Week 5

This week we spent more time talking about Twitter. Having explored Twitter for a couple weeks now I have found a couple people that I am interested in following. I have logged onto Twitter to see what people have tweeted in the past couple days. Some tweet more than others and I have found that some people are not tweeting what I have expected them to post. This summer I would like to spend more time searching for professional development sites that could enhance my teaching. I am looking for tweets to help keep me up-to-date with technologies available to be implemented into the classroom. I would also like to search for more math professionals on-line. As for posting tweets myself, I find it difficult to find ideas on what to add myself.

This week we were also asked to create a TokBox video message. This was very easy to do and I think could be very useful this upcoming year. I feel like this will be an easy way to communicate with my class as well as with my long-term sub. This would also be a great way for students to pose questions. Often they have difficulty expressing themselves through words and math symbols so I feel that many of them might be able to pose their questions more articulately if they were able to do it verbally with visuals they pose in front of the camera as well. I look forward to seeing how I can use this professionally.

New Ideas Week 4

Screencasting tools are very easy to use and I think they are a great way to communicate information with students, clients, and parents. There are so many different ways to create them and publish them. You can find them on YouTube or "How To" sites, companies have even made their money creating and editing them. You can make elaborate ones or you can simply just show the step you go through to do something. There are a lot of things we can expect students to figure out on their own, but for some learning types they need visual cues instead of just words. This is one way to get all students the necessary information in the most efficient way. I am excited to use screencasting in my classroom.

Screencasting would be a great way for students to share and express sites they have found. This would allow them to show and demonstrate how to interact with a site they have found. For me,

as a visual learner, this is a great options instead of having students write papers and reviews of sites. Students would have to create a "script" to ensure there is a flow to to the screencast instead of choppy fragments of ideas.