PLN-Twitter for Teachers

I created my own PLN. I created a twitter4teachers account and I susbscibed to other Elementary teachers pages. I am able to follow other teachers and they are able to follow me as well. This will be a great way to learn about new resources and information involving teaching. To stay informed when people make new posts I signed up to receive emails.

You can view my twitter account here:
http://twitter.com/britneylg08

By being a member of Twitter I can keep track of certain "tweets" teachers post about resources, activities, and news that is valuable for me to use as a teacher.

Classroom Communication

For classroom communication I plan to use blogger. At the beginning of the year I will send home a paper that explains my blog site and what it is for so that parents and students will be able to access it. I think that it is an effective tool because I will be able to post information about things such as field trips. If there is a field trip coming up I will post information about it and also I will talk about the field trip permission slip that parents need to sign. It is my responsibility to communicate this information to parents, therefore if students do not get the information passed out at school home to their parents they will still be able to access it. Also I will be able to post information about certain assignments that students need to complete. If a student is at home and they are having problems they will be able to get on my blog site and view information about it. Also the parents will be able to view the information so they can help their child. If there is an upcoming test, I will post information about it so that parents are aware and they can help their child with studying for the test. If parents have questions or concerns, they can reply to my blog posts and I will be able to respond back to them. This is efficient because if other parents have the same questions or concerns, they will be able to view it too. I won't have to respond to multiple parents because it can all be viewed by everyone.

Station One- KidPix Pictograph (Elementary/Early Childhood/TAL)

Intro: Everyday in Ms. Martins kindergarten class, they complete a different graphing activity. Ms. Martin thinks its important for her students to experience different types of data visualization. For this activity students will learn about tally sheets.

The above activity was the activity that we were working with for our station. The first thing we had to do was create a tally sheet with Microsoft word using pictures instead of words. On the tally sheet we had to create a 2x5 table with Basketball, Baseball, Football, Soccer, and Volleyball included on it. This is the sheet that students will use to collect their data.

After we created the tally sheet we had to do was to make up data to use with it. We then had to make a pictograph to present the data. You can see it below.The next thing we did was create a snowman glyph on KidPix. There was a paper that told you instructions on how to make your snowman. The snowman was created based on your answers to the questions. An example question was "Do you like pizza?" If yes, then you drew a red hat on your snowman. If no, then you drew a blue hat on your snowman.

The final thing we had to do was create a microsoft word document with questions to ask our students. An example question on the document was "What sport was liked the most and what sport was liked the least?" Then we had to create discussion questions also to ask in a whole class discussion.