Major Project- Language Arts Lesson (Week 1)

Good Morning Parents and or Guardians! Welcome to Ms. Dispenza's first grade class blog!  These upcoming post are going to be covering all of the different lessons that our class will be completing in the Fall Unit. The Fall Unit is going to last about six weeks. Each week, I will post what we did for each particular lesson through our different class Thinglinks. This week in our class Thinglink, I have three different activities that your child has to complete. The first button includes a video recording of Apples and Pumpkins written by Anne Rockwell that I created on SpeakPipe.com. Secondly, I have pictures of the physical book for your child to follow along in Thinglink with the audio recording. I turned the pictures into a book by using the MyStory app on our class iPads. From the beginning of the school year, we have been working on how to use the MyStory app. I feel confident enough that my students know how to use the app properly. So for the last part of our fall unit language arts lesson I am requiring the students to retell the Apples and Pumpkins story in his or her own words. They can make it as creative as they would like.  If you have any questions just email me or you could comment on our class blog page. Have a wonderful day! 

Here is a song that we have been singing all week since we are learning about apples in our language arts lesson! 

Mind Map

Hello! I am about to start my major project for my instructional technology course. I decided to base my project on creating a fall unit for a first grade curriculum. I am gearing towards using various tools and resources that I learned in class to incorporate into the different lessons for my fall unit. I can't wait to begin and see where this project takes me! More information will follow soon!

Week 9 PLN

This week, I learned about the new evolving digital classrooms and different flexible learning spaces. Most schools and educators are now choosing to use these tactics in order to help benefit their students attention span. The Not Old School video, describes how architects are changing the way they develop schools. These three new elementary schools in Concord, New Hampshire designed   multiple learning environments for students to move around throughout the day in order to stay motivated and focused. This new digital classroom revolves around a library that overall shapes the infrastructure of the building. The school offers natural lighting which helps with children being able to read in appropriate lighting. The children within the school feel trusted and responsible from their teachers allowing them to walk to different learning areas to work on assignments such as projects, group work, or just reading in the natural light.

Other places are also adopting this new ideology behind students working better in a flexible learning environment. From Education changing and evolving to this new ideology allows educators to be able to connect with students one on one. By having moving desks allows children to fidget and move while not having them sit still for hours in a desk. Making classroom environments with desks that move also gives teachers to make lesson plans where kids could break up into groups or use the fishbowl method.  This allows students to collaborate more since it is easier to break up into little groups. Overall, the main point of this study is when someone is moving so is his or her brain. When a child is active he or she is able to stay focus and can easily transition to other lessons more efficiently.

I definitely think this concept of flexible learning environments is a great resource to find the most effective way to teach children. In my future classroom, I would really love to have these tools such as the moving desks and more natural lighting to help me incorporate entertaining and engaging lessons. I definitely loved learning about this new upcoming change in education because I think it will benefit students and teachers to help each child learn to his or her best ability.

Week 8 PLN

This week in my Principal Technologies class, we got to experience a live chat and learn about a teacher that incorporated Ebooks into his classroom. Mr. Smith decided to use this tactic of ebooks to motivate his students to learn different literacy skills while incorporating technology. As a society, we are in a global age of sharing our work through social media. Mr. Smith started this project called "The World Is My Audience" where he shared and sold the student's Ebooks. Multiple teachers are starting to use this tactic throughout their classrooms to reach and motivate their students. For example, Mrs. Gibbon's class created a Christmas book that helped them with their reading and writing skills. Her special education students also gained enough confidence by creating this story that they went to a preschool to read to the preschoolers.

Ebooks can be incorporated into special education classrooms by helping develop motivation and excitement for learning. A speech pathologist contacted Jon Smith about his success using Book Creator to help her reach her students. The autistic students were having difficulty with social skills, so by using book creator they created inactive books to help them with these skills. Overall, the results were priceless, her class became so engaged and always wanted more ways to learn more.

There are various resources out there to help educators and students incorporate Ebooks into their everyday learning through iPads and Androids. Ebooks allows teachers and students to share their work globally. This is really directing education into a virtual classroom. According to E-Books and TPACK article, "...using e-books, children tend to more naturally investigate words, images, and interactive, tap-to-hear word pronunciations, built-in dictionaries, definitions, games, and puzzles". Using TPACK with Ebooks allows an educator to incorporate all three of these aspects within Ebooks. Ebooks also have scaffolding throughout it to help develop new literacy skills for young children. Ebooks is a vast and exciting thing to incorporate into a classroom. Definitely a tool that I will be using to help go beyond the standard requirements of teaching with my future students!!

 

Sock Puppets

This week, I got to the opportunity to use various apps and websites to describe a story. Storytelling is key to any classroom environment. The app that I ended up selecting was called Sock Puppets. Sock Puppets is available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. Sock Puppets allows you to create a video using different sock puppet characters. To begin, you first pick out your characters then decided what kind of background that best fits the story. After that you have the option to use various props within your video; however, props that have a red box around them can not be moved once the recording process begins. If a prop has a yellow box around it that means that you can move the prop around during the recording process.
I worked on this video with the collaboration of my fellow colleagues: Lauren Reitz and Savannah Smith. https://drive.google.com/a/setonhill.edu/file/d/0BxVW0j44-iM6U1lqYmNUS3d6bXcyUzlsaXNicTZacW1vRmlJ/view?usp=sharing We decided to create our story about two students fighting over a microphone and then we described how they must learn to share. At the end of the clip, we had the two students apologize to each other for not sharing. This video would be good to present to younger children about how to share his or her toys. The only problem that we had with this tool was that it only could record for 30 seconds, since we had the free version. We wanted to incorporate classroom rules on how to share, but with the short recording timing we could not talk about it in our video. If you plan on using this app in your future classroom, I would invest in getting the $3.99 version so you could have the longer recording time.
I would use this in a classroom to just switch things up instead of just reading from a hard back book. This app also allows students to be creative with storytelling without having to come up infront of the class to present or role play. This app gears towards students in elementary school. I think this would help a teacher that was teaching kindergarten-2nd grade make creative reading lessons, but have 2nd-4th graders actually creating their own stories. Sock Puppets app is a little confusing for some students just because there are multiple steps before you even start recording. Once you start to record you have to press on the character that is talking so his or her lips with sync up with your recording after you are done. Saving the story can be a little confusing because basically, you can save it to your camera roll, email, or directly post it to your youtube channel. Overall, this tool would be a great addition to any future educator going into early childhood education to incorporate into his or her classroom.