Screencast
My goal was to create a screencast to present to my students. I chose to use Educanon to create my screencast and had some trouble with it at first. However, after problem solving with my instructor and my practicum student I was able to figure out that when using the free version you can only use some of the different question types. Once I figured that out, I was able to easily create a screencast to supplement a social studies lesson on goods, services, producers, and consumers. I also shared the link with my Twitter followers. Yeah!
Graphic Organizer
I also created a graphic organizer using Educreations and shared it with my students. We just started learning about personal narratives and I was teaching a lesson on how to narrow down a topic. So, I used Educreations to draw an inverted triangle to illustrate how to go from a topic such as a vacation and narrow it down to the specific place such as Worlds of Fun and then to narrow it down one more time to what it was like to ride on one of the roller coasters.
I would also like to try using Popplet to show my students how they could brainstorm some different topics for their personal narratives.
Teaching using Traditional and New Literacies
I really enjoyed reading the following article: http://pwpresearch.wikispaces.com/file/view/Combining+Traditional+and+New+Literacies+in+a+21st+Century+Writing+Workshop.pdf
about how to integrate technology into the writer's workshop. I loved the idea of having students record themselves telling their stories and then listening to them to help them get the writing process started. I think this would be especially beneficial for students who are intimidated by a blank piece of paper and struggle to get their writing started. I think it would be challenging to have every student in my class do this, but I would like to start small and have at least a few of my students try this strategy. I also like the ideas of my students turning their personal narratives into digital stories. I think it would be really engaging for them.
