Adding to Pinterest, 11.13. 12

It should be no surprise that I like Pinterest.  I have found so many ideas that have helped mainly with my children but I have not been impressed with specific classroom content. I want to have a rotating board that would fit with each unit of study.  I am in the process of creating a board for my next Unit on African Americans and I will be pinning very useful sites for my students. Then I will put the board on my class blog.  At the end of the unit, I plan to assign students to explore and evaluate my pins, plus they must add at least a few of their own. 

What can Students do with Ipads? 11.13.12

Wow! I bookmarked this article for later use.  One of my biggest challenges with technology is movie making.  I tried a video creation project this year and I was very disappointed with the results.  I need specific ideas on improvement and this article provided me with them.  For many of my students I need to be the expert and by creating several, not one, video example will help my students use technology that many already have.  While these specific examples were for English, this specific activities can be used for ALL subjects because isn't the goal to have students learn the story of our subject. 

How to learn from your mistakes? 11.13.12

What a dynamic teacher Diane Laufenberg is!! I got many ideas from her talk:
1) We do a family history project in our immigration unit.  I like the visual timeline that she did at the begining of her talk and she included them again at the end of her talk.  This would be an amazing thing to include in a family history project for student.  Instead of my students doing a traditional paper, they can get family photos and present their family history in their words (voice.)
2) I also appreciated the learning process that she demonstrated that her students and her talk out loud about their presentations.  My students did video projects and that activitiy would have been very beneficial to use in my classroom.
3)  She makes an excellent point that we need to rethink how we teach our students because the focus isn't getting them the information but it is how to get them to interact, learn, and process the information on a higher level.