Ed Tech week 7....We are finished!!!

Yeah! We are finished I am so happy to have turned in my final assignement for Ed Tech. I learned so much in this class and am excited to use many of my new skills in my Kindergarten classroom! I am currently making a powerpoint using my students voices to tell the Christmas story for their families. Everyone who has seen the work in progress says it is the most amazing thing. I was a little nervous about attempting to record five-year-olds but it is priceless! I pray you all enjoy some rest before we dive into Children's Lit.

ED Tech Week 6 Reflection

Wow!!! I cannot believe this Educational Technology class is a two credit course. I am still slogging my way through the assignments with no end in sight. I guess we should be pleased with the value we got for our money...I think we have done at least four if not six credits worth of work by the 15 hour per credit standard...just look at how much money we saved! I am nearly finished with week six finally but so sleep deprived and not wanting to wake my daughter to use her laptop since I don't have Office 2007 to finish the APA Paper assignement. i have watched all the tutorials and I do like the built in reference feature for formating papers I may have to upgrade for that alone.

I changed my mind this week about the educatoinal value of video games. I never would have thought I could embrace this two-dimensional technology and yet after our reading I do see the value in incorporating games to support and supplement the curriculum in moderation.

I also still need to post my ppt outline to some wikis and make a contribution to the discussion of plagerism. Not tonight though...my brother is in town for a belated Thanksgiving celebration so I got a very late start and I must be up to run the sound at our early church service tomorrow.

Ed Tech Week 5 Reflection

Week five finally gave me a chance to catch up in this course and in my classroom. I am enjoying the new applications I am learning in Ed Tech and look forward to using them in my classroom. For my PowerPoint presentation in this class I used some old pictures from a preschool production and incorporated a podcast voice over. I am really excited to try a variation of this with my Kindergarten students using their artwork, photos and voices to create a gift for their parents. One of our readings linked us to a free trial download that allows us to convert ppt to dvd. I plan to experiment with that next. Well, on to week six. Everything is falling into place and I also realized this week that this course is a week shorter than I thought it was so that is a blessing as well!

You Might Be Jealous...Black and White!!!

Top this Annie and Darcy...
This is the #1 song on the day I was born...Showin' my age!
Thanks for the link this is fun!

Week Four Reflection

This was a crazy week in my Kindergarten class preparing for Thanksgiving and an entire week off. I enjoyed the information about copyright and the exceptions for teachers. I find it all to still be quite confusing and even after all of the reading and considering the different scenarios in our assignment I still only scored a 57% on the quiz. I think if I run into an area that I question I will still have to look up the exact wording of the rules. I appreciated all of the links to resources especially the slider on the library site.

I was not really familiar with podcasting so I enjoyed that exercise and have come up with a number of ways to use it in my Kindergarten classroom. I am excited to experiment with creating some reading activities for my students using podcasts. I am also interested in incorporating a voice over on a PowerPoint for a keepsake for my families for Christmas. We will see how effective that is! I have used PowerPoint quite a bit so I was familiar with most of the information presented in the tutorials. I appreciated the points concerning the over use of PowerPoints in general and the necessity of moving away from clip art, bullets and too much text! I am looking forward to week five as I do not have to teach, we are out for the Thanksgiving holiday so I will have more time to put into this course.l

My Philosophy of Education

“Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it.”
Proverbs 22:6


My responsibility as a Lutheran teacher and coach is to assist parents in their God-given role of nurturing and educating their children to approach life from a Godly perspective. The most important goal for a student or athlete to achieve is a personal relationship with their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. While we need to develop skills and abilities to function well in society we must recognize that, [t]he fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline. (Proverbs 1:7) As the children in my care develop a relationship with God they are then able to benefit from wisdom and discipline.
In my classroom contributing to the success of my students is essential. I am committed to providing a variety of age appropriate learning experiences in safe and secure surroundings. My job is to convey knowledge and teach skills to enable my students to be productive, contributing members of society. I provide opportunities for my students to practice the skills necessary to interact with society constructively. My classroom is a happy, healthy, nurturing Christian environment, which promotes physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual growth. I encourage problem solving and critical thinking so children will find joy in discovery and are well equipped to be life-long learners. I provide instruction, encouragement, assessments and feedback to all students corporately and individually. I recognize the importance of appropriate, detailed instruction that will allow each child to experience success. I model the behaviors and attitudes I wish to see in my students. Furthermore, I attempt to commend the quality use of God-given talents, skills and abilities. I am in a unique position of influence when I consistently demonstrate appreciation and reinforce the value of using these gifts to God’s glory.

There is a huge responsibility associated with teaching and coaching. This is an area of undue influence and this influence must be used judiciously. When I have the opportunity to give counsel to my student athletes I must be very conscious of the possible implications of my suggestions. Often I find that I am a confidant and I can help guide and direct in areas my students or athletes are uncomfortable to share with a parent. It is essential therefore; that I develop a relationship with my student’s parents and that we are able to communicate so that I am able to reinforce the attitudes and ethics they wish to teach their children. Partnering well with parents requires regular open communication in the form of newsletters, displays, emails, telephone conversations and as often as possible, face-to-face. In addition, I solicit and welcome feedback from my student’s parents in the form of an anonymous questionnaire in order to best ascertain what I am doing well and the areas I need to focus on for improvement.
I believe Lutheran Schools should be governed by and filled with faculty exuding the love of God. To develop a climate of loving acceptance for our students we must focus on positive reinforcement. It is necessary to encourage behaviors, attitudes and ethics we wish to see. Negative behaviors, which must be addressed prudently, often demand attention so it takes determination to focus on the positive behaviors and give them the attention they deserve. Above all, Lutheran Schools must share Christ. The faculty and support personnel who are selected to guide the students in a Lutheran School must enjoy a personal relationship with God. In order to teach effectively, the teacher must know the material. If I want my students to have a personal relationship with God I must continually seek to develop and grow in my relationship with God along with continuing to study curriculum design, mapping and strategies; best practices; learning theories; and cognitive development.

Week 3 Review

Wow! I am not doing a very good job of keeping up with posting my thoughts on our class. I am really enjoying it though. I learned a LOT in week three. I am really excited about the web site and the opportunities I see for implementing this in my current classroom. Every day I come up with more ideas of things I could post there for parents and links to activities to reinforce the curriculum.

Cyberbullying is a real issue we must deal with. With all of the great technological advances there are always growing pains and I think cyberbullying is one of them. Hopefully we can develop a good program to teach children how to deal effectively with these type of attacks and the confidence to head them off.

The cell phones in the classroom idea really stretched me. I found myself agreeing that we must embrace technology and look for ways to use all of the resources available to our students. I really thought I could not be convinced to allow cell phones in the classroom. In fact up until a little over a year ago now I did not own one and did not desire to...my standard line was...I don't want to be that accessible...but now my family has gone completely cellular...if that is an accurate description. We cancelled our landline and just have cell phones. In such a short time I have come to really rely on this technology and love the connectedness we have as a family...especially with my teenage daughter.

I am really buried this week with all of the Thanksgiving school activities coming together. I have had to put some of my college course activities on hold but intend to spend a good block of time this weekend and then next week while school is out for the Thanksgiving break. Our school has the entire week off so I am looking forward to a nice break and a chance to catch up on a number of things including house keeping. Truly my family is such a blessing at times like this when school, college and life starts piling up...literally!

Week Two Reflection

I am starting to get the hang of this stuff. I learned a lot about Wikipedia and checking the credibility of websites. I changed my opinion of the usefulness of Wikipedia after reading the article about it and think there are valuable applications for allowing students to do research using this tool and the necessary research to corroborate information attained here.

I am having fun with the website design. I made a hyperlink to this page so I decided to type in my reflection of this week while I am here. I have so much to learn about technology and the uses for it in the classroom. It is fun negotiating these sites and not as hard as I thought it would be. Of course I am not yet finished with my website but I did get in to it so that is a good start for me.

As far as student attention span goes, I do not think educational technology is shortening it but I do think that technology in general and our national tendency to indulge in instant gratification is.

I missed the boat on the reflecting on week one so I will reflect on week one and one half. The first week was crazy as we finished up our Learning Theory class and began to negotiate this technology course. I am not real tech savvy so this is going to be a very beneficial course for me. I have learned so much already! I am excited to build a website because I think the families of the students in my care will really enjoy this medium of communication.

Using Blogs in the Classroom

I really like Mr.Harbeck’s blog. I think this is a very effective means of communication for his students. Encouraging his students to critique and provide positive constructive feedback to their peers is excellent and demonstrates the techniques described in the Don’t Feed the Trolls Article. I think it is very fitting to use a medium such as blogging to help students develop appropriate written communication skills. Mr. H is obviously quite skilled at arranging the information, as his site looks very appealing. I also enjoyed playing the second grade Chinese problem solving game that required me to move the frogs from one side of the pond to the other.

I think with some practice I could effectively use a blog with my Kindergarten class. It took me a little while to get my favorite animal post to look the way I wanted it to. I managed to navigate away from the page inadvertently three or four times and had to start over each time. It was a little frustrating that my page did not appear like the preview when it posted to the actual page. I spent too much time trying to get the page to look the way I wanted with the appropriate spacing and such viewing it using the preview prompt since it did not appear as the preview showed on the real site. It makes me wonder why it has the preview when it is not accurate. Once I posted and saw that it did not match the preview I wanted to change the line spacing so the words would break across the page in a more pleasing fashion but I could not figure out how to make these changes. I was able to get back into the edit section but the changes I made did not make the text adjust.

In regard to application in my current Kindergarten classroom I could use a blog in a number of ways. I could provide regular updates to communicate to families what we are doing in class. I could provide links to interactive sites or activities to enrich what my students are learning in the classroom. I could facilitate interaction and communication between the families in my classroom to encourage development of a community. If there is a means to provide a secure, pass protected area I could post pictures of my students to illustrate what we are doing in class and make them available for parents to download and printout.

My Favorite Animal

Hi, my name is Dina Weber.

Mrs. Weber to my fifteen wonderful Kindergarten students!

I love teaching Kindergarten.

My favorite animal is a giraffe. They have beautiful long legs and necks and appear regal as they stroll about munching leaves from the tops of trees. I think they are cute with their long eyelashes and funny bumps on their heads.