Chapter ten was all about teachers getting together and collaborating with each other. Professional learning communities allow different schools to try out different online tools and collaborate with each other about what they liked about it. Twitter is a great platform to use as a blog. RSS feeds are a way for users to import a collection of websites and generate one feed for all of them for easy access to skimming all of them at the same time. Internet projects are something I have never heard of before. I have heard of pen palls before which are also really neat but I’ve never hears of Internet projects. Internet projects are a way to have collaborative projects with local, national, and even international colleagues. I would love to try this in my own classroom one day. I would enjoy researching this more. I would love to learn more about if it is just the teachers collaborating with each other or if the students ever get to talk to each other. Ano...
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Chapter 9 was less about ways for children to use the Internet in the classroom and more about ways for teachers to assess the children. One way children are typically assessed is by having a face-to-face conversation with the teacher. With the use of the Internet, children can receive feedback in other ways such as audio recordings, virtual sticky notes, and blog comments. Backchanneling is a wonderful way for students to post questions and comments they have for the teacher in real time. I love this idea because it give the teacher the opportunity to be online in the evening if time permits to help students in real time rather than answering when its too late. Rubrics are an excellent way to show students what they are expected to do. They also help teachers assess the children by seeing if they fulfilled the criteria. Checklists are another wonderful way to assess children. Checklists show if a child is excelling in a particular area or if they need a little mor...
This chapter seemed to offer a lot of new ideas that I never knew about. One of the things I learned new in this chapter was about all the ways to help students conduct a search. Whenever I have a question I always look to Google to answer my question. I never knew there were other websites were I could customize my searches to make them better. A website I would love to try out is InstaGrok because it not only offers a wonderful search engine graph, it also saves all websites as well as generates a citation for each. I cannot wait to try Boolean search terms; I did not know that I could use this technique. I wish I had known I had the ability to limit what kinds of websites I would see. Often times teachers will say that websites ending in “.com” are not reliable sources however I did not know I would exclude them from my searches. Something else that was interesting to me in this chapter was asking wonder questions. Showing students pictures and asking if they wo...
"The Doorbell Rang" by Pat Hutchins was one of my favorite books as a child. This book is about a mother who bakes cookies for her two kids. When the story starts out the kids decide that there are enough to have 6 each. As the story goes on the doorbell keeps ringing and ringing with more and more kids coming over. Eventually there are only enough cookies to have one each but the doorbell rings again. When they open the door, to their surprise it is their grandma with more cookies. This book although simple is fun for kids to read because it leaves them in suspense wondering if there will be enough cookies. I can remember reading this book over and over again as a child. I definitely recommend this book for other children.
This chapter did not provide me with as many new ideas as previous chapters have. This chapter was primarily about writing responses to stories read. Throughout my life I have always had some assignment where I had to write an essay or paragraph about my option about the book we had read or list questions I still had. As far as I can remember the questions I had were never answered. Being able to post writing responses online is a wonderful idea. I think it is great to be able to see what other children think about the book they have read. It is also a great way for children to start a discussion with each other by commenting on other children’s posts. Writing responses do not only have to be read after reading the book yourself. Children can provide links and videos to enhance their responses for anyone who has not read the book themselves. Making these public may be a great idea because children may try harder...
Chapter 6 introduced many different online elements I have never heard of before. Online sticky notes are a tool that I did not know existed. Now that I know about them I would love to try them out myself. Being able to highlight and take notes on any website is something I have always wanted to do. Secondly something that was discussed in this chapter was all of the different online dictionaries available. I have always thought that dictionary.com was the only online dictionary out there. I had no idea that there were tons of different dictionaries including ones for ELL’s and young children. Another part of this chapter that I thought was really cool was the idea of virtual authors visits. These can be anywhere from emails to Skype calls for a fee. Authors tell all about their thinking while creating stories. The next new thing I learned about in this chapter was GoogleLit trips. Theses are ways for children to be able to go on virtual road trips. These roa...