The Next Step

After a professional development my first year of teaching, I turned to my mentor and made the comment that all the information we learned was so overwhelming. There was so much information that I wanted to apply to my teaching that I didn't know where to start. My mentor then told me something that I still try to apply today. She said, "After each professional development, I try to pick one thing that I will use in my classroom". As this class is coming to a close, I'm definitely going to need to apply that advice. I have learned so much in this class, coming back every Thursday with something new I want to try with my students. I've realized though that if I want to integrate technology into my classroom well, I can't do everything at once. I'm going to need to take baby steps. The one project I really want to take away from this class is my digital story idea. When we do our community unit in February, I hope to add the technology component to the unit. I'm really excited now that I learned how to add sound to Power Point because that might be easier for me to make a digital story with than Movie Maker with my class. This will be the first step I'll take in adding more technology to my classroom, but I'm glad we're getting CDs with all our projects so when I'm ready to take my next steps, I'll remember where to go!

Coincidence?!?

I was talking to my aunt this morning (we both had snow days!) and she asked me if I had gotten her email about joining her Wiki. I couldn't believe this coincidence that I had just blogged about confusion about Wikis and here was my aunt asking me to join hers! She told me she had decided to set up a blog about our Dekker family. She wanted it to be a place that we could update each other on our lives. I told her that I had just blogged about Wikis in class and we talked about Wikis in the classroom for awhile. My aunt teaches 8th grade and she said she probably wouldn't be up doing a Wiki with her class, but one thing she wants to try is setting up a Wiki for her Washington D.C. trip. Every summer she takes a group of her 8th grade students to Washington D.C. for a week and she said a Wiki would be nice to keep parents updated. I am now part of a Wiki so let the fun begin! =)

Wikis

I was reading an article in The Reading Teacher this week about Wikis. I read it because honestly I have no clue what Wikis are. From what I gathered from this article, it explained that Wikis are basically like blogs with the added feature of being able to change the content of the Wiki along with leaving comments. Just after reading the article, it seemed to me Wikis might be a bit more user friendly for younger kids because you can make corrections and changes so easily. I like blogging for myself, but I honestly think it would be difficult to use with first graders. Those of you more familiar with Wikis, what do you think? Do you have a preference for one program over the other? Where could I go to get more information on Wikis?