I have just finished my Digital Story and my Retrofit Lesson! As I was writing my plan of action for the digital story I was really excited because I can't wait to use this in the classroom. I have learned so much over the past month in combination with this class and the class I took prior which also focused on technology.

Yesterday I was able to get some hands one experience with using the Smart Pens with Dr. Gradel. I cannot believe that we only scratched the surface with what they are capable of doing. I learned so much on how to incorporate them into the classroom and how they are a great tool for special education students. The recall abilility would be such a great tool for the types of students I work with.

I am excited to see everyones Digital Stories and wrap up class tomorrow!

Today I spent a lot of time looking through information on smart pens! These pens have the ability to record what has been written and saved and then can be transferred to a computer. I have. It had the chance yet to play around with the pens but tomorrow Dr. Grades is joining our class and we are going to get to use them hopefully. I have been continuing to work on my digital story and have uploaded all of my photos to Photo Story. I think it will be really neat when it is completed! I also was able to finish my cool tools assignment and the 6+1 traits assignment. There peas so much information I feel like my brain had been overloaded. I am very excited fr my last two days of class so I can see what else I can start to incorporate into my teaching.

For the past few days, I have been working on my digital story! I have finished story boarding and all of the text is complete. Now, I have to decide what program I am going to input all of my information and text into. I have looked into Cast Book Builder and Microsoft's Photo Story. I think I am leaning towards Photo Story just becuase you can record right into it and you do not have to upload from a seperate audio application. I have been also looking for videos to put into my story as well to make it a little more interactive for students.

We got a quick glimpse of voice thread today in class and I think that would be a neat tool to use in the classroom.

Today I learned a lot of neat ways to storyboard and put together digital stories! I chose to do my personal digital story on the life cycle of a butterfly since it is a unit that I cover every year. I thought it would be neat to have my students create a digital story as a sort of assessment at the end of the unit. I would like to use the one that I create as an example for my students to see next year. So far, I have decided to use Jason Ohler's graphic organizer to storyboard and I am still deciding on what program I am going to use to actually put my digital story together!

My peers and I also discussed the topic of a flipped classroom today. I had so many questions on how to implement at the elementary level and I'm glad I'm not the only one who has questions. Rather than flipping the classroom totally, the idea of flipped teaching was brought up, which is something I really want to try. Flipped teaching is when not all of the lessons are flipped, but maybe a few throughout the year just to introduce it to students and see how well they react. If flipped teaching is effective you could use it more and more at a pace that is comfortable for you and your students!

The things I have learned the past two days has been so neat and a little bit overwhelming!

Yesterday when my group and I met for our Glog assignment we got to use Glogger and it was the first time for all of us. It was very frustrating at first, but the site has awesome capabilities. I think this would be a really neat tool to use in the classroom for students to create something that is unique to themselves. I really think students would pick up on it much easier than my group and I did!

Today, I spent a lot of time looking at the "flipped classroom" approach. After I watched the videos I was really interested. I want to keep looking into it because it seems like it can be really effective. My only concern is that out of all the examples that I saw it only showed it being used in middle/high schools. I want to find ways to use this strategy with elementary students because I think it will really prepare them for future endeavors. I like how it makes the students responsible for their actions and for their work. I am looking forward to my classmates posts on the flipped classroom and see if they have any ideas for elementary implementation!

Hi everyone! My name is Rhea Williams and I am a special educator in Western NY. I am blogging to report what I am currently learning about on how to use technology in the classroom with and for your students. Yesterday, I discovered Fakebook for the first time. It did in fact look a lot like facebook that most people are using today. As I explored Fakebook I realized that students could really benefit from it and have fun using it at the same time! Students are constantly talking about how they are all on facebook and how they are all friends with each other, so why not incorporate something they are familiar with into their everyday learning? So much could be done with fakebook such as author studies, theme studies, presentations and could also be used as a discussion board for certain topics.

I was also introduced to linoit.com yesterday and I had the chance to explore that as well. It is an interactive online poster board where you can post sticky notes or pictures to the board. I could see this being used a TON of different ways in the classroom. It is very interactive and changes things up a bit from the regular paper and pencil writing.

This is my first time using a blog, so I hope as I post to you I can learn more about it and how I could use a blog in my classroom as well. If anyone has any blog ideas for me please let me know!