Starfall

Every child, parent, and educator should take advantage of this wonderful website. It contains excellent mini lessons for preschoolers, and they vary from words to sentences. Kids would love it! As we learned in chapter 3, the more children are exposed to reading and writing, the better readers and writers they will be in the future. Starfall makes reading and writing fun because of the excellent animation and games that will attract children, parents, and educator’s attention. This website was very helpful to me because as a kindergarten teacher I am truly concerned with fostering emergent literacy in my classroom and I could get millions of ideas every day to enrich my lessons. Thank you!

Letter Writtig Lesson Video

I loved this lesson! I am definitely trying it with my students. I think it is an excellent way to expose them to feel the writing of the letters and to assess them by seeing what they interpret. It was curios how they each obtained different interpretations of what the teacher wrote at the beginning. I liked this lesson because this is also another approach to teach writing, instead of the teacher writing on the blackboard or having students practicing how to write from their desks. This encourages students to try new learning techniques and to realize that learning how to write could be fun. This was a very creative lesson because it also emphasizes team work and previous knowledge about letters.

ReadingA-Z.com Article

The article provides good information and techniques for us as teachers to foster the development of literacy in our students. It teaches us how to make developmentally reading resources available in our classrooms so each child's instructional needs are met. I agree with the fact that there should be a reading foundation in early childhood since alphabet recognition and phonemic awareness are indicators of early reading success. Parents and educators should work together to expose children to new vocabulary words (important, useful, difficult ) that will help them enrich their language and reading skills.
I also found the strategies and methods to teach reading such as asking questions to guide student's understanding so they can generate their own questions about the reading. Students being able to generate questions on their own is a good sign because it means that they are understanding the main idea of the reading, and that they are being able to make a connection between the reading and their experiences. Other important information were the educational resources such as ReadingA-Z.com, RAZ-Kids.com and others, that are extremely helpful to teachers to widen our knowledge and performance in the literacy world.

Chats in Elementary School?

I think we should use technology in our classrooms , and chats could be an excellent idea to get students involved in the class. Students will feel motivated and excited to learn, therefore they will complete the work in a comfortable environment doing something they are familiar with, and at the same time it will help those people that are very shy to be vocal in the classroom like everyone else.

Education Today and Tomorrow

Excellent video! I agree with the message this video is trying to send because it is so true, our students live in a totally different world and that world is ruled by technology. We should be preparing them to be competent in that world full of instant information, entertainment, collaboration, and communication. This means that we as teachers need to be prepared as well, so this video is also an invitation for us to embrace technology. We should embrace it, to better prepare the students of today and tomorrow.

Pay Attention Video

I loved the Pay Attention Video. It made me think and realize that the children that we teach probably know more than us about technology. I believe that before a teacher could get to the student's mind, he or she must get to their heart, and this means that we must talk about their interests. Students will be motivated to learn more in our classrooms and participate if we incorporate in our system what really interests them: technology.

Educational Blog Article Critique

I think this article is wonderful! Not only does it give educators many ideas of how blogs can be used: to post rules, assignments, or suggested class activities, but it tells us why they should be used. Students of these days are exposed to technology everywhere, and blogging is an excellent opportunity to make school meaningful to them. Instead of being a formal lecture, blogging takes the shape of a conversation, because it is their way of expressing their opinions, feelings, and ideas.

This is probably the reason why so many students are into blogging. Several educators from different schools mentioned that once they introduced it to the classroom almost every student started to participate. In the events of September 11, 2001 blogging was also an excellent source, since it provided information and it was as if people were part of the event.

Blogging provides many opportunities for the educational world. For instance, it implements the emergence of a learning community beyond the walls of the classroom, posts could be read by anyone, and reactions/suggestions/ideas could be posted in response. Even a student who is shy and therefore, struggling to participate in a traditional classroom has his or her own space, and it could be as vocal as any other student in the classroom. This also offers an opportunity to improve student's writing skills, since most of them double check their spelling because they know their posts could be read by anyone, therefore putting a situation of equity in the classroom. Definitely it is something that we as educators can use to teach our students!