21st Century Tools, Tool #4

Well, after completing this lesson and having everything here ready to go I was spell checking my post and pressed backspace to change a word and it deleted everything that I had ready to post!!!!!! Horrible!

Lets try this again I guess...

I was able to create a document of a grading rubric that we are going to use for a project in our Science class on the Human Body systems and share it with my team members. I also created a form in which I polled some of my fellow teachers on what their favorite NBA team is.

The NBA poll can be found here.

Tool 4 was pretty much a review of all of the Google Products we have previously become familiar with via all of our campus technology offerings/my GT training this summer. The products are very useful, however I think that they can best be used to collaborate with fellow teachers to share and edit documents, for example a test, and together at the same time make changes to the document from anywhere with Internet access! No more saving and emailing the document to open, change, save, and send back through email.

The best opportunity for parallel teaching throughout the grade level, in my opinion, could be reached with this google docs or forms tool. If I had an idea about what my students are doing in LA or Social Studies I am confident that I could find a way to tie in their learning fro mother classes into Science class, just as I am sure that the other teachers could build upon what we're doing in Science. This is something that really could be achieved without much effort at all...

As a teacher, once I have our technology in my classroom I will be able to share forms (test questions, practice quiz questions, or other checks for understanding) with my students in the middle of a lesson to make sure they're all "Staying with me" as we are goingover a more difficult topic. IN addition I would be able to save so much paper if I knew that all of my students had access to a computer and could get online to do the homework that I shared with them over the web...

21st Century Tools, Tool #3

Tool #3 took me some time to figure out. It was cool going to the different video sites and I was able to bookmark Blinkx which is a great place to search for online videos from many different sites at once. I was really interested in figuring out how to embed a video onto my blog, and finally was able to do it as it is seen below. It was not easy, and I had to play around with where to put the right code into the right place! However, I think that being able to embed a video will really be very cool once the blogs have been integrated into the classroom along with out "Soon to come" technology. I hot-linked a video, and embedded one below...

This video is an overview of human body systems with some very cool images.



This video below shows the journey food takes through out digestion systems...
Click Here


I was able to create a dropbox account, and have uploaded a couple of documents there. Dropbox seems OK, however it's the same thing that any online "hard drive" will do for you. I am sure that it will come in handy when I am working from home and come across or create a document that I would rather upload to the dropbox site rather than just email it to myself? Some of these tool do very similar things, and it seems like if we tried to use every tool, it would get very confusing as to where I saved this file or this link etc. However, when picking a couple that do not do the "same thing" these tools can make life easier I hope!!!

21st Century Learner Tool #2

In going through this tool, I was able to visit a great deal of "Educational Blogs" that proved to be pretty interesting. I put links below to the ones I enjoyed the most (adding a link inside of text was learned here too!), however it seemed that a great deal of the blogs were so "Busy" and overwhelming. It was almost too messy for my taste. I did like how these blogs below utilized the "Tags" feature I am sure that helps the subscribers more easily navigate through the copious amount of information displayed at times. Getting the hang of this Blogging thing!


The Fischbowl
Cool H/S Science Teacher
Technology Tidbits
Learning is Messy - Great Blog!

Also was able to go create a Diigo account. Will take some time to sort through all of my links, but should be a great tool to use to not loose any bookmarks if the computer crashes! Also to share with folks...

11 Tools for the 21st Century Learner: Tool #1: Getting Started - Creating your blog!

11 Tools for the 21st Century Learner: Tool #1: Getting Started - Creating your blog!:

Got my Science blog all set up! Also with this post I learned how to link pages to my blog... Cool!