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What did you learn at the Unconference?

Posted by Guest Blogger-Samantha Whorton
After our Unconference 2.0 on Friday I found myself eager to try out some new things. Some of the things I learned include present.me, blogger, Arkive.org, historypin.com, Ifaketext.com, among many more.

Present.me is a great tool to use for presentations. Instead of just the regular PowerPoint, you can include videos as well. With PowerPoint, you can input videos, but then you can not see the slideshow. With Present.me you can have a PowerPoint slide on half the screen and a video on the other half to explain the slide. This is beneficial for many reasons such as oral presentations, homework problems, explaining a process, showing examples to the students, etc. 

Blogger is a great tool to use for classrooms and also for communication between the students, parents, and teachers. I have had a blog for my classroom for two years, but during the Unconference, I learned a great deal about adding pages, inputting my google calendar, and also making it more interactive. I am excited to show my students my new and improved blog on Monday.

Arkive.org is another resource to use within the classroom. This is a website that is designed for education. It has many real pictures of animals from around the world. It also has videos, PowerPoints, teaching worksheets and answers, and tips. The majority of the resources include information about endangered animals, but there is also resources for other topics. For example, my students just finished learning about plants and their parts. On Arkive.org, I researched plant parts and found a useful video, PowerPoint, and interactive game to use. 

Historypin.com is a resource to use for social studies, history, etc. There are millions of real pictures from millions of places. In social studies, you can type in a place such as the Arch and get many different pictures from different time periods. This would be useful to show the students the differences in time periods, as well as compare different places. 

Ifaketext.com is a resource that I haven’t decided how exactly to use it in the classroom. It is a website where you can type in conversations to create into a fake text. After you type it out, you can select the provider and also where you want to send it. My ideas for this resource so far are for conversations, creating stories, talk about point of view, etc. I think the students would have fun with it. 

Comments

  1. During Lindbergh's Unconference, I was excited to see how many resources I could take back to my room and USE! As a kindergarten team, we discussed many resources that we would like to investigate further, but Class Dojo stood out as a "must have". It is a behavior management website that helps to improve behavior, share data, and save time. It is simple to use and I plan to start later this week. Teachers can set up positive and negative behaviors that they might see through out the day. Points can be awarded or subtracted according to classroom behavior. It would be easy to tie this into our Stoplight and Bucket-filling behavior managements that are already in place. At some point, I would love to have little buckets instead of avatars. :)

    Parents can also have access to their child's record. They can check it through out the day to see if there is a certain time of day that their child begins misbehaving, or prepares them for conversations that they can have when they return home in the evenings.

    I am thrilled to see how easy it is to use and I hope you find it helpful for your classroom!




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