Reflection

I believe my favorite tools are the ones that allow me to manipulate images and videos. I am looking forward to assign my students with a photo story so they could add a free narrative about the events they are shown and let them work in pairs so they could share their work at the end with the rest of the class.

My expectations have been already transformed for this new upcoming school year. The learning process is changing all around the world via multimedia and, as a part of this global structure, we have the obligation to update ourselves and become better digital citizens of this nowadays small world so called home.

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I would love that my students understand that not every single thing they find in the web is exactly true.

We all have the obligation to share our technological knowledge to construct a better digitalized society.

Be cautious with the content they find on the web especially when it comes from unfamiliar sources.

I would like to transmit to my class that just like any citizen has got the right to go to school and learn to read, write, add and multiply ordinarily. There is also a different way to acquire knowledge and a new fashion to interact with innovating devices to accomplish it. I’d like to state that such new era comes with its own challenges for our society including ethics, security and obligations.

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Wireless technology has taken over and life without devices such as Bluetooth is simply unthinkable nowadays. The multimedia era provides us with such mobility hardly ever imagine before. Mobile touchscreen technology gives us the opportunity to mainly focus on our students instead of concentrating our attention on the interactive board. The diversity of apps, that are offered online, opens our horizon of possibilities to include dictionaries, thesaurus, newspapers, e-books, biographies, etc…into the learning process so our students find handy as many available resources as they can get to better perform their academic assignments.

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Screencast allows us to store images so our kids may narrate a photo story, not only fun to do but actually acting out the stories, by incorporating their voices, including different tones of voice, variable verbal fluency, whispering, etc… mean the dissection of the characters from deep inside that would assure the fully understanding of their features which would enable our students to make inferences and drawing conclusions a much more easily process.

Coincidentally, I happen to have several friends that either teach in elementary or middle schools down in Mexico City. That makes me wonder the possibilities that we have in our hands to connect our students with the rest of the world in real time. I am sure that we can interact with other classrooms in a different country and learn from them at the same time; not only their language but their culture in general: customs, traditions and holidays.

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Including videos into the learning process represents such a very powerful tool in this more becoming teledirected instruction; television simple makes things to come alive, in real time if necessary, so the children have a positive reinforcement of topics, previously discussed in class, that illustrate such diversity of themes.

Kids seem to be more involved into the matter of study when it is represented by images in a coherent sequence; they also seem to abstract and better develop such themes when they are prompted to respond to what they are being exposed to.

I posted two videos that may be useful in a 3rd grade class. The first one is about a guy that trekked across the Amazonas River for two and half years, those images provide us, as educational leaders in our classrooms, with the opportunity to explain concepts such as landforms, maps, exploration, tropical life structures, etc…The second one is about Martin Luther King Jr. and it can be used to introduce one of the greatest American heroes and the importance of our civil rights and obligations as citizens.

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Digital stories are indeed fun! Our students will definitely be captivated by the magic and visual power of images of themselves and personal environment. The best thing of all is the opportunity that we have to provide a meaning to those images either by sequencing them, in order to fit them into a photo story or developing a narrative out of it. Possibilities are as limited as our imagination, I clearly see the usage of this tool to document classroom experiments, represent life cycles, record field trips and even to create a class photo album.

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A wiki web site may be used in endless different ways in and out the classroom; we, as educators, set up the limits or expand the frontiers of learning. A wiki may become a simple articulated list, a family budget, a collage of images or thoughts, a social writing workshop, etc… you name it, I mean the possibilities are just right there in front of our eyes to try the known and unknown in the effort of constructing a new scaffolding of ideas, procedures and tools in this more and more teledirected society.

Teachers may find useful a wiki web to work on a lesson plan in and out the campus at any convenient time.

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more from imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov
more from hubblesite.org

I used tags such as Nasa and Hubble. I certainly found plenty of related web sites but I just posted the most relevant ones. The great thing about social bookmarking is the possibilities that it offers to share web sites with others, even if that is not our intention, since it is public. Our students may be benefited by getting so much information without a big waste of time. Kids may leave comments about different web sites so the rest of the class may be aware of the content without even opening the sites. This is a great tool for our students, especially when it comes to do independent work or individual research at any station or computer available.

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Sometimes we create documents using certain programs or versions that are not compatible with some other computers, or it might happen that our file gets damaged or even worse our whole pc is broken and our files are completely gone, well guess what folks that issue is solved by using Google docs. No more hassle to get access to your documents. Availability is not a problem anymore.

It is great to get to know a different way to share files, all at once with multiple contacts, plus having updates and feedbacks in real time. I found pretty interesting the application Forms since it could be used in the classroom to get responses from students to certain topics or even apply quizzes of the curriculum, which would mean less grading time consuming and immediate data feedback.

Google reader would make our life easier by offering the possibility to organize our contacts and their responses in a much more simple way that would enable us to follow and update our particular sites of interest in a very practical fashion.

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Spell with flicker seems to be a great tool for lower grades so kids get to know the letters of the alphabet, get familiar with their sound, create new words, classify different word families, identify diagraphs, etc… Now Wordle offers the opportunity to create a world cloud that perfectly fits into upper primary grades activities, for instance we could use those random words to introduce vocabulary of a new lesson or we may ask our students to work on a free writing that would include those words into their narratives. I mean the possibilities are nearly endless, it is just a matter to get creative.

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1) Personal learning networks allow participants to interact in a much freer academic environment since boundaries have been potentially extended nearly limitless. Expanding our universe of learning will inevitable increase our global perception of the outside world and our interactions with other beings will also be modified in such a fashion where distances have been shorten practically to a push of a button.

2) Interiorizing the out world via multimedia offers a totally new paradigm for the humankind that slowly sees the homo sapiens walking away to presence the arrival of the homo videns whom relies on data transmitted and transferred in such an unorthodox way.

3) Tomorrow and beyond, Using technology in the classroom, ELTH, First blog, Technology XXI century.