Curriculum Page

Check out my new curriculum page giving information, links, and even some video guides to some amazing technology!

What's Your Story?

When I tell people I teach middle school, I get one of a few stock responses. Sometimes people simply ask, "Why?" Or they tell me, "I could never do that." Sometimes they simply wish me well on this impossible journey.

What they don't understand is I have a secret weapon. I don't just teach middle schoolers, I teach middle schoolers language arts. Some could call this a handicap but they don't understand the power of stories. When students sit in math or history or science they don't get a chance to share their stories. In my room, though, we are story tellers. We share and connect as a class, and that my friends, is what makes my job wonderful.

Writing by jeffry james acres on Flickr
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jjpacres/3293117576/

I recently came across a new way of telling stories and that is digital story telling.  I've been thinking of ways to make this work in my classroom.  I think it would be interesting to have students use Prezi as a story telling tool, or voice threads, or even just using narrated slides on PowerPoint or SlideShare.  What I'm struggling with now, is what type of assignment I could use this for.  Right now our standards have become very cumbersome and not oriented towards narrative writing.  I, like every other 8th grade language arts teacher, am drowning in FSA (text based essay writing).  Every spare moment I get, I spend on poetry and book clubs.

My students are just wrapping up their first book club in class, and one pretty easy way to use digital story telling would be for my student stop make digital book reviews.  I think I might offer this as a culminating activity opportunity.  Check out the amazing book review one student did on Insurgent by Veronica Roth (do not watch if you have seen Divergent!)

We are also beginning to work on spoken word poetry.  This type of poetry has a performance element and it might be interesting to have students work on reading their poems via voice thread.  Using pictures paired with audio to create their poetry story.

All of these are still in development stage and I would love to hear how YOU use digital story telling in your classroom or even personal life!

Nearpod and Kahoot: Interactive Tools for ALL Classrooms

Check out my Nearpod presentation below.  See how Nearpod can work as homework (by going through the Nearpod presentation yourself) and check out my video walk throughs for both Nearpod and Kahoot!

Trust me... you want to use these in your classroom!

Looking Back to Look Forward

I was inspired this week to take a look back at the history of computers.  If you've read my previous post about my technology autobiography, then you know technology has been a part of my world for as long as I can remember.  I thought I'd take this week to look back at some of this technology.

Yes, that's me.  Not many adults my age have pictures of them on computers at such a young age.  I was talking to my husband whose parents had a computer in the house but it was for "taxes" and he wasn't allowed to use it.  My parents had us using every computer in the house and I know this contributed to my tech savvy nature as an adult.

I talked with my dad a lot this week about the computers we had. The one in the pictures could have been our old Leading Edge PC, which came out the year I was born and we purchased in 1987.  It could have had at most 512kb of memory.  To put this in perspective, that is about the size of FIVE small pictures.  It may have been our Mac IIcx which had our first color screen.  When my father bought this computer which has a shocking 20mb hard drive, my grandfather exclaimed, how are you ever going to fill up all that space!  It is more likely that it is one of the later computers we had, maybe our PC 80386 or our Mac IIsi.  This cutting edge computer had 40mb on it's hard disc.  I have 200 times that space in my relatively out of date iPhone.  

My favorite computer we had was by far our Macintosh Portable.  

It was the precursor to today's laptops.  Weighing only 16 pounds, my dad described how excited he was to actually take this computer with him.

Now a days, I am constantly lamenting how out of date my resources are at school.  How slow the bandwidth is and the lack of technology in general.  It was refreshing to look back and see how far I have come and we have come with technology.  It has certainly been exciting literally growing up with computers and I cannot wait to see where technology takes us and education in the future.