Saturday, October 31, 2009

Happy Halloween!

It looks like a wet night for the neighborhood trick-or-treaters. I hope everyone has a fun and safe evening out.


I've spent some time this afternoon working on our mid-term assignments for class. I was successful at designing and posting my survey on Survey Monkey. I decided to create a "kid friendly" survey called All About Me for my Kindergarten students to take part in. They will need their parent's assistance, but I think it will be very easy for them to follow. It will give them experience with multiple choice questions. It is similar to something we do daily in the classroom called "Question of the Day". They come in very excited every day to see what the question is and are able to respond by placing their name card under their selection choice. This particular survey will give us simple responses that can be easily graphed using a program called Graph Club that we have at school. It will be fun for them to see how the information they submitted at home can be seen back at school.


I also spent time reading the posts that are up so far for the first discussion question. Many of us have similar responses and feelings about how technology is being implemented in today's classrooms and can see how far ahead the kids are in their use and understanding in many ways. As a Kindergarten teacher, I'm glad that I get the chance to be one of their first experiences with many types of technology. They are eager and learn quickly. I believe they will be able to teach their parents along the way.


My next task will be to read Chapter 3 of our text and start planning for our presentation. It's called Weblogs: Get Started! Janie and I have plans to meet this week to get started. I'm looking forward to everyone's presentation. It will be a nice way to learn some very new material for me.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

First day in ECOMP 6008

Today is the first day of my 2nd course in graduate school. It's called The World Wide Web as an Educational Resource. So far we've completed the following activities:
Survey Monkey Discussion
Internet Q & A: A Wired World
Social Bookmarking
Electronic Lists
Weblogs
Whew! A lot for one morning. I am anxious to implement several of these technology tools with my Kindergarten class and group of parents. Wish me luck!