Web 2.0 Tool: NoRedink

Hello everybody! Today I'm going to be writing about an awesome tool called NoRedink. This site is a fun way to practice and master grammar and writing skills for students, teachers, and parents. Click here to see a 5 minute video tutorial created to teach you about key features of this tool.

Now that you have seen a brief overview of getting started,  let me tell you about 1 of my favorite features of this tool. One feature that I thing can be so helpful in education is the option to track a student's progress throughout the course assignments, pretests and quizzes. This allows a teacher were she/he needs to reinforce specific content to help that specific student or students. You can see a screenshot of that feature below:

As you can see, NoRedink can be a very helpful site for not only teachers, but for parents and students as well. This can be a very powerful site content in a very visual way, it gives students, parents and teachers the options to see where the students are at academically. I hope you enjoyed NoRedink!! Please go check it out!!

Podcasting in Education

                 
     This blog will be completely dedicated to the topic of podcasting; I would also like to show you why podcasting might be very useful in your classroom. Through, doing some research I have found that you can find a podcast for almost every subject, the podcasts can be very fun and interesting, and you can find podcasts of short explanations of the topic you are going over in your classroom to very fun songs that will help your students remember the material; they are catchy and very memorable. 

          When learning about podcasting; these two tools were very helpful in creating my very own podcast and I couldn't have done it without the help Audioboom, they give you a limit of ten minutes per podcast. Which helps you keep your information condensed and you can literally trim the fat of extra information. I feel as a teacher that there is a lot of information that you have to teach your students and thanks to audioboom you can get rid of the unnecessary stuff and focus on the main points you need to get across. Audioboom also gives you the freedom, to have your students watch the videos before and after class, so they can learn at their own pace and it gives parents the opportunity to stay involved in their child's learning. We also used iTunes podcasting tool, when you go to the iTunes podcast and select the education category and you can look up any subject you want, they have almost everything. The podcasts are usually updated weekly and you can follow those subscriber's podcasts. Which this is very awesome, because I have also found podcasts of learning about children with speech and language delays, I have also found podcasts about autism, to a special education major; that is a very useful tool for all special education teachers and those who are getting their degree in special education. These are the reasons I feel that makes these two tools very unique to me.

            When going to the Audioboom website, you can create a free account; you need to put in your email, your username that you would like and a password that you can easily remember. When you log in there is a red record button, in the right hand corner. When you hit the red record button you have the option to record or to add an already recorded audio file into the podcast, you can even add a picture of your choosing. You will then hit the save button, which will then highlight the option of giving a title and a description and then all you have to do is hit the publish button. You can share your podcast with other social media sites and even on your own blog. For the iTunes site, you download the iTunes application. You will then go to the view, and show the sidebar and hit CTRL S, and then you will select the podcast option. You can then select a category of what types of podcast you would like to view. For this project we used the education category; after selecting the education category we will scroll all the way to the bottom to select specific levels of education, I picked the K-12. It showed us all the hot podcast that were very popular; we could even search other categories if we wished as well. This in turn helped me find my topic to make my very first audioboom podcast based on one of iTunes very own podcast.

          For my very first podcast, I found a podcast show called Scientific America: 60 Second Earth and I based my summary on their 9th episode "What Explains Past Climate Change?" The podcast looks over the issue of global warming issue. Overall 1000 years ago in Europe enjoyed on average temperatures; you will see what misunderstanding they had back then about present date global warming and we will see the potential causes of global warming. I hope you enjoy my first ever Audioboom podcast! 
     

listen to ‘Podcast’ on audioBoom

Introduction to Blogging:

Hello,  my name is Ms. Kaitlin Stricker, I'm an interdisciplinary education major, working with kids from birth to preschool. I'm getting married this June to my fiancee' John, we have a one year old son named Cayden. I have a brother named Ben, he is 19 years old and I have a adopted sister named Alyssa, she will be 20 in a couple of days.  In my spare time I love to go fishing with my family, I love to scrapbook, I especially love to read, my favorite author is Nicholas Sparks. I originally wanted to be a nurse, but I decided this past year to switch to interdisciplinary education. This came into light, when I began a job at Redwood, working with adults with disabilities. I realized through working there, that I couldn't imagine working anywhere else. I love working at Redwood, everyday I learn something new that helps me better myself in my career path.

Blogging can be a great tool for the classroom, not only to communicate with parents, but to communication with other teachers and students and get there input on the activities you would like to instill in the classroom or, when we have a learning function that involves our students we can post this, we can other ideas to keep for future reference, or to give other teachers ideas for their classroom. For instance when you look at Ms. Cassidy's blog you can see when the science center came to visit them, and other activities on her posts. When we look at the aspect of asking our students to write a blog, we will be looking at how they feel about their learning, what they love about it and what they might not like to much in classroom. They can even give the teachers ideas on activities or events that they think would pertain to their learning. They could find an activity that they really liked while they were outside of school and want to present it to the teacher as an option, that maybe the rest of the class would like to do. I think students blogging would be an amazing idea and one that I might instill in my future classroom, so I can get their input and hopefully help them to the best of my ability, and also make the classroom and learning experience awesome for them.

"We the People"  by Flickr user Truthout.org/ Creative Commons Licensed

In looking for a site that would become very beneficial to helping 3rd- 5th graders learn about the early United States history. Mission US, is a very fun interactive game that helps them students have more of interactive role in their learning. I feel that children should have fun while they are learning, this game does not only adapt to their age level, but it keeps them interested. Mission one, the students will be figuratively put in Nate Wheeler, who is a printer's apprentice in Boston in 1770, you will be virtually encounter the patriots and loyalist and will see the Boston Massacre, and the students must decide where their loyalties will lie. This is one of the 5 missions that our students can participate in. I think this will be a very great learning tool, I feel that when students are involved in their learning, they will virtually be able to retain more information and they will be better prepared for the tests etc.