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.