I’ve found on many blogs, including my own, that many writers write a “year in review” post summarizing a calendar year, but as a teacher I thought it would be a good time to look back and reflect on my successes and places to grow.
 Blogging – in September my first foray into individual student blogging was painful. I had created accounts, but we had to learn to log on, navigate our dashboard, how to create a new post, edit posts, and format the look of the blog. There is a lot of upfront set up work (selecting a theme, title, tagline) that was overwhelming at first. By the end of the year we were blogging experts! We did comment, but the next step would be to become more proficient in commenting. I would like my students to comment as often as they blog. |
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Videoconferencing – |
 Games Based Learning – This has been a new area of growth for me. I’ve tried several new projects including Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympics, Just Dance, and Endless Ocean 2 on the Wii. On the Nintendo DS we worked with My Word Coach, Professor Layton and the Curious Village and Scribblenauts. Off of games consoles and on the PC I used SimCity, and the 2D Spore Creature Creator. I would have liked to work more with Endless Ocean and done some level design with Scribblenauts, but the inclusion of games in my classroom was huge success. |
Digital Storytelling – My students really enjoyed using technology as an avenue for sharing stories. They created digital stories with their own drawings and their own audio and compiled them using Photostory III. My favourite storytelling tool became Prezi. The students created narratives with movement, and uses the text zooming features to bring emphasis to their stories. |
 Our biggest digital storytelling project was using Marvin to create 3D avatars to tell the life stories of the students. It was a fantastic integrated project that brought together students from three different communities to share on Moodle and learn more about each other. The students were able to build understanding of themselves and others in our class. We used all sorts of tools including glogster, wordle, One Note, Voice thread, and Moodle to build an understanding of ourselves before building a story about us! In the end we all went to the movie theatre and watched “our” movies on the big screen. It was fantastic! |
Podcasting – On Friday afternoons I would give each of my students a brilliant card. they would write an idea on the card that they could share about our topic. We would often review a unit just before a test. We would go through and make sure everyone had something to contribute, then sit in a big circle. We would take turns sharing our ideas, add some music and sound effects in Audacity, then post it to our blogs. It was a great review exercise and we were able to come together as a class at the end of the week. Many of my students used the podcasts to help review for exams. Fantastic! |
 Getting Outside – With the amount of screen time we have in our class it is really important to get the kids outside and moving. This year we used our GPS units to geocache all over the school yard. We had eggercize caches at Easter, did a really fantastic dinosaur cache project that integrated, math, language arts, video conferencing, blogging, and hands on model making. |
We use the Nike + attached to an Ipod to track our running as we completed a marathon over the course of several weeks. The kids loved to run with the sensor on their shoe, and the loved to see the graphs of our results after a run! |
| We had a fantastic school year. This is just a taste of some of the projects, but a good sampling of a fabulous school year. |
