Ideas to Inspire

Thanks to Darrell Kim for showing Liana who showed me, your fabulous voicethread creations can be put into your KS blogs. Yeah!

Here’s the link to take you to Darrell’s blog for directions: Embedding Voicethreads post

He’s just more eloquent. And while you’re there, check out Liana’s papa mālaaʻo a voicethread. Cute kēia.

Now that back to school day is over, keep your parents informed about what’s going on in your classes through your blog as well as a wikispaces site.

Advantages of wikispaces:

• students can be the authors of their pages while you still hold administrative power
• videos (imovies, voicethread, flip camera quicktime movies, recordings from photo booth) are all simple to upload to a wikipage
• ohana and other students can c0mment directly on voicethreads from the wikispace rather than sift through drafts of presentations on the voicethread site
• the site is as private as you want it to be
• if someone inadvertently erases some content, it’s easy to fix, as the program tracks who changed what and when
• wikispaces, unlike your school blog, can be worked on from home

Check out the wikispaces sites of some of your colleagues, and if you’re ready to add to your repertoire, I’ll be happy to help you set up a site.

Jerelyn’s grade 8 social studies

Mele’s Papa Nohona Hawai’i

Weboword is a website dedicated to teaching vocabulary visually.

If students are visual learners this is a great site for learning vocabulary. Not only does the site give a daily word, it also gives a visual, a sentence, a definition and information on the root of the word.

Why I like this: the more exposure students have to vocabulary, the more chances they have to learn new words. Also, by giving a visual picture, students have more ways to learn a word.

PBS online has a new website (new to me) up called Poetry Everywhere

There are 34 animated films made by students working with docUWM, a documentary media center at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the University’s creative writing program, in association with the Poetry Foundation.

As a perk, they also have teacher resources for the poems/poets.

• Coleman Barks
• Lucille Clifton
• Billy Collins
• Emily Dickinson
• Mark Doty
• Robert Frost
• Robert Hass
• Edward Hirsch
• Jane Hirshfield
• Marie Howe
• Yusef Komunyakaa
• Ted Kooser
• Stanley Kunitz
• Philip Levine
• Naomi Shihab Nye
• Sharon Olds
• Linda Pastan
• Adrienne Rich
• Charles Simic
• Gerald Stern
• Mark Strand
• Walt Whitman
• W.B. Yeats
• Kevin Young

Are you as a teacher comfortable with tech? Do you think that your prowess with e-mail makes you a techie? Do you text, twitter, IM? Are you on Facebook, MySpace? Do you collaborate with Google Docs, organize your information on Evernote, delicious, Photobucket or flickr? Do you blog? Use a smartboard? Upload your class presentations from your flip camera to YouTube, or TeacherTube? Create short videos with iMovie or animoto? What does your avatar look like? Do you use audacity or garage band to record performances?

If you at least know what these tools are, then you are well on your way to understanding the digital natives that are sitting in your classroom.

Who are they? According to John Palfrey, author of Born Digital, digital natives:

1. were born after 1980
2.  have access to technology and are networked
3. have the skills to use these technologies.

Three myths about digital natives

• Digital natives are a generation – digital natives can cross generations.
• Digital natives are more likely to be in danger -
  • young people need guidance from their parents and teachers to navigate the digital landscape and learn to protect their personal information
  • digital or not, it’s sometimes hard for young people to make rational decisions, so they need adult mentors
  • help young people engage in life online in constructive ways, grounding them in common sense
  • provide opportunities for them to go online in a safe, secured environment first

• Digital natives are less intelligent and less informed – (the “dumbest generation” premis) – The truth is that they learn/interact differently. The challenge for educators is to help them make sense of these new contexts and think synthetically and critically, rather than letting them lose their way.