11 tools reflection

My favorite tool has to be tool 8, video resources. I might be able to use this in my classroom after any musicals, concerts or productions. Since I am a music teacher and not a regular classroom teacher, I am not sure how I am going to use some of the actual internet training in my classroom yet, but i am sure that i will figure out some way of doing so. As for being surprised by any of the outcomes of the 11 tools program, I was not. Most of this can be done by most kids with a myspace or facebook. I guess that I am most impressed with the school district wanting to teach the technology needed for the future development of education.

Tool 11

The three things that I think are important to the furthering of education and digital citizenship are first, digital literacy. Digital literacy is the way of the future. We as early childhood educators can set a foundation of digital literacy which our students will use for years to come. Second would be proper etiquette while on the Internet. As teachers, we are responsible for educating our students in proper when doing anything that we teach. And finally, Internet safety. Proper ways to search should be taught and private information should not be given out.

Tool 10

There are so many ways to use I touches in my classroom. Since I am a music teacher and i touches were originally geared towards music, there are a lot of different applications that I can use. There is an application that has a "Star Wars" them but it is called "Clef Wars." The object of this game is to blast the different notes on the staff as they are coming at you. the more that you get correct, the faster it gets. It gradually will teach the students the placement of note names on the staff. It come in both treble and bass clef. There are also about a dozen ear training programs that not only teach the students to read music, but how the music should sound withou having heard it. I am not too sure if there were any "wow" moments because I have been researching this for the last year in light of possibly getting a classroom set of i touches.

Tool 9

I am going to find a way to use Skype and possibly a screencast in my classrom this year. I just bought a $200 video camera for my computer that has great resolution. I have a friend that just moved to China to teach Western culture to elementary aged kids and he plans on doing the same thing. I know that because of the time difference we will not be able to do any live chatting, but we can record messages and send them to him. I think that it is pretty cool and I believe that my students will also enjoy it.

Tool 8

I selected these two videos because they can be used to learn about the symphony and percussion. These sort of websites are valuable tools because you can find anything on them. I have used them this last year quite a bit.

I got this video from http://www.schooltube.com/

I got this one from www.youtube.com

Tool 7

I had no trouble using this software. It was very user friendly and took about 30 minutes to create. It probably would not have taken that long if I would not have used as many pictures. This could be a valuable tool when presenting pictures in a slide show. The students might be able to use this in my classroom when we do some kind of event. But, since I teach music class, I am not sure how much blogging will be going on during my lessons.

Tool 6

The students and I can use Wikipedia to compare our opinions of anything historical to what we know. IN MY OPINION, Wikipedia is a bogus site that should NOT be used to gather fact because of the nature of how the info is gathered. It is gathered by everybody. Anyone can change what is written on any subject which can be both ood and bad. A student might not know that the subject is not fact and believe it to be truth before somone can catch it to change it. It does, however, have many links to credible websites. That is probably the most beneficial part of Wikipedia.