Tool #11

I plan to incorporate much of these tools into my lesson plans. Whereas I used maybe 10% of them about 10% of the time, I now plan to use them several times a week. Or at least, have them available as choices to my more traditional teaching style. I will try them out as 2 stations and then see about having 1 or 2 per group to use as an alternative assessment. What surprised me was how much I enjoyed many of the later tools and that the old adage of "you can't teach an old dog new tricks, " simply isn't true! Also, the assessment gave me some good ideas.

Tool #10

1. I will first give them the i-safe fact sheet to see what they already know. 2. I'll use some ideas/lessons form Wesley Fryer. 3. They need to be taught cyber safety, ediquete, literacy and learning strategies. There are so many concerns like sexting, texting at inappropriate times, stranger dangers, etc. My favorite website was the Digiteen project. I plan to borrow heavily from it! 4. How I will share digital citizenship with my students' parents is to have some of the videos up from Digiteen on my laptops during open house, also ask them direct questions about their monitoring of their children's computer usage, when I initiate parent contacts over the phone.

Post #9

I could see one station with the SBISD Skill Builders for those students who struggle with basic social studies concepts, and another station with Think-finity which had interactive games and also able to create a postcard (pretending you are visiting another region or time period in history and writing to a friend back home explaining what you see there. Animoto is also an excellent way for a student to retell a time period, battle, etc. in history and teach other students with it. The way I would hold them accountable would be to show them my expectations first (examples) and provide clear guidelines, training, a rubric and time them.

Tool #8

1. I already had a iTunes account. 2. I already knew how to download apps and have done some on my ipad already. 3. I learned how to sync apps to iPads. Now this helped put it all together. It was very useful.

tool #7

On the collaboration piece, I could take our project on "Famous Texans" and have students pose questions to students in other class periods about their research. Mrs. Sturhan and I could have our kids collaborate via SKYPE and Edmodo on the adaptation to the environment of various native american tribes. We could even take virtual field trips and talk to other TX History classrooms along the "Independence Trail" of Texas Independence, making it very visually rich and more real for students.

Tool #6

Today's Meet is a really cool idea! Not only will it be good for warm-ups (to see what they already know), but also for discussions on current events--which is why I created mine to be "Texas Today"

http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/5554088/Untitled Wordle is great for vocabulary!