Tool #10

I have been lucky enough to be able to download some interesting and useful apps to my new itouches. One of the apps that I have found is the shape builder. The kids have a picture and need to find the correct shapes to fit in the space. Another great app that I found was letter tracing. This will be very useful for extra practice when we talk about the letters in whole group. My last app that I found was pop math where the students need to find pairs of numbers to pop the bubbles.

I think that the itouches are going to be very useful in my classroom. They will help keep their short attention spans going! They are hands-on and will keep the students engaged in the activity. I believe that introducing technology is something that all Pre-K teachers should do. That way, they are fully capable of these skills at a young age.

Tool #9

I think that Jing would be a great tool to use in a Pre-K classroom. My kids are very young, so it is hard for them to follow multi-step directions. With the help of Jing, I could capture a certain screen and record the directions. That way, if the kids are struggling and do not know what to do, they could replay it to refresh their memory. That would be a time saver for me so that I do not have to go around and remind each student of the directions. 

I think that Skype could be used in the classroom for many ways. For starters, it could be a great way to keep in contact with parents. Several of my contact numbers are long-distance, so Skype could be used to call them from home and avoid using minutes on my phone. Also, you could use skype to do a video chat. For example, when we study culture, we could find someone from a specific country to talk to.  That way the kids could have a very memorable and engaging experience.

I have use Skype in the past on many occasions. I have two sisters that are both far away; one in L.A. and one in Austin. I can use Skype to get in contact with them so we keep in touch. I really enjoy the option of video chatting so that I can see my two nephews that are in Austin. Since my daughter does not get to see her cousins often, it is the next best thing!

Tool #5

I created a delicious account. I have attached my account so everything that I bookmarked can be viewed. I really like this social bookmarking site because you can add someone and view various websites that they bookmarked as well. You can organize it into various categories. I have alot of websites that I found that pertain to Pre-K curriculum and I can share with other people. You can even bookmark websites that can pertain to your personal life: I have my bank website, my college website, internet safety, news and so much more. I had so much fun with this and I added websites that I visit frequently. This would be good to share with team members, or even parents that are looking for educational websites to visit to help their kids at home. 

http://www.delicious.com/klh1985

Tool #4

For the Google docs, I created a document for my ESL team members on our Dr. Joy gross motor curriculum that we implement at Tiger Trail. It was a document to our students' parents explaining what Dr. Joy is and what exactly the children do during this time. This tool also has been implemented in our lesson planning meetings to share some good ideas for our differentiated instruction.

Google Reader is a great tool to keep up with blogs and news. You can share ideas with people from other blogs without having to visit individual blogs.

Tool #3

This is a short video that I created using pictures of my daughter! I thought that it was fun to go through and choose the ones that I wanted for my video. While this one was made for my personal use, you could definitely use this in the classroom. You could use pictures taken at parties, during class, or at recess to make a video of your students. This video could then be shown to parents during back to school night or other school events.




I created a wordle using student names. I thought that this would be something fun to post in the classroom so everyone would know who was in my class. Learning how to write our names is something that we focus on in pre-k. So, by having this posted in the room, they could have a tool to use for help. If they weren't sure how to spell their name, they could look up at this page for some assistance.

Tool #2

1. I think that building a personal learning network is a great way to keep in contact with other teachers. Teachers learn so much by working together! You can share your experiences with co-workers so that you can incorporate new ideas into your classroom. You can discuss things that work and things that don't so that you know what to try with your students. The PLN could also be a great inspirational tool to inspire others with student success stories!

2. I like the advice about asking open-ended questions. I think that this would be an inviting way to get more responses. If you just write a general statement, no one will feel the need to respond. By asking open-ended questions, more people will feel the need to write back. After also reading the article about how often people do not post on blogs, I think that you could fix this by asking the open-ended questions.

3. Here are the five blogs that I commented on:

Erin Valdez - the use of videos to keep in touch
Kelsey Williams - sharing pictures through animoto
Stacy Hoover - comic generator as a tool to engage the kids in lessons
Nancy Bryant - google docs is a great way to share documents
Erika Rodriguez - how jing can save you time on repeating directions

Tool #1

Creating my blog was actually not as hard as I expected! Since I was hired late, I did not know if I needed to do this process, and was very nervous when informed that I had to. I had several friends who had to do the blog and I knew how much work it would be. However, creating the blog and the avatar were not very complicated. I know that I will learn a lot from this process and am excited to incorporate it into my classroom.

I think that my blog could be used as a communication tool between myself and the parents of my students.  Since my students are so young, I don't know how difficult it would be to have them actually interact with the blog. However, it could be a very useful way to interact with the parents. They could be informed of what we are covering that week, upcoming events, and see whats going on in the classroom!