Day 4

Today we started off getting familiar with Glogster.  This is such a wonderful program! It is very user friendly and super interactive.  I think with younger students, it is ideal for a school librarian to make the glogsters for them to use.  Easy to follow and direct.  However, since this program is so user friendly, I would say from grade 4 on, the students can make their own and it can be an essential tool in student to student teaching.  I think that all of the technology tools we have learned about in 629 so far are a great motivators for students to do their best work since they know it will be published.
As well as learning how technology is a great tool for student publishing, we also had a guest speaker today, Ms. Parisi.  Ms Parisi spoke to us about UDL (Universal Design Learning).  I must say I was blown away by what Ms. Parisi is able to do daily in her classroom to differentiate learning for all of her students.  I would love to visit her classroom in action to see all of this technology at work.  I would also like to sit down with her and pick her brain on where she finds the time to do this all???  And I can imagine it would be very difficult to be such a pioneer with technology in a school that is not totally on the tech wave yet.  Overall, she stressed the importance of differentiating lessons for all learners.  That is difficult for a teacher to do in any form but it is so vital for student success.
After our guest speaker, I was able to explore LiveBinder.  What a tool!  It is a cloud based bookmarking site that allows you to follow websites through tabs.  You can categorize the tabs as well as create sub tabs.  They are great for teachers to develop for students as a tool to get them started on their research.  It can provide the students with all the tools they need for success but still requires them to search.  It is also great because within the tabs, you can include links to videos, images, text to speech websites as well as very informative wordy websites.  This tool of LiveBinder fits in very nicely with the educational theory of UDL that Ms. Parisi spoke about.  The information is presented in many different forms, all provided by the teacher.
Today went by very fast and we learned a lot of technology tools.  I cannot believe that tomorrow is our last day!