learning community that spans the bridge between school and home. I would like to suggest that we adopt it at our school to help our young learners be the best that they can be. The power of this tool is that it aligns so well with UDL. It allows both teachers and students to really hone in on all three guidelines of UDL: engagement, representation, and action & expression. First, let me tell you a little about this tool. Seesaw was designed as a digital portfolio platform, but it really works as an amazing digital learning platform. Teachers can post an assignment to the class page. This assignment can be posted in many different mediums at once. An image, video, text, and audio can describe what students need to do. Then students can decide how to respond in the manner that works best for them. Students can...

Wakelet I've dabbled with wakelet in the past. Our district uses it to collect tweets and blog posts from teachers around the district to share with families. This has been a great way to "market" our district and all the great things that are happening in all of our schools. I also really liked that the #ATCHAT twitter chats were archived using wakelet as a way to participate and learn asynchronously. My biggest pet peeve about it though is that in both examples there were a lot of things curated in one wakelet. It takes ages to scroll through all the different posts, some of which are not necessary for the whole audience of wakelet viewers. The friendly banter between people who are friends during the #ATCHAT (similar in our district share too) is distracting from the important learning nuggets. That being said, I think the when used to curate information, resources, or work examples, wakelet is a really awesome tool. I like that one can enter examples from many differe...

4TH GRADE RESEARCH PROJECT SUPPORT I created both my YouTube playlist and my screencast on helping 4th graders with their science research project on the topic of Energy. I'm relatively new to youtube playlists. I have subscribed to a few of them, but honestly it was only on my personal account. I haven't thought to use it as a way to stay current on topics that I teach. I will be looking to add subscriptions of amazing librarian and tech integrationist that can help fire up some lessons. I have used both playlists and screencasts regularly in my teaching. I have created playlists of book trailers for the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award as well as videos to help with state research projects. I create screencasts for various reasons. Mainly to help teach a new tech tool or research resource such as the screencast I created above. I have also used them to create parts of lessons when I have a sub. Since I only see students once a week, if I know I'm going to be out an...

I have designed many websites in my life. In college, in the early 2000s, I created my first website with just jokes that my friends wrote (all not very good). Since then, I've create many more using tools such as Blogger, Google Sites, Wix, Weebly, and Finalsite. I love the new Goolge sites because it vastly improves the user friendliest of its features. It continues getting better but one thing I hope that eventually gets added back is the levels of visibility on the web. Keeping somethings more private with a "only those with the link can view", like a students portfolio, without adding specific users to the site used to be super helpful. I've used websites to share information with students, to display library resources, and for students to create to share their learning. With students I've had them create a Google site to be their learning portfolio, but I've also used it with students who created a site at the end of their research unit, sharing the info...

Link to my reflection using voicethread:  https://ed.voicethread.com/myvoice/thread/13054149/78783142/73255639

I LOVE PADLET! I've been using padlet for a long time now (7 years?).  Kids really love it and I like the different formats that students can use to show their learning.  I actually created a padlet this summer to use with my teachers as a way to post book suggestions and questions to ask students for reading when it comes to building a more diverse classroom library (and school library too).  The idea was that we all know a little, but if we put it all together it could be a great resource to increase the equity literacy in our school.   I've also used padlet as way for students to group brainstorm ideas.  Once all ideas were in the padlet, they could start organizing the posts into main ideas.   Padlet is great for a variety of learners because of the different modalities that are offered.  Students that have a hard time putting words down on "paper" can video or audio record their ideas.  Students who are more visual ca...

I’ve made eBooks before in the past. I collaborated with 1st/2nd grade teachers to create a school ABC book. Each student picked a letter from the alphabet, picked something at our school that began with that letter, wrote a short paragraph about that thing and why it was important to our school, took a picture of it, and then created one of the pages on our shared eBook using Book Creator. It was a lot of fun and the books came out great. For this eBook, I decided to write a picture book based on true stories that my mother likes to tell. There is an introductory video on the first page of the book to explain this as well. I decided to do this for two reasons. One was to send to my mom and the other was an example of writing a narrative fiction story for 3rd/4th grade writing unit. I really love using Book Creator. I think it is fairly easy to use, looks professional at the end, and uses so many different modalities it is engaging for all students. My biggest challeng...

Dear Parents, I want to share with you an amazing resource that is available to you and your student through our library: audiobooks!  Using a program called Overdrive, you can download a huge variety of audiobooks (and eBooks too!)  These can be loaded on to any computer or device for an easy and convenient way to listen.    Why listen to audiobooks? Audiobooks are a very engaging way to access a story and all readers benefit from listening.  Think about the time when your children snuggled up to listen to a story being read aloud.  There is a strong emotional connection to listening to stories that helps bring literary worlds to life.  That special moment in time was also a moment when your student was learning what it means to be a reader.  Audiobooks can give your student a similar experience now.  Listening to audiobooks can help students learn to decode, comprehend, and pronounce difficult words.  ...

I love eBooks.  I love reading physical books too as there is muscle memory that feels comforting and familiar.  When reading for pleasure, I will often choose a physical book for this reason.  BUT there are many reasons I will opt for an eBook instead.  When traveling, it is much easier to bring my device loaded with eBooks than shoulder the weight of many books in my bag for example.  When engaged in reading for learning, eBooks are best.  For any class I take, I will always purchase the eBook version of required texts if they are available.   Being able to highlight and annotate what I'm reading and then having the app automatically gather these notes in one place to review is a life saver.  I can quickly find the passage I need when writing or look up word meanings or even directly search the internet to further my learning of a new idea.  An added benefit is that all of my books are in the cloud so I can use any...

We have covered a lot of important concepts in the past couple of weeks: telecommunication, collaboration, assessment, and evaluation. All are integral to creating powerful IBL/PBL projects. Each week has given me food for thought and added tools to my tool belt. I have already started embedding these concepts into my practice. In week 7 we covered telecommunication and collaboration. With today’s advances in technology, students are no longer stuck learning only within the school’s walls. They can now connect to other students around the world or with an expert in a specific field. These connections can be very powerful. Students start to see bigger pictures, see their real world potential, and are more engaged in their learning. There are some great examples of this happening all over the world that we got to explore. I really was blown away when looking at some of the projects on the Google Science Fair webpage. These kids were inspired by real world problems and situation...

I think I’ve written this assignment about five times now. Each tool that I look at I think, “ah ha! This will be my golden nugget!” I do a little write up while exploring the site. But I decide to check out another tool and the excitement begins again! There really are an overload of fabulous tools out there for us to use! The tool that end up really winning my heart was diigo (www.diigo.com). I know it was discussed a bit in class, but I had never heard of it. I actually went to it to start bookmarking some of the great tools that I had been looking at. When I signed up, I realized that this was the golden nugget I really was looking for. I’ve used delicious and honestly wasn’t all that impressed. It was nice to have websites cataloged in a cloud for me to be access from any computer, especially since I tend to do homework anywhere I find time: home, work, library. But other than that I never really got into any of the other features. Right away diigo’s website is organized i...