Video Conferencing

Video conferencing I believe to be a great tool to use in schools. It is a great way for students to gain real time information from others, who may be across the state, the country or possibly the world. Video conferencing has opened a series of new doors to us as educators on how we are able to get information to our students. When I was in elementary school, we were pen pals with a class that was a few hours away from where I lived. At the end of the year we were given the opportunity to video conference with this class. This allowed us to see face to face who our pen pals were and what they looked like. This also gave us the opportunity to chat with them and receive information about them instantly. I have also been in classrooms who have done this same thing with classes across the country. This allows them to learn from these students what it is like where they live and to compare it to where they live. This would be a great tool to use if you could find someone who is a professional to talk to your students about their job, or to help further educate your students on a topic that they might be currently learning about.

Digital Photos

I love the idea of taking photos of your students to be used in a newsletter sent home to parents, or for a class digital year book to be handed out at the end of the year. But however I think that the photos that are taken of our students have to be used carefully and wisely. Parents at the beginning of the year are asked to sign a permission slip regarding the use of photos of their child for different things in the school, but this does not pertain to the use of images of their children on photo sharing websites. As a teacher you do not want to be the one responsible for endangering the well being of a child because you put a photo on a website of them, not intending any harm, and the wrong person got a hold of that picture and too much information about that child. So when using pictures of your students, and having them on your computer, just be very conscious on how that photo is being used. Just something to think about.

Blabberize

While working on my annotated resource guide, I remembered a site that I was shown during my student teaching. I attended a staff development day that was specifically geared towards incorporating technology into the classroom and this was one of the sites that stuck with me. The site is called Blabberize, and it allows you to take any picture and make this picture talk, by giving it a mouth. You are then able to record your own voice, take something that is already on your computer or record using a phone conversation, which you call into the company and they apply it to your account. I think that this would be a great website to use for student projects or as a fun way to open a lesson by making your own video about what the lesson will be about and having the students watch it. I encourage you to visit the site and play around with it yourself to see what it is all about. And did I mention that this site is free to anyone and you don't even have to have an account to make a video.

Visit the site by clicking here!

Pintrest

I know many of you most likely already have a pintrest account, but for those of you who do not, you should really consider getting one. Not only does this site provide great recipes, home decorating ideas, wedding ideas, humorous pictures and sayings, etc. It also provides great ideas to use in the classroom. This allows us as teachers to find some really good ideas all on one place, without having to use a search engine for them. It also provides ideas that we might not have thought of, for things that we might now actually be searching for at the time. I have gathered many ideas that I have used in the classroom and for lesson plans. I highly recommend this website.

Teachers Count is a website that I came across while searching for different ideas for my lesson plans that I was currently working on during my student teaching. It is full of different ideas for just about any classroom. This site is broken down into four different categories: I'm a teacher, I want to teach, I'm a teacher booster and I's just curious. Each section provides many different resources, including different job search engines under the I want to teach section.