Ann+Gookin

**Web 2.0 Connections** =1. Glogster = Glogster is a fun, interesting, and interactive way for students (and teachers :-) to make informative posters about a topic or subject. Glogsters can incorporate videos, images, text, and links to related websites. The example Glogster I created below is a review of the book my sixth graders will read at the beginning of the school year called __The Sign of the Beaver__ by Elizabeth George Speare. This computer/tech tool would be a great way for students to summarize the books they read, and would be a welcome change from the traditional boring book report! I'm excited about trying this one with my students!

media type="custom" key="6470005" align="center" =2. Animoto = ​ ​Animoto is a free, fun, and easy way to visually share student work. After students create the text, choose the right photos, and upload the perfect tune, their final product is a powerfully-packed slide show! In our language arts poetry unit this spring, my sixth graders used Animoto to create their free 30-second clips. Since Haiku poetry is made up of only three lines in length, we found it to be the perfect poem to showcase, using this tech tool. I had my students e-mail their finished product to me. The only downside was that line two in each poem, (which had seven beats), took up TWO lines, instead of just one, in the Animoto slide show. We could not find a way to resize the text to make it fit on one line. However, that did not take away from the effectiveness of the end result. During the final week of school, the kids felt like celebrities while they watched their "mini movies" on the big screen. It was a great way to culminate our unit and school year! The following is a student example of Haiku on Animoto:

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3. Wordle
Wordle is a web tool that generates "word clouds" from the text that you type. If a word is typed more than once in Wordle, it appears as a larger font size and will stand out on the page. Wordle can be used in a variety of different ways in the classroom, such as brainstorming ideas about a particular topic, writing poetry, summarizing, finding the gist of an article, and building vocabulary skills. (I've even seen it cleverly used as a "Save the Date" for a wedding!;-) I tried Wordle with my sixth graders this year, and found that it was really cool to do winter poetry. The only frustrating part for them was in editing spelling errors. After a Wordle is posted, it cannot be edited. However, my students soon figured out a solution to that problem: type the text in a Word document first, spell-check it, then paste it into Wordle. Problem solved! (Click on the Wordle below to enlarge it.) I'd like to incorporate Wordle into my reading curriculum this year by having students summarize parts of books we read, or by doing a character sketch and making it into a game of "Who Am I?"

​4. Photo Peach
Photo Peach would be a great way for my sixth graders to start the year by using this cool tech tool as a "Get to Know You" activity. Students could either bring in a flash drive of pictures of themselves, family, pets, etc., or they could choose pictures that are available on Photo Peach that would describe themselves. Photo Peach has a wide variety of music to choose from, they can add captions, and then they could share their finished slide show with a partner, small group, or the entire class. Another cool feature of Photo Peach is having the ability to write comments, which would be a great evaluation tool, too! Below is an example of a "Get to Know You" that I could share with my classes in the fall:

media type="custom" key="6477315" align="center"

​ Very slowly, but surely, I am trying my hand at Twittering/Tweeting, Skyping, Google-Reading, and Blogging, but it's taking me a long time to feel completely comfortable with it. I'm finding myself frustrated at times, but I know that it will get easier with practice. Our Web 2.0 class has opened my eyes to a wealth of information at my fingertips that I never knew existed! It's a wonderful way for teachers to share information and links. Here's what I've been learning & working on:

__Twitter/TweetDeck__: The first time I twittered, it sounded so corny I went back and immediately deleted it. :-) However, as I got more confident, (and as I read over everyone else's), it was almost as easy as Facebook, only on a professional level. It has been exciting to hear and read about what other schools are doing ~ and I've been especially interested in following Van Meter's tweets, and reading Shannon Miller's suggestions. I like the idea of building a list of people to follow on Twitter who teach language arts & reading (like me) and to share new & innovative ideas for the classroom.

__Skype__: I first time I skyped was when we had a foreign exchange student staying with us from Brazil a few years ago. She was getting a little homesick, so we bought a camera for our kitchen computer, and her family in Brazil did the same. It wasn't a great connection and there was quite a delay in transmitting, but it worked well enough to make our "daughter" from Brazil laugh, giggle, and cry when she saw her parents and sister for the first time in months. It's a perfect tool for connecting with people you don't normally get to see very often. In the classroom, it would also be a wonderful way to meet and hear from people and places you are studying ~ such as a famous author, star athlete, or a pen pal from another city, state, or country.

__Google Reader__: I am still learning about this one... I have bookmarked several sites that look interesting, but I'm having a hard time finding enough time to go back and read them all! It reminds me of my MSN homepage, since the sites change continually. This is a great way to collect important facts or interesting ideas for your classroom. I will continue working with this tool.

__ Blog/Wiki __ : I am disappointed to say that I didn't have the time I needed to submit a Blog or Wiki for my classroom yet. I was glad to be able to create a Glogster, but it wasn't the Blog that I had hoped to do! It was a goal of mine to do that before this class ended, but too many conflicts occurred at home, and I haven't been able to do either yet. However ~ after our two mini vacations are over (which begin tomorrow), and our daughter starts her new job and we finish helping her move to West Des Moines, and our foreign exchange student from Germany leaves (in a few weeks), I will forge ahead!

IOWA CORE CURRICULUM INTEGRATED LESSON PLAN:
​​ Below is the Iowa Core Curriculum Integrated Lesson Plan from our group:

=X Marks the Spot= For content Understandings our group chose R3 - Higher level thinking is generated through student interpretation of non-fiction. The 21st century ICC enduring understanding is T2 technology enriches adademic collaboration.
 * [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/user/pic/1264045524/kurthja-lg.jpg width="48" height="48" caption="kurthja" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/kurthja"]] || [|kurthja]
 * [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/user/pic/1264045524/kurthja-lg.jpg width="48" height="48" caption="kurthja" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/kurthja"]] || [|kurthja]

Essential Questions for 21st Century ICC is Why is collaboration important in understanding new concepts/ideas. Essential Questions Content is how does reading nonfiction help you interpret the world

The learning Experiences/ Interactions Content is to read a range of nonfiction books and the TCT tools will be graphic organizers, guiding questions, images and voicethread

Assessments Formative - voicethread Self- graphic organizer Summative - voice thread reflection

Our group worked very well together. It is a very hard activity to come up with the enduring understandings and essesntial questions. What really helped was the cheat sheets that Marci provided. I think without the cheat sheets we probably would have killed each other.

The positive part of this lesson is that it really makes you think about content and how you need to make it a deeper learning activity, moving away from regurgitating of facts and having technology support the content not drive the content. || [|klehmsh] Thank you Tricia for typing this in for us! || [|nelsonte] We had a good discussion about formative vs. summative assessments with Voice Thread. A finished Voice Thread might seem like a summative assessment, but the more we talked, we realized the comments and reflection that are added to the initial project are actually the summative assessment. It was fun to see how our thinking changed. || [|kurthsu] You read my mind! Content has to be our guiding force and working with a group that teaches all different levels and coming up with an activity we could all do, was tough but exciting that technology can be used across grade level and content. || [|goudydi] What a great think aloud Tricia -- clear -- thanks for the model. || [|annhektoen] Our lesson plan is applicable to many grade levels and content areas. Collaboration made this plan possible. || [|nelsonte] Also, nonfiction reading is an area that is lacking in middle school. I do it, but this is a way to engage the kids a little more. I'm looking forward to trying it out! || [|AGookin] THANKS, Tricia, for typing up our reflections! You ROCK!!! I agree that Marci's cheat sheets are a must. Collaboration is ALSO a must. (To do this alone would be torture!) It's difficult for me to visualize what the final product would look like without experimenting more with Voicethread, but I'm anxious to give it a try with my 6th graders! || [|betty.lowe] I agree that the most difficult part of this activity is focusing on enduring understandings and the questions that will generate them! || [|kaska-boom] Voice thread is another tool I want to play with a little more. I can see it in reading class as another discussion tool -- maybe easier than wiki? At least another alternative. || [|kaska-boom] I like the spotlight on non-fiction reading, too. We do some in 8th grade reading, but I know we could/should do more. || [|dunlapma] ICC/UbD Feedback: Essential Questions for 21st Century ICC is Why is collaboration important in understanding new concepts/ideas? D**R**oes this question fire up the learner or is it more for the teacher? How does this question nudge the learner into discovering the content? ||
 * [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/i/user_none_lg.jpg width="48" height="48" caption="klehmsh" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/klehmsh"]] || **re: X Marks the Spot**
 * [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/user/pic/1202793136/nelsonte-lg.jpg width="48" height="48" caption="nelsonte" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/nelsonte"]] || **re: X Marks the Spot**
 * [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/user/pic/1276722953/kurthsu-lg.jpg width="48" height="48" caption="kurthsu" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/kurthsu"]] || **re: X Marks the Spot**
 * [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/i/user_none_lg.jpg width="48" height="48" caption="goudydi" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/goudydi"]] || **re: X Marks the Spot**
 * [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/i/user_none_lg.jpg width="48" height="48" caption="annhektoen" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/annhektoen"]] || **re: X Marks the Spot**
 * [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/user/pic/1202793136/nelsonte-lg.jpg width="48" height="48" caption="nelsonte" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/nelsonte"]] || **re: X Marks the Spot**
 * [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/user/pic/1276643657/AGookin-lg.jpg width="48" height="48" caption="AGookin" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/AGookin"]] || **re: X Marks the Spot**
 * [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/user/pic/1277928029/betty.lowe-lg.jpg width="48" height="48" caption="betty.lowe" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/betty.lowe"]] || **re: X Marks the Spot**
 * [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/user/pic/1245280009/kaska-boom-lg.jpg width="48" height="48" caption="kaska-boom" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/kaska-boom"]] || **re: X Marks the Spot**
 * [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/user/pic/1245280009/kaska-boom-lg.jpg width="48" height="48" caption="kaska-boom" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/kaska-boom"]] || **re: X Marks the Spot**
 * [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/i/user_none_lg.jpg width="48" height="48" caption="dunlapma" link="http://www.wikispaces.com/user/view/dunlapma"]] || **re: X Marks the Spot**

The following are posts I've made:

 * TPACK
 * Iowa Core
 * Web 2.0 Resources
 * PLN
 * Several on Twitter/TweetDeck