Sean's Blog

For my final project I wanted to involve the 3rd grade students I work with. Every week the teacher I work with puts out a weekly newsletter about the past week’s events.  When I approached her about my idea about putting the weekly newsletter on a classroom blog, she thought it was great. Using a basic Microsoft Word format, I was able to copy and paste the newsletter into the post.

Using Audacity, I chose two students to read the weekly newsletter and record them.

Once the recording was complete, I edited everything together with some news show intros from World News Tonight and Nightly News. The news beds were repeated throughout the “broadcast.” I exported the file to an mp3 file.


The video below shows the steps I took to attach the audio to the blog.

The experience so far has been tremendous. The students who have been recorded so far are very excited that they are “on the internet.” The parent responses so far have been positive too. My goal with this blog this year is to post projects that the students will complete by the end of the year. For my resource center math students I would like create video study guides to help them with the material that will be covered through the end of the year. Based on their reaction to my ideas, it seems like they will get a lot out of this blog.

I found this whole process fairly easy to do however there is a lot of copying and pasting that needs to take place in order to embed audio. I also believe blogging can be very motivating to students. How neat is it when a third grader can post a completed project to the class blog and share it with grandma in Florida?

I came across one 3rd grade classroom blog from Talladega, Alabama. Within this blog, the teacher used a new way for the students to respond to a question. She was beginning a unit on Hurricanes. She asked the students to type what they know about hurricanes and what they want to learn about hurricanes. I like this idea especially for 3rd graders because it is something new instead of the “paper and pencil” way.

This technology is not for every teacher. Maintaining a class blog or website can be very time consuming. Many teachers are nervous to try new things especially when it comes to technology. With a little bit of training, I believe those teachers will at least give this technology a chance. The best part about using Audacity and a blog is that is is all FREE!

Learn more about this project

Where do I start with this project. At first I was very excited to use Scratch and had lots of great ideas on how to use it with my students. But I quickly became frustrated. There were many time when I was creating my game when I thought I had all of my commands covered and when I tried it out, it didn’t work the way I envisioned. I would love to have a little bit more training on this software so I could utilize it with my students.

Thanks Craig! Not sure how well you can see what I added into the picture but Santa’s sleigh and reindeer are waiting outside the windows.

I decided to use a picture that was taken on Christmas Eve with Santa as my background. Using pictures from the internet I place some Christmas presents on the table and had Santa’s sleigh and reindeers waiting outside the window. Working with GIMP should have been easy but for some reason I could figure out how to make my layer pictures bigger. I am sure there is a way to do that.
Ok just tried to attach it to my blog but the file is to big. Can anyone help me with making it smaller so I can post it?

A computer teacher from my district found this video. Pretty interesting. It is long so if you have a few extra minutes check it out.

I decided to retrace my honeymoon in 2003-2004. My wife and I went away for a couple of days after our wedding and then took a 2 week trip to Ireland the following August. I could have been doing this for a long time if I put all of the places we visited in that 2 week period.

I found adding the pins very easy. Adding the pictures was easy as well. I was able to tilt one of the pictures and totally forgot how I did it and couldn’t figure out how to do the same to the rest of my pictures because I think it is a cool feature. I didn’t insert any polygons because I didn’t see a use for it. I tried to use the path tool to show our flight from JFK to Ireland but couldn’t get it from one side of the Atlantic to the other. As I was putting this together I was thinking I could use it with my 3rd graders when we research Hopewell History. However I think Google Maps might be a little easier for them.

For my RSS feed I decided to keep up with my favorite baseball team, the New York Yankees. I am a big fan of the NY Daily News sports sections and linked up with their coverage of the Yankees.

I created a screencast for educationcity.com. This is a wonderful web site that can be used for pre-k through 6th grade students. I use this application a lot in my resource math class. I found it hard to record everything in 5 minutes until I found that I can pause the recording and move on from there. Even with pausing I just made in under the 5 minutes. I plan on using screencast in the very near future with the parent of a student that uses a lot of technology in and out of school. Many times it is hard for me to explain how to set programs up at home while I am at school. Using screencast I can demonstrate on a school computer and send to the parent through my blog or email.

Storybird Quick Tour from Storybird on Vimeo.

Storybird is a really cool site that allows students to be creative with their writing. I believe this could be beneficial to our struggling writers. Many times throughout the year I see students sit at their desks staring at a blank piece of paper and say ” I don’t know what to write.” The following is a quote directly from the web site:
“Storybird promotes imagination, literacy, and self-confidence. Kids who play with words and pictures early in life tend to score higher in cognitive and aptitude tests later on. They read and draw more, and are better able to understand concepts and ideas. Plus, they become comfortable with the act of creation: turning nothing into something. In an idea-based society, that’s a key advantage.”