Millennial survey

I was very happy to find out that my Millennial age was 82. I think in terms of my own teaching and my students that means that I will never be afraid to try new things or use new technology. I often find that I am never afraid to try to "figure something out" when it comes to new technology. I had my mom take the quiz because I knew that none of the questions really applied to my Kindergartners and her score was 23.

Frand's 10 Characteristics:
1) Computer's Aren't Technology: I am in. I use the internet, my cell phone, anything that is a MAC product. I am always using anything technology based.
2) Internet is better than TV: I think I am in on this one especally since we use the internet to get our TV. We have not had cable at my house in about two years and use netflix and hulu plus for all our TV.
3) Realty is no longer Real:  I am totally in on this. You never believe anything you read on the internet. It is hard to believe anything you read and with youtube is it often hard to believe things you see.
4) Doing Rather Than Knowing: I think I am in on this one. I often want to just know or figure out something I don't need to learn it I just want to do it.
5) Nintendo over Logic: I am so in on this one. I am never afraid to mess around with something and try to figure out what it can do. I love discovering what my iphone can really do.
6) Multitasking way of life: I am so in on this one. I live my life pluged into the internet, listening to music, and studying all at the same time.
7) Typing rather than Handwriting: I am in on this one. I TYPE EVERYTHING!! I took one typing class in middle school and once I started texting and emailing I got really fast.
8) Staying Connected: I am in. I never turn my phone off unless I am on an airplane and I will hear facebook or a text in the middle of the night and feel the need to check it.
9) Zero Tolerance for Delays: I am in. I am very quick to refresh a page on the internet or restart my phone if it is too slow.
10) Consumer/Creator Blurring: I am in. I have burned my fair share of cds and copied and pasted images from the internet.

I think people need to move to a mind set that times are changing. We are only going to become a more technology driven society not less. I think this really opened my eyes that I am right where I should be. I think in terms of the technology standards this is great professional development.

Voki

This was a very cool assignment. I really enjoyed how easy it was just add a little text and my little avatar girl did the rest. I started by just creating a simple introduction in word. I remembered that when I was trying to embed something before that after I coped the code for the avatar all I had to do was click over to "HTML" paste my code and she would be in my blog!

I really think this lesson meets the standards for design and develop digital age learning experiences. I think this would be great for many of the topics we learn about in Kindergarten. It would be great to use for the presidents unit. The avatar could give facts and the students could hold up pictures of Lincoln or Washington depending on the facts given.

Word Clouds

I LOVE Wordle's!!!! I created a bunch to frame as decorations at my rehearsal dinner for my wedding and they were a hit!! I have never used them in my classroom before but I know a lot of teachers do for spelling words. The standards have moved from being teacher centered to being more student centered. The current standards are more focused on giving students the opportunities to grow in this growing digtal age. I like how the wording has changed from just being "Technology" to talking about the "Digital-Age".

The words that appeared the most in the 2008 standards were: learning, digital-age, design, and model. That is why they are the larger in my wordle for the 2008 standards.

The words that appeared the most in the 2000 standards were technology, assessment, and experiences. Check out my wordle!!!

I was thinking about how I could use this in my own classroom. I would love to use this for my holiday unit. Students could work in groups create wordles about the differnt holidays that we learn about in december!

I think if I was to use wordles in my own classroom it would be a great way of expressing standard 1. This site is all about letting students get creative. I am really excited to try this activity out in December in my own classroom. 

Carpe Diem

This was a very interesting webinar. I often wish our school used more technology in the classrooms. I would love for our students to be able to use ipads or itouches. I remember a few years ago when my brother was in elementary school his school was a part of a pilot program for the i pod touch in classrooms. The Carpe Diem school seemed a little extreme. I understand test scores are going up but for one half of the day to be in front of the computer screen I agree with the presenter that they are loosing those critical thinking skills. I think I would be very happy to work in a school like St. Marys. I love the idea of blending the technology with the hands of learning. I don't think I could work in the Carpe Diem school it seems boring to me. The only example of the Carpe Diem model that I can think of that we use in our own school is when the students use the SME math program during the computer lab time to run math drills. I wish we had more technology in our school to do more of the St. Marys model but I plan a lot of lessons using our Promethean board. The other day I taught a lesson about ordinal numbers where as a class the kids took turns playing games on the board to practice these skills. If I had the power I would push our school to invest in class sets of ipads. There is such cool stuff I see about ipads in the classroom on pinterest that I would love to try out. I could see my self very smoothly transitioning into a blend of these two models. I use the Promethean board much more than most teachers at my school and I would love to expose my kids to more.

Excel 2

I have to admit when I first read this assignment I had no idea what it all meant. Luckily, my husband has done all of this before when he was in grad school so he was able to help me understand what I was looking for. I was able to follow the Jing no problem but once it came to interpreting my results I was lost. I think I finally get it.
Due to the fact that my P(T<=t) one-tail is 1.60 that is greater than .05 that means that I do not reject the null so that means that gender is not a factor in 4th grade reading scores.

If I had to look at something for my own class the research question I would like to look at is: does age of kindergarten students effect reading scores? I would love to see if a student who enters kindergarten already having a few months as a five year old score better on their PALS test than a student who turns 5 during the first month of school. My groups would be students that enter kindergarten already having turned 5 and students who turn 5 during the month of September. My independent variable would be student age. My dependent variable would be PALS scores.

Hypothesis:
H0: There is a difference in students PALS scores between students who enter kindergarten at 5 and students that turn 5 during the month of September.

H1: There is no difference. (null hypothesis)

This assignment if applied to my own classroom could really help me with my professional development as a teacher. The idea of really looking into the performance of my students could help in my teaching.

Excel 1

Once I was able to actually open excel on our home computer this assgignment went pretty smoothly. Our computer has been a little wonky ever since our assignment where we were suposed to download photostory. My husband finally figured it out and I was off and running. The jing videos were extreamly helpful and once I was able to export the data to excel it was really easy to compute the descriptive stats:

It was also a breeze to sort the scores in ascending order:

 

If I am reading this right Virginia is ranked 9th. We are above average. I created a scatter plot and I think I was able to find Virginia. I think Virgina is doing very well.

I think if I was still teaching the upper grades I would use this activity as a way to "develop digital age learning experiences". I think it would be great for my 5th graders to do an activity like this in our school computer lab or on the laptops. I was a little unsure working though all of the steps but the jing videos were a great idea. I was able to pause and go between excel and the video to go step by step. 

Google Site

Check Out My Site!

I feel very silly that I am posting this a day late. I had this ready on Monday but I have been fighting with posting from Google Docs. I finally posted about it on the discussion board yesterday and found out that I was not doing anything wrong all I had to do was hit save. Now I have a lovely website with both my resume and my rubric about my writer's workshop project. I have also included our Kindergarten syllabi. It was fun to learn about how to create a website but I don't think I would use a website like this in real life. Though the school we have our own homepages that we can add pages to. I think most parents are used to going to the school homepage to get information about me. Once I discovered all I had to do was hit save to get the Google Document to appear adding pages were really easy to do. I picked the template that I did because let's face it I am stuck in Kindergarten land and that template screams Kindergarten.

In terms of our technology standards having a website can be a way to promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility. It is a good way to show students how to be responsible on the Internet. You could also create an assignment with older students to have them create their own website. I also think this assignment in general is a way for teachers to grow professionally.

Rubrics

It is not often that I actually use a rubric that I have created in Kindergarten. Our entire Kindergarten report card is one big rubric that we assess on. It took me a while to come up with something that I could create a rubric for that I might actually use. I decided to create one for one of my favorite writing assignments of the whole school year. Towards the end of the school year we read "It Is Not Easy Being A Bunny". The children then take the pattern of this story and write their own stories. I often give the students guidelines for their writing. Most Kindergartners need that kind of direction. So I created the It Is Not Easy Being Me rubric for this writing assignment. It was really fun to think about all the elements that I look at. I did not want something that would be used for Kindergarten to have too many elements. The rubric looks at exactly what I look at when I assess my students writing. Rubristar was really easy to use. I created all of my own descriptions for the levels because I thought theirs were too wordy for my kids.

This is another assignment that is helping us grow professionally. If I used rubrics more this would be an amazing tool to have. I will however pass this site along to my friends who teacher other grades.

Self Graded Form (Part 2)

So....
I misunderstood this assignment :(. Now that I know what I am doing and I  am on the right track. When I read the assignment the first time I thought people in our class were going to take our quiz before doing the self grading part. Today I had my assistant and myself take my quiz and then worked all the formulas. It was easy once I got the hang of typing out the formulas to drag and apply them to all the cells that I needed to. Feel free to check out my spreadsheet. My quiz was linked on my first blog post. I also forgot to mention on my first blog post that I made each question required. I thought that would be a good idea so that students would not be able to accidentally skip any questions. Now that I am on the right track I feel really good about this assignment.

Self Graded Form

I am still a little confused but I am going to give this a shot. For this assignment I created a simple 8 question addition and subtraction quiz that I could see myself actually giving my students. I do not see myself giving them a Google docs quiz like this unless it is with a math concept. It would be hard for me to expect them to independently take anything that required a lot of reading. After looking at the YouTube video it looked like I had to wait for a couple of people to take my quiz before I can make it self grading. After I created the quiz I went into the spreadsheet view and created my key. If I understand the video correctly once I have a few people take my quiz I should be able to create the self grading step. I am excited to go in and try the self grading feature once some of you have tried my quiz. I will blog a second time tomorrow to talk about how the actual self grading part went.

In terms of the standards I really think this assignment is all about modeling digital learning. We are moving away from the standard pencil and paper test to an age of on line assessments. Adding a self grading feature will save teachers hours and hours of grading.

Google Forms

I used this assignment as an opportunity to create something that we might use in our classroom. We are always searching for ways to get as much information as we can from the parents during our schools open house and with 50 students open house is usually CRAZY!!! I created a Parent-Student Information Sheet in Google Forms. I had a basic idea of the information we needed from the parents at the start of school. I really had to think hard as to how I was going to use the Grid question. I ended up brainstorming with my assistant and we decided to create a question about how many years, if any, the students attended preschool. I LOVED how all the information was imported into a neat and organized Spreadsheet. I was surprised to get several emails from Google docs. I knew the first one was to fill out the form and then I realized the second one was a link to my spreadsheet. Also, when I later went into my Google Drive I clicked on the link for my form and saw it was the spreadsheet. I was also able to view my live form once I was in the spreadsheet.  I really think this would be great to email out to all the parents before open house to have them fill it out. I would of course have copies of the form in the classroom for parents who did not have access to a computer. I could always offer to let them use the classroom computers to take the time to fill it out. I also love how I could change the form to Spanish for the non-English speaking parents. Finally, I thought of providing, on a business card, the link to the form in case parents did not get my email and still wanted to fill out the form on-line at home. I really hope this is something I will actually be allowed to use next year. I am never exactly sure what the rules on this kind of stuff is but I will be talking to my principal about it. For this assignment I filled it out for a child I might have in the future, I had my assistant fill it out for her daughter, and my Mom fill it out. I would have given it to real parents but I was not sure what the rule about getting their information in this format were. I really like Google Forms. I really think in my case, because I used it to create a form about information that I would need, I was using standard five. This assignment really helped my to grow professionally.

Prezi

Groundhog Day!

I thought this was a really cool assignment  I remember that last semester someone used Prezi for a presentation but at the time I did not know what they had used to create such a cool presentation. I was excited to play around with Prezi once I knew what it could do. I decided to take the information I already had, from a boring Groundhogs Day presentation I created last year, and use a template that Prezi provided to make the information more interesting. I really enjoyed playing with the path feature. I had to go back several times to fix things so that when the page zoomed all my information could be seen.

I think I like Prezi more than PowerPoint for my class because I think it makes the presentation much more interesting. I think my students would sit longer for a Prezi presentation because they would think it was fun. It also helps teachers isolate the information they want their students to focus on. However, I think it would have to be used to deliver certain information. I don't think Prezi can become the be all and end all of classroom presentations. For example I don't think I would be able to adapt by rhyming PowerPoint to a Prezi and still be able to deliver the same message.

I think the two standards that really jump out at me for this assignment are standards one and two. I think if teachers introduced Prezi as an option to students for classroom presentations instead of the standard PowerPoint presentations we would be opening a world of creative and inspiring student learning. I also think kids would really get into designing Prezis. Along with inspiring student learning we need to provided students with a chance to "design and develop digital learning experiences . Students could have a chance to work with this really cool new type of technology.

Short Presentation

This was by far the hardest assignment to date. I decided to use this presentation as a lesson that my assistant could use if I was not there. We will be talking about pumpkins the last two weeks of October and I know I will be out one of those days so I thought this would be great for her to use then. I started my presentation off with a shared reading lesson. So on each slide I went over a sentence of the poem we will be working on for that week. During the reading of the poem the students have an opportunity  to "find and frame" words from the poem (which they all know how to do). I also allowed for time for the students to read the line of the poem that I read back to me. The name Mrs. Calvitti is mentioned in my presentation. She is my assistant and will be checking the students during the presentation. I added a pumpkin life cycle project on to the end. My assistant would know ahead of time that it was coming and she would have to get the kids prepared to start the assignment.

I do not have a mic on my desktop at home so I decided to use imovie on my MAC. It took me a while to figure out the program but once I started playing with it, it was not so scary. I really like that I could narrate a slide at a time. This allowed me to watch my timing and also change anything I needed to with out going back to the beginning. If my kids respond to this type of lesson I might use it more often when I am not going to be in class. It might be a nice way for them to start the day to get a message from me. I really tried to make this assignment mine and make it work for Kindergarten. This always seem to be extra crazy when a sub is there so I really thought this would make it very easy for my assistant to pop this on the Promethean board and off the kids could go with their lesson.

If this is meeting any of the technology standards it has to be professional growth. This assignment really pushed me to learn new things. I hope now that I have tried this type of presentation once I will feel much more confident to try it again in the future.

Powerpoint

Check Out My PowerPoint

 I was excited when I read this assignment to try Power Point again. I really have not used it in a while. Due to the fact that we now have Promethean Boards in our rooms I spend a lot of time developing flip charts right in Active Inspire. We have our PALS reading test coming up for our students in the next few weeks so I decided to develop a presentation on rhyming. I broke it up into two sections. Part one teaches about rhyming words and in part two they get to practice rhyming. My kindergartners would not sit for a 50 page slide show so it made sense to me to break it into two sections that could be taught over two days. I know that my kids always need to release some energy before I have them sit for any extended period of time so I included two videos at the beginning that they can dance to. I then used Jing to import pages from one of my students favorite series "Llama Llama" these books have tons of rhymes. I have also included two kinds of practice one where they circle the pictures that rhyme and one where they make their own rhyming words based on particular endings. When I use this in my own classroom I plan on importing it into Active Inspire so the students would be able to circle and write in the presentation. I also read the blog and the article that was assigned for this assignment. They left me a little confused. However the think the overall message is keep things simple. You never want people to have to read too much. When you make a PowerPoint you have to do the talking. I really tried to do my best of this PowerPoint to make it usable in my own classroom. I would love to get better at creating lessons for my Promethean Board. I think this assignment encouraged us to "Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning" and "Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership." I can see these types of lessons as a way to introduce many interesting topics to my students.

Google Earth

First of all I think Google Earth is AMAZING and it should be used by all teachers. I can't wait to use it durring my Japan and Kenya units in the spring. I loved playing around with it and seeing my house. It was so easy to go into Google Maps and save my field trip as a KML or "Keyhole Markup Language" file. Then all I had to do was open it in Google Earth and there were all my places.

I think using Google Maps was an important step. It was very easy to create a list of places to visit and save them to Google Maps which made importing them into Google Earth a breeze. I went on to the Google Earth For Educators website and started looking around at all the lessons. When I searched for Google Earth lessons for ages 0-6 I was not able to find anything. However, I did find one lesson for a second grade scavenger hunt that with some tweaking I think would work really well for my class. I would have to make it places in Japan and Kenya and I would do it whole group.

Just like the Google Maps assignment I think this assignment is all about developing digital age learning experiences. The kids are able to see for themselves places that they may never get to see in person. I think it would be so cool to be able to transport my kids to Kenya or Japan. It really brings their learning to life.

Google Maps

I created a simple field trip for my young students. To do something like this with my kids would take a lot of preparation. I would spend the week working with them on how to use Google maps and what each part of the map is. I would also have them work with a partner. I created a map with ten sights of Washington D.C. We are heading there in the spring so it would be nice for them to have a little background before going. I would have created a little travel journal for each student to use during this assignment. I created the assignment right in "Google Drive" and published it right to the web so it could be accessed by all my students during the assignment.  I included a link to the map on my assgiment where I had already found all that I wanted them to look at. I think it would be way too hard to ask my students to search for specific sites on their own. Here is how my map turned out:

Please feel free to check out My Field Trip!!

I loved this assignment. It really got me thinking about how I could use this with Kindergartners. This assignment would allow me to use standard 2. My students are having a digital experience. They are seeing their Nations Capital from their own classroom.

Batchgeo

I thought this was a very cool activity. I also really think this would help my students visualize that they all live in the same area. It is so funny that they are all shocked to find out that they all live in Leesburg. For Kindergartners the concept of town, city, state, country, and so on is very hard for this. This program would help them visualize these concepts. I also think my kids would love seeing how far they live from me or how far we will have to travel to get to our field trip destination. It took me a while to figure out that I had to copy the information into the example spreadsheet that opened in excel. For a while I was trying to copy and paste right on to the web page. Once I figured that out I struggled with the last 5 names on our list not copying over no matter what I tried. I eventually ended up printing out our list and just typing them in. I was amazed at the map that appeared once I hit "map it". I never did figure out how to embed my image into the blog. I copied the link from my email, went to insert picture, and pasted it into the "from a url" spot but nothing happened. I ended up just using Jing to capture an image of my map. When working through this assignment I kept thinking about standard 2. This website just screams "design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments".  We are showing these kids things that can only be done using technology. This is using the technology to bring these concepts to life.

Jing Video

How to Create A Pivot Table In Excel

 Earlier in the week I found out that my blog was detected as a spam blog so I have been waiting to be allowed to blog this assignment. I received by email go ahead from Google this morning. This was by far the most frustrating assignment, for me, that we have done so far. I decided that I would learn something new for this assignment. My husband has been bugging me for about a year now to teach me how to do a pivot table in excel so I thought this would be a great time to learn. The actual learning of how to create a pivot table was not that hard. It was the actual making of the video that drove me crazy. The first time I recorded I discovered that I had not opened my viewing screen wide enough so that all the information I was recording was in view. The second time I recorded I remembered to enlarge the area of the screen capture. I really struggled with knowing how fast or how slow I should move my mouse. When I finally, after about 4 atemepts, got my video the way I wanted it I saved it to my desktop. I was suprised to see that it was saved as a "SWF" file. I have never seen that extension before. One of the prongs on the Jing Sun is the history. I was able to click on that to find my video. I was then able to upload it to the internet by clicking the "Share" icon.

I really think this assignment would really help in the classroom. Especially since I have students who have never seen a computer before. I might be able to create all types of videos to teach them how to log on and use different programs on our school computers. I think this assignment hits two main standards. One as the teacher I am able to "Model Digital Age Work and Learning." I am able to show them exactly what to do and each student can watch at their own pace. Also as like most of the other assignments I am engaging" In Professional Growth and Leadership" by learning something new and creative to help my students.

Jing Image

I was really excited to use the Jing tool after I really saw what it can do. I recently discovered a site called We Give Books. It is a wonderful site that allows to you to digitally read books. This is great for reading books on our Smart Board and also when you want to specifically point out certain things in a story. I used the We Give Books site and Jing to create a sample lesson I might do on rhyming words. I created 4 images with Jing do just give an idea of how I might start a lesson. After I created my first shot it was very easy to save the image as a jpeg to my desktop. I thought the desktop might be the easiest place to find the picture when I wanted to upload it to my blog. I always start every story reviewing fiction and non-fiction.

If we are reading stories in a series I always try to get them to think back a little and make some connections. I created the next shot in a effort to prevent all the hands going up and the students all trying to share with me the other books they remember from the Llama Llama series.

Finally, before we start any story we always review title, author, and illustrator.

Now we are ready to start reading and going over the concept I am trying to teach, or review, in the case of this lesson. Not only did I save my last image to the desktop I also did a screencast of my image. All I had to do was then go the the screencast website, log in, and my image was right there waiting for me.

I think Jing is an awesome thing that I am really going to start using more in my classroom. It hits many of the standards. I am going to be able to "Design and Develop Digital Age Learning Experience" that my students will be able to get so much out of. I love being able to add arrows to draw focus and text boxes not only to prompt my students but, also myself. These skills are going to help me "Model Digital Age Work and Learning." Finally, as with all of the assignments so far I am finding myself engaged in "Professional Growth and Leadership" because I am learning so many new things and I am constantly thinking about what other areas of my teaching I can use Jing with.

Diigo

I wanted to get on and blog about this assignment last night but, I was at Back to School night until 8pm and had to attend a school spirit night tonight so, I am finally able to get on and blog about what I have done tonight. After reading this assinment the wheels in my head started turning and I relised that I have been social bookmarking for over a year now on Pinterest. In fact I am sure my husband would say that I am addicted. When I first heard about Pinterest I was only pinning on my Mac at home and I was using mostly Google Chrome. For those who do not know what Pinterest is it is basicly a virtual bulliten board. You are able to bookmark and organize pictures to help you remember why you bookmarked a site in the first place. I started off slow at first only repinning ideas that other people had already had on the site. I started off with only a few boards. At the time I was planning my wedding so I had a boards for wedding ideas, recipies, and one for ideas for my classroom. Eventually I felt like breaking out a little and I wanted to start pinning my own ideas to get out there. I was really easy to create a browser add on so I could pin what I was finding. Since I have already done that on my Mac in Chrome (a long time ago) I decided that for this assignment I was going to install the add on in Firefox on my PC desktop. I found that it was so much easier to do it in Firefox. All you had to do was make sure that your bookmark tool bar was displayed and you just had to drag the "pin it" button to the tool bar and you could get started pinning. As of right now I have 9 boards, 1,071 pins, 83 people following me, and I am following 52 people. I am always on Pinterest. I have it on my IPhone, my Mac, my IPad, and on our desktop.  I think it is pretty clear that Pinterest had helped me "Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership". I have tried so many new ideas because I discovered them through Pinterest. Feel free to check out my Pinterest page or follow me if you are already on.

Self Portrait

 

I really liked this assignment. It was a lot of fun to create a funky self portrait. I never even knew that the Picassao Head site even existed. I really think this might be a cool site to use with my students as a fun center. For this activity I went to the site and just started playing around with it. I think if I introduced this site to my students I would have them play with it on our smart board. I also think it would be interesting to have them make a couple of faces during the week. I know that if I made my face on a Saturday it might look much different than the face I made tonight. I made a very tired face. I also tried to perk myself up a little by using my favorite colors to brighten it up a little. I also thought it was pretty cool that we got to add a signature. My students would love to sign their art. When I was all finished with my self portrait I uploaded it to the Gallery. I think my students would get a kick out of being able to go home and show their parents that their art was on an on line gallery. The snipping tool really came in handy with this assignment. I could also see myself taking a quick snip of each of their faces to print later to display. While working on this assignment I kept thinking of standard 1. This website screams "Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity." I think too often as teachers we get consumed with shoving the content down our kids throats. It is important for us to shake things up and get creative.

Resume Revisit

I was excited and curious to do this assignment. I feel so lucky that I have the job that I have but I have always wondered if I one day decide to change schools how will my resume stand up? I was very pleasantly surprised. After uploading my resume I saw this screen:

I was very proud of myself. Before I graduated from Longwood in 2003 I took a class to help me build a teaching resume. Ever since then I have just taken the time every once in a while to update it. I guess Longwood was on to something :). I think this assignment in general is helping us address the standard of "Engaging in Professional Growth and Leadership". It is clear that it is always important improve and grow. Whether you are improving on a resume that you just wrote for this assignment or just adding to the one you already had we always need ways as teachers to gain that professional growth.

Snipping Tool

When I first started reading about the snipping tool I was excited to learn how to create a screen shot of a small area. I knew how do it on my Mac but it is always good to learn how to do it on the PC as well. I have used this tool on my Mac for unit plans I have written for other classes. When I have to turn in a paper electronically that includes worksheets being able to just snip the area I needed made life much easier.

 I really can't see a time when I would ask my Kindergartners to use this tool. However, I have a reason to use it for school right around the corner. As I mentioned in my last entry back to school night is right around the corner and I am working on my grade levels packet. I am also in charge of my grades flip chart for that night. Our school is going to be opening up the county's grading system to parents to see in January so it is our job to discuss it at back to school night. It will be nice to include a snip of the report card and parent guide in the presentation. It would look like this:

I also love how there is a highlighting tool that I can use to make sure that I bring certain areas of the report card to their attention. I am also using a cool new thing in my classroom this year called reminder 101. I think this site is pretty awesome. The parents are able to text into the website to sign up and I am able to later go in the website and send out  reminders that the parents receive as a text. I wanted to have a way for the parents to actually see how to sign up. It would look like this in my presentation:

For this lesson I can really see it applying to two of the standards. I think this tool will really be useful for teachers in terms of standard number 2 "Design and Develop Digital Age Learning Experiences and Assessments". I think the snipping tool will help teachers enhance what they are trying to show their students. If their students looked at a particular flip chart of website to learn about a topic the snipping tool would allow teachers to create their assessments around what the students used to learn. Also I feel like this is another tool that allows me to "Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership". I will be using the snipping tool much more in the things I am creating for parents and my students. 

Google Docs

At first when I read this assignment, I thought for sure that I would be creating a resume from scratch using the Google doc template considering that I have been teaching at the same school for the past five years. Luckily, I remembered that I had to create a resume for a class I took in the spring semester so all I had to do was make a few updates and up load it right into my Google docs.

While I was in Google docs I started to look at all the documents I actually had in there. I started to noticed that none of them were my own. I had many lessons downloaded from teacherspayteachers.com. I love being able to save something to google docs at home, go into school and print it out, and have it whenever I need it. I don't know why I have never used this program before to save my documents that I have created for school to use there. I now feel very silly for dragging my laptop back and forth just to print at school. In fact I am currently working on my grade levels back to school night packet and saving it to google docs would not only help me, but I would be able to share it with other teachers.

I was very excited to learn how I can publish documents that I create to the web. In fact, it might be a great idea to publish that back to school night packet to the web and include a link to it on our school web page in case parents misplace theirs. Because I am currently teaching Kindergarten I can't think of many ways that my own students would need to be using google docs themselves. However, I think this would have been great during the year I taught 5th grade. When my fifth graders needed to type up something, it always seemed to take forever because there was limited laptop time when we could get enough for the whole class. It would be wonderful if the students could save their work and pick it up for homework on their home computers.

If I was to apply this assignment in the ways I described, I think it covers three of the ISTE NETS T Standards. First, if I was able to implement the use to Google docs into an upper grade classroom I could see it relating to standard three of "Modeling Digital Age Work and Learning" because we would be working towards helping the students grow. They would be able to show there parents what they are working on in school and get help not only from their teacher but from their parent as well. I also think in the age we live in with younger and younger kids getting into texting and Facebook it is always important to "Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsiblity". Students would be responsible for what they put out there in terms of their work. It is a good lesson to learn early in life. Finally, I feel like I have "Engaged in Professional Growth and Leadership" just by thinking in terms of applying the use of Google docs to my every day life at school. I will use this application much more now that I have learned to use it the way it was intended.

 Check Out My Published Resume

All About Me!

Hi I'm Jessica! 

I am currently in my fifth year as a Kindergarten teacher in Leesburg VA. I love what I do and I am (on most days) thrilled to go to work. My school has morning and afternoon Kindergarten so I have around 50 students. 

Outside of work I tend to think I am a pretty boring person. I have recently gotten married to my boyfriend of nine years. We were married on August 4th in Georgetown after a romantic proposal in Paris last summer. When I have the time I really love to cook. I have been Gluten Free for about three years and I enjoy learning to prepare food in different ways. I have a little addiction to social media. I am always checking Facebook and Pinterest  for new ideas for school or recipes.