Rise School's in Houston!

Zoo Trip 2010

This spring break I am spending it with my Sister and her family in Houston! My niece's are fortunate enough to go to The Rise School In Houston! I will update you as I spend another Spring Break here in Houston watching my niece's flourish!

Updated Website!

 I updated my Website! make sure you check out my lesson plan using Dragon Naturally Speaking!

Writing in the Classroom!!

This year I have been student teaching in a 3^rd grade classroom. I have noticed that many of my students have such a hard time writing, because of their penmanship, spelling, or simply because they don’t like it to the point where a student begins to hyperventilate. Writing should not be that stressful, there are many ways to make writing more fun and easier for students. I want to use a technology that students can use to express what they have to say but don’t exactly have to write it. I have explored Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 10.1.

My goals for my lesson are to have students use this technology to express themselves without the constraints of a pen. I want to use this to show my 3^rd graders that writing does not have to be stressful and there are other ways that they can get what they need to say or want to say on paper. My objective and goal of my lesson is to make writing and self-expression in class and also give students who have a hard time writing a tool to help in their education so they can strive like every student should. I feel like many people believe that text-to-speech programs are expensive and are hard to use. But this one is FREE! So what is better than that? I cannot wait to use this technology in the classroom and watch my students flourish!

Digital Story

This week in my class we were asked to make a digital story and how it might be useful in our teaching. It took me a while to think about what I wanted to do, what could I do that would be useful in my teaching? In this class and my other class we are talking heavily about technology and how it can impact our students. Then I was thinking about my project that I did on Glogster and how I showed it to my 3^rd grade students and had them write their own “Where I Am From” poems, so I thought about what else is important to me that would also be important and fun to my future students. I instantly thought of Friends and Friendship. I decided to make a Slide to demonstration my digital story.

It felt extremely fitting since my friends are my foundation. I have been lucky to have a wonderful group of 8 best friends. Some of us have been friends since we were born, elementary and middle school.  I created a slide show of pictures of my best friends. It is called “Why We’re Best Friends” with each caption a different word. At the end of the slide show, I created my own picture and a map of the United States and put a picture of our faces where we go to school or live currently.

 I thought this would be useful in my classroom because my students can pick any topic and write a story only using a couple of words. I think that this is extremely useful because it allows students to showcase what they are proud of, and that they can create their own pictures and use their computer skills and incorporate it in their project. I really liked working with this program, it was simple and easy to use.  Any  grade who had access to the internet and pictures could use this. There are also so many different features that it is very versatile which is extremely nice! The one thing that I did not like was that it wouldn’t let me save it once and I had to create an account to save it, but that was not that big of a deal. However for younger students who might not have e-mails it might be more difficult.
This program was really fun to use and easy and I hope that I can use this in a future lesson to my my future students create a digital story!