Notes from Millie D

Today I received an RSS feed update that JotSpot is back up and running under the Google name, Google Sites.

As I’m writing this I only found the service through my school’s hosted services through Google and not through my Google account. I’ve got another late night at work so I’ll have some time to play with the service and post my findings in a later entry.

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Technorati Tags: google, googlesites, rss, wiki

Between snow days and vacation I was entering this Monday with a sense of skepticism and lack of focus/direction. The first day back from vacation is usually tough on students (like I need to tell you this). I decided to take a chance and let my students try out a new piece of software in the lab, Comic Life.

I made a conscience effort to only provide enough information to get people started because I wanted to let the students teach themselves and not listen to me. I showed students how to add a template, new page, add pictures, and how to add speech bubbles. After that I let the students go and they went. I knew in the first few minutes that they were going to be successful. A couple of minutes into their discovery time I heard, “Check this out!” My 4th graders figured out how to change the style of pictures, placeholder backgrounds/line style, and speech bubbles. Every couple of minutes I heard, “This is cool/How did you that?” By the end of the period I realized that children’s sense of discovery with new items is still precious and needs to be preserved. For myself, I rediscovered why I’m in this line of work.

I decided to be a risktaker with one of my more challenging groups and reintroduce a piece of software called Dinosaur World. The first time I introduced the software to this group it was a disaster. Their powers of discovery was so intense that their behaviors got in the way and I had considered shelving the software rather than dealing with their behaviors. Providing them second chance paid off and watching the children apply their classroom knowledge to their virtual environment was worth the risk. Children were correctly identifying the species of dinosaurs, the environment dinosaurs lived in, and some geographic concepts while exploring the game. Again children’s curiosity and power of discovery were validated and I knew that I had a great job.

The end of the day I went back and introduced Comic Life to other groups and their curiosity was peaked. The results were the same as the morning. I realized the common thread of the day was the fact that students were engaged, active, cooperating, risk-taking, and enjoying what they were learning. I needed to be reminded of that fact to help refocus my work.

Thank you to my students for making today a special teaching day! Tomorrow, establishing the foundation for “Doodles 4 Google“.

tags technorati : comiclife dinosaurworld teaching engagement inquiry discovery

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Google Docs has done it again!  This week the team from Google Docs took their spreadsheets to the next level by allowing creators the chance to make forms.  

From the tech side creating a form is as easy as the picture shows.  The user creates a questions decides how it is going to be answered (check list, multiple choice, text, etc.).  Google Docs creates the form and the corresponding spreadsheet that the data gets dumped into.  You can choose to invite people to your form or have a url for people to access your form.  The great part is that they don’t have to have a Google account or an email address (key when working with elementary children) to access the form.  It almost sounds to go to be true.  Where is the catch?  I haven’t found it yet.  Did I mention it was free and you can build as many forms as you want (as space is available that is)? From the teaching side what a great way to make your class more interactive and responsive to your students’ needs.  Daily surveys about topics covered in class, survey projects covering mean, median, and mode, learning about students interests and dislikes, heck even online testing taking are just a few ways that this Google Docs feature could be used in class setting. Teachers can become data driven decision makers much easier now.  Using tools like SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang (which has a cost factor) are nice but there is still the extra step of putting the raw data into a  spreadsheet.  To many this doesn’t sound like a big deal but it is an extra step that many won’t do for whatever reason.  The integration of the form creation and the data spreadsheet is the power of the tool.  I believe teachers want to integrate technology but if there are too many steps or clicks teachers don’t have the time or energy to follow through.  The ease of the tool is the power just check out Voicethread.Just try the forms feature within Google Docs.  What do you have to lose? tags technorati : Google survey online voicethread integration