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.

Tool 5

http://www.musictheory.net/
This website is an educational site that teaches elementary level music theory. It teaches it in an animated setting that makes learning music theory fun. (although I think that music theory is fun without the help of an animated website.) Since we are getting computers in our classrooms this coming year, this could be an important tool to help me teach the kids music theory.

http://www.songsforteaching.com/
This website could be base for both the student and educator use. It has an extensive list of songs that teach other subjects. i thought that this would be helpful when having to teach the TAKS objectives. I could teach both elements of music and another TAKS subject.

Tool 4

I shared the document with another teacher on my team. This could be helpful by being able to share a large file online with select other teachers. And subscribing to other peoples' blogs could be helpful by keeping up with a subject that a another teacher is researching. It may be able to help you with that subject in your own class.

http://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1Y6O-cR9saAxgAdRz_9q72c6gYcLAzH64--Kxt6mUTOw&hl=en&authkey=CPqu9rwP

I beleive that the picture captions add flare and personality to our blogs. It can also give the students a visual reminder of a lesson or something else from class.

Tool 2

Commenting on blogs was easy for me since I have commented of blogs in the past. Students can comment on blogs and help other students with solutions to problems and such. The blogs i commented on are:
1. Pennix
2. Lail
3. Turner
4. Andrade
5. DeLeon

My tool 1 blog!

I think that I may be able to use the blogs in my classroom by sharing information with my students. They can use it as a journal to refer back to when they are at home. Other teachers can also see what I am doing and might get ideas from my blogs in their classrooms.