1. What are your favorite tools you now have in your personal technology toolbox? Briefly describe a particular activity that you will plan for your students using at least one of these new tools.
My favorite tool by far is Animoto. It is so user-friendly and more importantly, kid-friendly. Students are able to easily navigate their way through the progress with a professional product at the end. It does not take weeks in a lab to complete a project. A project is not just a movie with pictures. Students may make a biography with picture and important facts. Students may create a summary with beginning, middle, and end of a book. Students can design invitations to an event or an advertisement for a book recommendation.
My second favorite is Big Huge Labs. Student can create many multi-Genre products such as trading cards, Motivational Posters, and Name Badges about famous historical figures or informational text about a study of a needy country.
2. How have you transformed your thinking about the learning that will take place in your classroom? How has your vision for your classroom changed? Are you going to need to make any changes to your classroom to accommodate the 21st Century learner?
One transformation of my thinking has gone through is doing Nook and IPad Book clubs. I will try this in order to be paperless and more importantly, developing students’ linguistic babble on rich literature. I think this will be a strong motivator to become a self-determined reader. I have already add the Nook app to my iPads in order to lend ebooks I hope to purchase if I win the Mini grant this year as well as a few Nooks for book clubs.
3. Were there any unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
I was surprised about the postings. There needs to be minimum standards is to what is expected in a blog post to stimulate more educational and professional conversations. Teachers need to consume blogs before they are expected to produce a quality blog.
