Activity 6 - Study Tools

Activity 6 - Study Tools

Tugxedo.com

You can easily loose track of time playing on this website.  Here I took my upcoming class list and made a "Welcome Poster" for them. I found some limitations. I want to say "Welcome to 2nd Grade" as one of the highly repeated phrases, but found out that your are not able to use a "digit - 2" and even though the phrase was repeated the most, it did not connect the words, therefore, I just used "Welcome".  To keep the phrase "Team Pieper" together, I took out the space between Team and Pieper keeping the caps and lower case letter in tacked. 

I have used a similar program, Wordly, with my second graders.  They would build collections of phonetically patterned words and copy - paste them into the program.  I had similar issues with this program with the addition of student names that where not "traditional" would not show up in the word art.

Timetoast.com 

I also thought it would be fun to creat a birthday timeline for our class.  It was time consuming in that I have not put together a class list with birthday's and photos, so I just add a few students to the timeline to give it a start.  I think my students will enjoy the interactive piece to the site.  They will enjoy finding themselves and their friends. 

Activity 5 - Create a MV You Tube Channel

Activity 5 - Create a MV You Tube Channel

The instructions and guide to setting up a MV You Tube Channel were clear and user friendly. This tool will help kill two birds with one stone.  I see it being useful as a teaching tool with in the classroom, practice and review for students and parent communication on what we are working on in class.  A few parents have requested that we not only communicate the concepts we are teaching, but provide them with information about the concept.  Here the video can be used as a teaching/communication tool which will satisfy the student's and their parent's needs.

Activity 4 - Screencasting

 

Activity 4 - Screencasting

This is a tool I will definitely use in my classroom.  This past year one of my teaching partners and I purchased a IXL license to share between our two math groups.  We hosted an information night to help parents learn how they can use this website at home with their child.  Of the 20 families invited, we had four show up.  I feel that providing the parent with the same information in which they can watch at tutorial at home, will only increase student participation and practice.

I need to spend more time using this tool more efficiently, but really like how I was able to manipulate it between using the web and a SMART lesson page.  One thing I would like to try to figure out is if you can rewind parts of the recording and tape over it.

 

 

I wasn't able to find out how to embed my screencast using Windows Media Audio/Video in which I recorded the cast on.  Once I had my You Tube channel up and the cast downloaded to that, I was able to embed choosing it from "My You Tube Videos".