Thing #18

You too can YouTube

I use You Tube a lot. Usually just for fun to help reinforce a lesson. May times when I teach a song from a musical or play, I try to find a clip of the original performance for the children to watch. Usually I teach the song and then let them see the clip. They always enjoy seeing and hearing how it was performed in the movie or on the Broadway stage and comparing it to the way we sang it. After all "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" is a fun song for children to learn, but look at how much more fun it is to sing along with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke.


Posted by AlexValve

Just for fun I have include a link to a video that I posted on YouTube last month. It is a video of pictures that I took at the Disneyland Electric Parade. It was very easy and fun creating this video. This is a great way for teachers to show off their student's work.

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Thing #17

Podcast

I am not a big fan of Audio Podcast. I have a hard time just listening to someone speak on a recording. Video is much better for me. If I don't have a visual to look at then I would rather read a book.

I listened to a podcast of Aesop's Fables on the web site Learn Out Loud. They had a large quantity of fables, however I felt that the narrator was speaking so fast that a child listening to this would miss hearing them state the moral of the story. What I do like about this site is that you can download the podcast as a mp3 file to your computer and listen to it later.

I also watched a Sesame Street Video Podcast. This podcast expands upon the television show's literacy segment, "What's the Word on the Street?" in which celebrities and characters on the show explain the meaning of words like "pretend" and "tricycle." This would be a good podcast to use in the kindergarten classroom.

Just One More Book is another podcast site that I explored. This is a site that reviews books. I listened to the podcast Talent, Teamwork & Triumph: The Dunderheads. I guess this is good if you want to hear a review before you read the book, but I was bored listening to them talk about the book.

I tried to listen to a podcast entitled The Future of Music. "The Future of Music podcast will show you cool new ways to find music and connect with your favorite artists. Discover the top-10 truths about the music business of the future and how you can benefit from the explosion in digital music, today and tomorrow." This is a direct quote from the website. I tried to listen to it for two days and never could get it to work. Oh well, that's too bad. It sounds like it might be something I am interested in.

Since I already have an account with iTunes, I decided to look at the podcast. When I clicked on podcast I realized that I have already been using it. There are two music sites that I have been subscribing to for over a year. These are both sites that I use for listening to new choral music for my school choir.

I can see how Podcast would be a good way to help learners that might have difficulty reading because of limited language or physical handicaps. I also like eBooks that I can put on my ipod and listen to while I'm driving or exercising and can't hold a book . (exercising, yeah right, LOL) However, I am a visual learner, not an auditory learner and listening to Audio Podcast just doesn't hold my interest. While I am by no means saying that podcast are bad, because I realize that they are work very well for some people, what I am saying is that we as teachers must keep in mind the many different learning styles of students when we are planning lessons. Just because it's a great new way to use technology, doesn't mean that it's the best way. And this is coming from someone that loves using technology!

Thing #16

Library Thing: Where Books Meet Web 2.0

I don't have enough books in my classroom that this would be useful to me , but I can see how it would be beneficial in the regular classroom. Teachers could use this to catalog their classroom library. Students could then use LibraryThing to look for books in the classroom. I can however see myself using it in my personal life. It's great how books are categorized in different ways to help you locate them. I also like that you can get information about local libraries, bookstores, book signings, and other events in your area.

Thing #15

Play in the wiki sandbox

This was one of my favorite activities. I always enjoy getting to play on the computer. It did tack a little time but that is probably my own fault. I keep following links that I saw on other blogs and experimenting with different generators. I know that we were just asked to post some of the things that we had already created, which I did, but I also included some of the new things that I made on my wiki page Songster Sister Sings Out. I added a link to the sandbox page but I will probably change a few things when I have more time. This is the type of thing that I can play with all day.

Thing #14

What in the world is a wiki?

Mrs. Cassidy's Class - Schools In the Past
This is a wiki where students interviewed their parents and grandparents on the comparison and the contrast of schools in the past and schools now. I really enjoyed reading this wiki. There were so many interesting comments. I could think of so many ways to extend this idea. For example were things different depending on where you lived, your faith, your culture, or your ethnic background. This gave me the idea of using the same concept of bringing our elderly and our youth together to discuss music of the past and present.

Kindergarten Counting Book
Kindergarten students use pictures to shoe the numbers 1-1oo. This is a perfect example to show that you are never to yong to start learning how to use technology. However, I do have a few questions about this wiki. Did the children take the pictures themselves? I notice that there was a name posted beside some of the photos, but more information was needed to clarify exactly what that child's contribution was.

Salute to Seuss
On this wiki PreK to Sixth Grade classrooms picked one or more books by Dr. Seuss and made an online presentation of the book. The classes used many different resources to create a blog, wiki, or web page to share their book. This is a very good wiki. It gives a lot of resources to use, including teaching materials.

Thing #13

Social bookmarking and tagging with Delicious

I can tell that I am going to really enjoy using Delicious. I had fun searching for different websites that I could use in music and technology. All through the year the music teachers are constantly sending each other emails of different websites that we found and wanted to share with the other teachers. I also like that I can choose which sites to share and which sites to keep private.I especially like the fact that this is accessible from any computer. In the past if I found a web site while working at home, I would email the link to myself at work. Now that won't be necessary. I am not very good at tagging sites. Usually whenever I worked on something that gave me that option, I would always just skip that part. I see now how this is really very beneficial. Hopefully I will get better with practice.

Attempted stretch activity

Well, as usual I got a little over zealous. When I did a search for sites in music education, I came across some of the sites that I had previously bookmarked in Safari. So I thought I would just go ahead and import them into my Delicious account. OMG, was that an enormous mistake. I have the biggest mess to clean up. I had no idea that I had bookmarked so many sites. The good part of this is that whenever a site is imported it is automatically locked so no one else will see this mess until I straighten it all out and decide to share it. If anyone is interested here is my delicious link it is http://delicious.com/songstersister
Well I guess I had better get started straightening out my mess.

Thing #7a

Google Reading Revisited

Checking my google reader has become something that I try to do everyday. I don't know if I will be able to keep it up when school starts and I have even less time. The last few days I have been reading a lot of articles about the life and death of Michael Jackson. Today I read an article by Newsweek, 5 Questions About Michael Jackson's Funeral. This article answers the questions:

1. Will there be a public viewing?
2.Who will deliver the eulogy?
3. What about the private service?
4. Where will he be buried?
5 How are the kids coping?

I like to read articles by Newsweek because I feel that they are more reliable than some of the entertainment magazines. Whatever your opinion of Michael Jackson is, the fact remains that the world has lost a truly gifted musician. I feel so much sympathy for his mother because no matter how old Michael was or what problems he might have had, to her he was still one of her baby boys.