I'm Lovin' It!

Watching all of your videos has been so fun! I hope you enjoyed my comments. If you need a few more videos to watch, here are the links to our classmates pages with videos already posted. Good luck and good blogging to all!

Katie DID From this video I saw how fun it would be to have students create an adventure to tell with pictures. This could meet any of the Language Arts core standards. (Katie Matthews)

Hooray for You This video helped me see that using existing text but adding personalized pictures can really make a lot of difference in a story. The actual photographs made this familiar story seem a lot more important to me. (Kami Orr)

Hatchet Trailer Wow, what a riveting book talk! I never would have thought to use a digital storybook as an intro to a classroom novel, but this showed me what a great success it could be. (Sabrina Huyett)

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Trailer Using photos from a video that students may have seen before was ingenious. I know that in my experience I always like the book better and some students might also. Having a male voice in the video also captured my attention more than a female. (Ashley Daley)

Real A to Z How wonderful it would be to use this in a classroom with ELLs. It's hard to find good picture books with realia type pictures. Creating your own, like this would be very beneficial. (Becky Edmonds)

We Are Family This one reminded me of my own a little bit. Just the idea of self in relation to family. Also the idea of describing likes and dislikes shows comparison in a more general form than the describers in textbooks. (Whitney Marie)

My Digital Story

Here is my video. I hope that you all enjoy it. I am really excited to use it in my classroom someday to help students in first grade understand the social studies standard of self and family. I am extremely close with my family and I think that showing my students my family will help them understand that importance to me and maybe make them aware of their importance in their own families. I can't wait to watch the other videos. Happy Blogging All!

My Storyboard

This week's assignment is by far the most exciting assignment for this semester. I am really excited to create this story. I decided to do a storyboard of the song "Baby Mine" from Dumbo. I have decided to use pictures of my siblings holding their babies as the photos that will be seen as the lyrics are being read. What I am most excited about, is turning this into a real book using MightyAuthors.com. I am also excited to sift through the many pictures I have of my siblings with their babies. Now, onto the business of this blog.

The content for my story book is related to the 1st grade content core Standard 2 “students will develop a sense of self in relation to families and community” and 1st grade Language Arts Standard 1 Objective 2 "Develop language through viewing media and presenting.
a.Identify specific purpose(s) for viewing media (i.e., to identify main idea and details, to gain information, distinguish between fiction/nonfiction)." I chose these for my content because I think that it will help the students to relate to one another if we all remember that we were babies at one time. They will be asked after the story to bring in a picture of themselves as a baby and they can share a tradition that they have with their caregivers, like singing this song is for my boyfriend's family.

For pedagogy I will use this as an introduction to a unit on understanding self. I would use this at the beginning of the school year. I will have the students bring in their own pictures and we can display them in the classroom to showcase how special each child is.

The technology of this assignment will probably be Photostory for Windows. I chose photostory because I know how to use it already. I made my own wedding video using iMovie, but find Photostory to be much faster and easier. To use technology with the class, I will present this story using a projector on the board. I could also scan the images the students bring in and we could create our own book of family traditions after this introductory story.

I am stoked about this assignment and really can't wait to turn it into a published book. I will give copies of it to each of my sisters and my future sister-in-law for Mother's Day this year also.

Here is my storyboard

Web 2.0

This week was full of a lot of crazy assignments. I found that it was rather difficult to get them all completed while trying to keep up with the normal work load. What I did learn though, was that creating my own wiki takes a lot more decisions than I ever imagined. With a blog, I have a few important decisions, like what layout and which background. With a wiki page, I have to totally create all of those things and rearrange them. My wiki has been pretty successful so far though. I have to finish editing the content page, but plan to do so tomorrow when I have faster internet access.

I love this whole idea of web 2.0 where the internet becomes so interactive. I find it empowering to get on the internet and create. I also love knowing that I have the skills to do this and a few programs of my own like digital scrapbooking that will make the quality of my class webpage look better eventually.

In response to the many goodreads and diigo experiences, I have to say that I do not prefer either of them. I know that they make life easier as a teacher and that someday, in my classroom, they will be invaluable, but right now I find them to be a complete nuisance. Getting weekly digests on which friends updated their booklists just seems to clutter my inbox and bookmarking in all of the different places like my computer, diigo, and delicious just seems like overkill. Google Reader on the other hand is something that I find useful. It brings the news that I want to read to one spot where I can access it easily and edit my preferences as I go. I previously subscribed only using iGoogle and prefer the layout and ease of use with Google Reader.

Here are the screen captures from my weeks assignments.

This shot shows me sending a video message to my god-mom explaining the weeks assignments. I attempted to contact her using yahoo messenger's video chat, but it was too late in Michigan.

This is my goodreads comment. I talked about the book The Wright Three.

This is my Diigo page. I uploaded my bookmarks from delicious.

Lastly, here is the starred copy of 20 Useful things.

First Blog of the Term

Why do I love education? Good question. It's not because I love being at school. Honestly, school gives me hives. I love and chose education because I love being able to communicate with children and with adults about children. I adore listening to the way children explain how they understand something and why they did what they did. I love reading. I love playing. I love being with people. AND, most of all, I love the look on a person's face when he or she understands something new for the first time. It's the Aha moment. The part of the educational day that makes it all worth it. This is why I love education. This is why I am Mrs. Hamilton.