Blog Post #9

My classmates came up with several helpful web-based resources and I agree that Youtube is a good site to use to gain students' interest and find millions of video clips. Also, networking sites could be useful for staying in contact with students and their parents. One web-based tool that I find very interesting and think would be great to use with my elementary students is virtual field trips. One particular site, http://www.uen.org/tours/fieldtrips2.shtml, seems to offer numerous online field trips and opportunities for fun, engaging, interaction.

When you get to the site, there are several categories to choose from including fine arts, foreign language, math, science and social studies. Seeing how I will be teaching all subjects to students in my classroom, it will be nice to have one site that I can use for everthing. Students are free to explore different habitats, travel back into history, and quiz themselves on math skills. There are even links for teachers to learn more about technology in use in classrooms, special education, and professional development.

The excel program is going to be very beneficial to me because like I said, teaching several subjects, I will need to stay organized. As opposed to calculating grades and averages manually, it will be very convenient to use the functions the program offers to ensure accuracy and save time. Also, I see excel as a great tool for keeping student information such as parents names, emails addresses, and phone numbers. In addition, I will be able to easily create graphs based on student grades and can see which areas I may need to adjust or where I need to spend more time.

For the final project, my group and I are supplying an astronomy class with resources to enhance learning and integrate hands-on tools. We hope to either organize a trip to a planetarium or even better, purchase one to stay at the school. One idea is to buy an inflatable dome and use computer software to project at nighttime sky on the walls and ceiling. In addition, we think it would be very cool to provide students with telescopes, star maps, and other computer related resources to assist in learning. One challenge I see is fitting all of our ideas into our budget. A portable planetarium is quite expensive as well as telescopes so we will need to do our best to ration the money.