Reflection

My favorite tools are:
• Google Doc
• Skype
• Video Resources
I chose them as my favorites because they are very interactive and I am sure they will keep the students focus and engage.
I will keep in mind that technology needs to be part of my tutorials, and also it is essential to support students and teachers in the classrooms. All our teachers have a variety of technology for everybody involve in classrooms in a daily basis provided by the district. I think this is wonderful and should keep going. SBISD is doing an incredible job keeping our students informed about new technology elements and integrating them into the classrooms and libraries.
I would say that the unexpected outcome for me was to see how beneficial these tools can be in our classrooms and the positive impact that they are going to have for our students. Also, I realized that I need to be all the time taking at look at all the new things we are having in our world to make our life easier.

Tool#11

I believe that these are important points to review and discuss with our students:
• Respect copyright.
• A guide with a list of web sites by subjects.
• Not everything that you find is necessarily true.
• Respect other people’s posts or comments.
• Read carefully all instructions
• Be nice when you post a comment in other people’s blog.
• Remember that a lot of people can see what you post.
• Be a creative as you can.
• Not everything is free on the internet.
• We are very lucky teachers and students for having all these resources and technology in our rooms. Please let’s take care of them.

Tool#10

I found really good apps for primary students. They can trace letters, produce letters, draw, find flash cards for vocabulary, and more. It's great. These are some of the apps that I would use: ICanWrite, Etch A Sketch, Comic Touch and ABA Flash Cards.

Also, for our intermediate grades there is fun too. These are the ones that I liked: NASA, Science Book, Math Drills Lite and USA presidents. I can keep naming apps. This is incredible. I did not know that my son will have all this technology available for him to learn.

Tool#9

Jing is a fantastic program. Teachers can create videos and direct download them to YouTube. Also, we can use it to review lessons. The only thing that we have to take into consideration is that we only have 2 GB of storage.
Skype is awesome to communicate with people even if they are far away. For example, in my case would be awesome to chat or call my family in Venezuela for free. Wooooooow!!!! I also think that it would be fantastic to let our student'parents know about this resource. A big percentage of our students have family in other countries, it would be good to teach our students how to use it, and so they can teach their parents and family members.

Tool#8

This is a great tool for me as an interventionist to help teachers finding resources and for my interventions and tutorials. It is a fun way for our students to learn.
I believe that music and movements should be part of classrooms’ routines, specially the primary grades. Students love dancing and singing and they can learn songs very easily, this is why I looked for videos with a topic reinforced by singing. These are two videos that I found:







Source: www.schooltube.com

Tool#7

I usually use power point presentations when I am teaching my lessons. I have never thought about this. I believe that this is going to become my new resource to reinforce my lessons. I really like to go the extra mile and create new ways for my students to understand new concepts, reteach or just review them and the photostory is just perfect for that.

Tool#6

I think that wikis will be really good for our students, specially because they can share information, add and edit it. I believe that wikis can be used for shared writing. It would be so fun for the students, they really love computers and everything related to technology. I can see them very focused typing and having a great time exploring this.

Tool#5

I found 2 really good web sites for bilingual classrooms, parents and the community. I used the tag: Bilingual education resources. These two web sites I believe are really good and informative. They can help teachers with different activities to reinforce what they are teaching. Also, they are available both in English and Spanish. Awesome!!! I really liked the way that you look for information, just a few words that you type in and it is done, you get all the information that you need. I think that this tool is very easy to use for the students. They just need a magic word and they will find all they are looking for. It is a very friendly web site for students even for the primary grades.
These are the web sites I found:
http://www.brightinvisiblegreen.com/kidscribe/
http://www.colorincolorado.org/

Tool#4

I had the opportunity to discover Google Docs when I went to the Eduphoria Forethought training. I believe that it is a really neat tool. We were approximately 30 people all entering information required by the trainers and giving feedback to people posts at the same time. It was live!!!
For this tool, I created a document that I shared with my husband about our summer vacations. He was stunning to see that the responses are posted immediately. He could not believe it.

Also, I am using Google Reader to follow these colleagues’ blogs:
Kindergarten at SOE
Speedlimit20
MGO at SOE
iHappyBlogger
Summer 2010

Tool#3

I think that showing pictures or videos related to specific topics in classrooms is a great tool to reinforce the students’ learning experience, specially for our visual kids.
I believe that visual elements should always be part of our lessons. In this way we are working with one of the learning styles and/or multiple intelligences that I consider helps and keeps on task a lot of our students.

Tool#2

PLN is a wonderful idea. I believe that the most we share the most we learn. It is great to know what other people think about technology or any other topic and also how they apply it in their classrooms and in everyday life.
Technology is all around us, so we have to assimilate it and have fun with it, like I am doing right now. It’s amazing all you can learn.
Sharing ideas, thoughts, suggestions, etc, is always going to be a good thing for us as teachers and of course for our students.

I made comments on the following blogs:

Kindergarten at SOE
Moni-K's Musings
Hatty Chatty The Techno Savvy Queen
Always Learning
ShoppingTeacher

Tool #1

I thought that the process was going to be more difficult but it was not. All you have to do is to pay attention to the instructions and details. I did not have a google account, so I had to create one.
I really enjoyed creating my avatar.

I think our students would have a lot of fun creating Avatars and expanding their knowledge about technology. I believe technology is the key to the future.