Get on track with TrackStar!

I learned about TrackStar at a conference, and it has become a favorite of mine. TrackStar is a tool for collecting web sites for online activities and lessons. You enter the sites into TrackStar and add directions, questions, or annotations for your students to create an interactive online lesson called a track. Create your own or search the database for one that's already made on your topic. You can search by subject, grade level, keyword, or standard. There is a fun track made for everday of the year, too! The site also allows you to build a website for your track or make a quiz. The tool is free and if you author your own track and a link goes down. The site emails you to let you know. You never get in the lab and get the dreaded message, "This page is no longer available." The view in frames guides the kids through the web pages while displaying your annotations at the top of the frame. The view in text is an online printable version of any text you entered. It makes an instant worksheet for the kids to use to record their answers and notes.

I use my Hispanic Artists and Folktales Track to guide the students through the artists and for kids that are gone during the class presentations to catch up on their own. It cuts the time needed and directs them to the examples I want them to see. (In the case of art, there are pictures I would prefer the students didn't see with every artist.) After studying the artists and reading, watching, and listening to folktales, myths, fables, and legends from a variety of countries, the students create a mural portraying a scene from one of the stories in the style of one of the artists. They present it to the class and explain how and why they connected the two. We also use one on Paris Monuments to take our students through a quick tour of Paris along with a little history along the way. Students can refer back to the tracks as they complete the final projects for the unit.My friend, Kristen, and I taught an in-service class on this tool and now several teachers use it on a regular basis in a variety of subjects.

Now, if you want to make your own, here's my suggestion. Search the database and bookmark sites you like on delicious. Then go in and create the perfect track for your class. That way you are the track master and no one else can change your track or make it disappear. POOF!

Do you have the Audacity to go Podomatic or Jing on TeacherTube?

Okay, I am a world languages teacher, but parts of this chapter made me feel like I was learning a new language. I have heard of podcasts, but had no idea there were multiple sites including podomatic and audacity which allowed you to make your own with just a few clicks. I have several ideas for audio files. I thought I might start with two French conversations, one formal and one informal. The students can listen to the conversations and then write down informal or formal along with words or phrases that support their position . I also thought of recording every other line of a conversation and having the students write down a logical phrase to make a complete conversation. I don't have a good mic though so I am waiting to actually create these later. I did find several podcasts for learning French and Spanish on iTunes. I also found sites that contained a podcast followed by questions like Madrid Young Learners that are great examples of how to use this technology in classes. Librarians or reading teachers could publish book reviews of new novels or interviews with a person pretending to be a character in the bool.

Jing is a terrific tool for staff development. Every year we have training about loggin in to the system, saving to the servers, setting up the on-line grade book. Any of these could be done as a screencast and saved to a group folder so teachers could access them any time they need a refresher. (Maybe we could even eliminate a meeting and just let teachers do it on their own.) Who hasn't had an in-service and by the time they get around to actually doing it on their own they can't remember exactly what to do? Jing will solve that problem.

Finally, TeacherTube, the educational version of YouTube, allows video uploads for class use or professional development. This is the tool I chose to use. Two guys from Madrid, Spain were visiting Madrid, Iowa to shoot a television spot. I was asked to help while they were here and I had my flip video camera in my purse. I asked them to introduce themselves. tell where they are from, and what they like to do. My hope is to post this to a blog or wiki like this one and ask for other native Spanish speakers to send me their introductions. I would love to have examples from all the Spanish countries so the students could hear a variety of people with different accents. If you're interested in helping out. Here are the examples below. Once I have a collection, I would add questions such as; Who is from South America? What country are they from? Who is from Spain? What does the person from Spain like to do? etc. I have also found several fun example projects. One of my favorites is the Celeb Roll Call that includes common classroom expressions, the imperfect tense, and negation in the same lesson. These videos were easy to make and upload. I know we have flip cameras available so next year skits will become videocasts for sure!

Flickin' through Flickr

So , I just spent about three hours flicking through pictures on Flickr. I searched places I have lived, things I like to do, places and people I talk about in my classroom. I could have kept going, but it was after midnight and I thought I should get a little sleep. If you have never used flickr here is a short overview video. My classmate also gave me some cool sites to help search, so check out search me and tag galaxy.

There are so many possibilities with this tool in a Modern Language Classroom. I can find pictures of all the countries that speak French and Spanish. There are also tools to create magazine covers, montages, and movie posters. I found one I especially liked of Marie Antoinette. Any of these could be used for a project in multiple subject areas. I imagine a montage of a historical period or endangered species and habitats or magazine covers detailing life in a country or the important contributions of an individual in history. There were poetry examples where keywords in the poem were tagged with images and I found a whole music video created with flickr images. I think this could be a time saver in many schools. Say you have multiple teachers creating presentations on ancient civilizations, what if they now created a group to share photos on that topic? The pictures would magically appear together and what one teacher finds is instantly shared with the group. I think the pictures could also be used as bell ringers. Put up a picture and ask the students what they think they are going to learn today based on the image you are projecting or as as exit card you put up the image and ask the students to write down how the image connects to the day's lesson. Fabulous!

An idea I have for my class is to have the kids create a photo gallery of the places we talk about in class on our wiki. I am also thinking of changing my Paris postcard project to a video using flicr images. Finally, I found a 365 days of flickr calendar video and I thought this would be cool for a team to do throughout the year as a photo stream and then turn it into a video at the end of the year. I even found a very basic video created by seventh graders on internet safety using pictures from Flickr.com/creativecommons. I think I could easily become a flickr fanatic!

Definately Delicious

This may be my favorite thing yet. I can access my things anywhere. Amazing! No more trying to remember a site or find it again because our in-service is in a different place than my main computer.

Our school is expanding by leaps and bounds. Next year my department doubles in size. Social bookmarking is the perfect tool for communication between department members and within interdisciplinary teams. Just think, all sites for the team could be on one site so when kids are doing homework they only have to go one place for all their subjects. What a time saver! Our PLC's are departments, but our daily work is on interdisciplinary teams so I would see advantages of having both multi-subject grade level sites and subject specific multi grade level sites. I think the multi grade would be a great tool for curriculum articulation and also for differentiation since you would know what the grades above and below you are using. Just an idea. In a couple years, we will split to multiple buildings making it even more difficult to share information. I am also interested in the Diigo software so I could leave comments and sticky notes or highlight important passages.

One thing I haven't figured out, is it possible to have multiple delicious sites on the same email account? I would like one for colleagues, one for my family sites, and one that my students have access to for class? I just haven't figured out the easiest way to do this. Any ideas? Maybe I will try twitter later and see if I can find the answer.

If you don't have an account try these videos to help you set it up Using Delicious and Diigo.

Real Simple Syndication is a Really Super System

Once again I have found the directions to be intimidating, but the actual process was a breeze. I subscribed to CNN, KCCI, DSM register, NMSA articles and student projects as well as French Blog Polly-Vous Français? I haven't tried the more advanced searches for feeds. I am waiting to see what happens after awhile of getting feeds from these. It wasn't the best day to set up feeds since Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett both died yesterday. All my news feeds were feeding the same information. I looked on technorati for awhile, but I didn't find anything I wanted to subscribe to on it. I picked a random one to practice the subscribe and unsubscribe and that was so easy. I did find a blog by a group of French speakers in Manhattan that blog to keep up their French skills. This is something our department has talked about wanting. It is hard to keep my French and Spanish abilities up when I only speak beginning French and Spanish in my classes. I thought this was an interesting way to use the technology for professional development.

I had been toying with the idea of having my kids complete writing assignments on a blog. I thought I might try it with one class, or as an optional way to complete the assignment for a couple of reasons. I see 160 kids a day and the idea of monitoring that many blogs scares me to death. I put in all the different sites I have been using and with RSS, I finally found a way to manage some of this technology. In the text the author states, "Instead of checking out all twenty-five (or thirty, or more) student Weblogs everyday, you could just collect their work in your aggregator using their RSS feeds."(pg. 77, Richardson, 2009) Richardson went on to say that using feeds "drastically reduced my reading time and allowed me to make all of my classes paperless."(Richardson, 2009) This is encouraging, but I really want to know it's possible with the number of students I am dealing with each day. Right now I am leaning towards group work so that would end up with maybe 36 total to check? That leads to my next questions. Will my district allow that? If they do allow it, how do I make sure the same student isn't doing the group's work every time?

While searching RSS videos, I found one on customizing youtube videos to your reader, CustumizingRSSYouTube. I also found a couple of others I thought I would share with you. Why let our students blog? video link out of New Zealand that supports blogging was really cool. I also found a clip about girls being way out numbered in technology related fields, which says to me we really need to be making sure girls are successful and knowledgeable. I think most of the careers in our students will revolve around technology.Aint Gonna Hold Us Back D-I-G-I-T-A-L

I better go check for any updates on my new reader. Enjoy the clips!

The wild world of wikis

I am really liking the possibilities of a wiki, but at the same time I am dreading the management side. How do I check them often enough to make sure nothing inappropriate is posted? Are they secure and safe for my students? How are contributions identified and graded? I am feeling very confident that I can create a wiki, but I am very stressed about the actual implementation. I keep reminding myself of the quote regarding Wikipedia in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Tools for Classrooms. It said, " If anyone can edit anything on the site any time they want, how in the world can you trust what you read there?"they ask. It's a great question. The answer is that, thankfully, there are vastly more editors that want to make it right than those who want to make it wrong." (p.56, Richardson, 2009) My next question for them is, but were they working with middle-schoolers?

Any one who has spent any amount of time with children in the 11-13 year old range knows what I am talking about. It is the age of impulsive behaviors and irrational thoughts. Many times I will ask a student why they did something they obviously knew was wrong and the response is inevitably, "I don't know." I really don't think they know sometimes. I will hold on to my belief that all people, including the often hormonally challenged students in my class, are inherently good people who will do the right thing and give this wiki thing a whirl. However, if any of you have any pointers on the management side to make the ride a little less bumpy, bring them on!

My first wiki
Log them On music video

How did I get here?

Wow! I did it, my very own blog. If you would have asked me who bloggers were I would not have expected myself to be included. I am a middle school modern language exploratory teacher who lives in a very small town kind of in the middle of Iowa. I am not a guru or expert on anything and definitely not a technology wiz. So how did I end up here? Let’s blame it on Vegas and my Australian pen pal.

Did I get your attention there? You see when I was in my middle school French class things were still running old school. We paid a dollar and got a pen pal from the country we selected. I started with five pen pals from all over the world and Andrew from Australia is the one that stuck. We have written each other for twenty-five years and I consider our relationship’s evolution to coincide with the evolution of Web 2.0. We started with snail mail, which we still occasionally use, and phone calls. That was all we had from junior high to high school, but when I was in college email came along. I can remember telling Andrew we could email anyone on our campus, and he responded with how cool it would be if we could someday email between our countries. It wasn’t long and we were doing just that. Last year he coerced me into creating a Facebook account because we could keep up better. Andrew and his daughter were my very first friends and truly I didn’t expect many more. Within days I had requests coming in like mad from high school and college friends, other teachers, and my daughter’s friends. I found out my 20th class reunion was being done almost entirely on Facebook.

So how did Vegas play in? Andrew had to come to the states in March for work and since we had never met, we decided it was time and we picked Vegas. I took a couple of personal days and my husband and I met Andrew along with three other of his American pen pals for a long weekend. Right before I left, our principal had offered an opportunity for teams of teachers to write up a tech proposal and the administration would select teams to pilot new technology and then train others. The perk was we could ask for whatever we needed for the project. Several of us talked about it over lunch and thought it sounded like a good deal and decided on net books and flip video cameras. Because I was leaving for Vegas, my great colleagues wrote the proposal and sent it to me to look over. After a few times back and forth we submitted it and found out we were selected. That’s when it hit me. Now I have to learn how to do this stuff and quickly, so of course I went in search of a class. So that’s how I ended up with my very own blog. Blogging is one of the assignments in the technology course I am taking, Web 2.0 for the 21st Century Classroom.

I was hit with another curve ball when I ended up with a surgery scheduled for the first day of the on-line course. I once again went the old school route and contacted the teacher via email and she allowed me to work ahead before the surgery. So now I am asked to reflect on how things are going with the class. I am seeing the advantages of technology first hand. I would have missed a week off a traditional class since I can’t drive. I can also only sit up for short periods of time, so I work 10-15 minutes and then lay down for awhile. When I start again everything is still in the same place it was before. I can re-watch the video clips if the pain killers had me in too much off a fog the first time. Before the web, I probably would have dropped the course. With the technology, I am still right on track.

So here I go, jumping in to the unknown with my copy of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson. I also read his article, Becoming Network-Wise(Educational Leadership, March 2009) and I am sold that technology is the way to go. In the article, Richardson states "we can use our own networks to connect to other classrooms to co-create and collaborate on projects and content, and we can give those works real, global audiences by publishing them on-line."(pg.31, Educational Leadership, March 2009) I teach French and Spanish to middle school students. One of the biggest battles I fight is getting the students to see the people in other countries as real people. What better way then having them work together? The students also want to know when they will use languages in "real" life, so perhaps a blog or on-line survery of some sort with area leaders and businesses.

Finally, the Joy of Blogging by Davis and McGrail(Educational Leadership, March 2009) states, "Brain research indicates that growth is enhanced when students move beyond their comfort zones, and into the unknown."(Brooks & Brooks 1994;Jensen1993) I am not sure where it will all go, but I will get over my fear of the unknown and dive right in. I can always use a little more brain growth. If you need anymore encouragement, check out this video, Technology Fear Factor in Education. I had to watch it twice before I could read the text message spellings so I consider it tech training as well.