How Does SeeSaw work?

Seesaw is a tool designed to be used by educators and students to share learning with their families, classmates, and teachers. One place for all Home-School Communication where families only see their own child's journal and teachers can send classwide announcements and private messages as well.

The app is easy to use, but if you need some guidance to set up your classes you can have access to their "Getting Started Guides" to follow a step-by-step path including introductory lessons for your students and ideas for their first posts! You can create your own activities, but their library is full of thousands of activities created by teachers for students K-12 to be used immediately, to give you ideas or to connect with other teachers!

I love it because encourages ownership and independence. My students have their own space to record, reflect and share; involves their families with updates about their learning; saves my student's work in one organized and accessible place.

I've been using it for 7 months and we all love it. Parents get excited every time they get a message from me or a post from their child. My students are always at the expectation of our new "Seesaw Challenge" and keeps them engaged with all our activities. You should give it a try!!

Twiter for Education

I'm going to be honest with you. I used to think that Twiter was not a tool for me. I didn't know how to use it and was reluctant to see it as a valuable tool for educators.

I just discovered, during the class of Use of Technology for the Teaching of English, that Twitter is a great resource of collaboration and professional development. You can find  valuable information, trending topics, coordinate assignments with your students, follow issues, and connect with a community of educators.

dsa

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Scratch - A Really Cool Tool!

What is it??

It is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, designed especially for students from 8 to 16 years old, but can be used by people of all ages.It is provided free of charge. 

What can you do?

With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations. You can start making your own projects using scratch or try out starter projects from their community library. Since it is a block-based visual programming language it requires practice and time to design your own activities, but the outcome is priceless. They offer additional resources like tutorials, ideas, and coding cards for step-by-step instructions.

Scratch offer more features for educators, but your teacher account will be available after 1 or 2 days. Meanwhile you can practice using the regular account.

Technology Enhanced Activity

I used this technology tool to create a game for my Kindergarten students to practice a group of High-frequently used words that they need to be able to recognize by sight. You can select different backgrounds, characters, sounds. 

When directed to the game, they will find the instructions to write their names and by using the mouse click on the words. They will listen to the correct pronunciation of the sight words and continue selecting the words and get scored every time they click on the words, instead of numbers or other characters.

Please, take a look of the activity and give me some feedback!!

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/287398216/

Discovery Education Network (DEN)

The DEN community is a learning network for educators that want to experience the digital world by searching instructional ideas, sharing resources,  collaborating and communicating with professionals from around the world.

They offer a wide variety of contents for K-12 instrucion and instructional strategies recommended by teachers for teachers incorporating effective digital learning tools.

You can also experience learning events in different formats to choose from, like webinars, virtual field trips, self-paced trainings, interactive modules,  in-person local events, international summis,  and online events.

Powtoon for Presentations

Powtoon is a tool for students and teachers to create animated presentations. You can highlight your main points and ideas bringing to life emotions from different characters. I think it is a useful resource to help catch the attention of the audience by including some movement. 

They also offer articles, webinars and tutorials to give you tips and inspire you creating new presentations and videos.

It's free and easy to share through Youtube or sharing the link of your presentation. Give it a try now!

Google for Education Training

GSuite for Education is the suite of tools designed by Google to help schools transform lessons integrating technology and collaboration in the classrooms.

They also offer free guides, complete trainings and certification through their Teacher Center, to help you master Google tools. This means that after you complete the self-paced training you can try to achieve a level of Google Educator Certification to show that you are an expert!

I just finished Level 1 training and I'm waiting for the confirmation email to start my exam. Stay tunned for another post about the process and my peronsal experience.

Google Apps and G Suite

To make things a little bit easier to understand, the first thing you need to know is that Google Apps and G Suite are the same. Yes, they just changed the name to make it more "suitable" to what they have to offer and what they will continue developing for schools or companies.

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According to Google, their mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". To do that, they have a created a suite of tools to improve productivity, communication and collaboration online.

Some of the apps included for communication are Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, and Google+; for collaboration, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Sites; for storage they have G Drive.

My favorite feature is the real-time collaboration in a document with other people. You can see edits as others type, make comments and chat at the same time as I experienced with my classmates during our class of Use of Technology for the Teaching of English, as part of our Masters Degree in Applied Linguistics program.

GSuite is also available for personal use. They offer different pricing options for all your needs. You can try it for free for 14 days and they have instructive guides to help you start. You can find more information here!

Blended Learning & Flipped Learning

When we talk about integrating technology in our classrooms we need to talk about blended learning and flipped learning. Take a look to this amazing art piece by Amedt Torrero explaining the concepts.

Blended learning is a technique that combines face-to-face instruction and a set of online resourses. Flipped classroom, in few words, is a type of blended learning where students view and/or listen their lecture material at home and discuss that information in class to process ideas and check their understanding.

If you want to make the work done out of class more intentional, I suggest you start “flipping” your classroom. When the work is done out of class students are more engaged in class activities and discussions with their peers, and professors. In this way,  online learning can enhance the process of teaching and learning in the classroom.

To start flipping your classroom you need to use a virtual learning environment (VLE), which is a set of teaching and learning tools used to integrate technology in education and enhance the learning experience. It is an extension of the traditional lessons in which teachers and students can have access from home or anywhere with a computer and internet. Examples of some of these tools are Google Earth, Nearpod and Virtual Fieldtrip, among others. I will review some of  them to share with you my experience when using in a Kindergarten Flipping Classroom.

You should definitely start combining a learning environment with your lessons to improve learning. When you do it, don't forget to comment and share your conclusions with us!

Welcome To My Blog

I'm excited to begin a blog! I love teaching blogs and I've been visiting them everyday!!

I feel that I have so much to learn about blogging, but I hope one day I can be a successful blogger too!

I'll start by posting information about integrating technology in the classroom, photos of some projects and all the fun and joy you can get when learning in Kindergarten.

Hope to see you around! =)