Spring Break

How wonderful it was to take a week away from all the worries in the world! I chose to spend the majority of my break at the beach, my favorite place to escape to. From the drive down to the beach until the day I returned, I experienced several uses of technology within one piece: The Garmin. I laughed at my husband when he received this as a gift for Christmas. After this trip, I want one of my own. I typed in the beach address into the Garmin before I left my driveway. It automatically recognized the address before I could finish typing. Throughout the trip, I chose to deviate slightly from the Garmin's path. I took a few different turns my dad had suggested so I would arrive sooner. The Garmin would automatically recalculate itself when I did this. It was very helpful, because it also told me where to turn and when. The Garmin also tells you how many miles until your next turn. This works great with my personality. I knew exactly what to expect and when. My favorite feature is how the Garmin tells you your arrival time. I went through a drive through at one point and it quickly recalculated the arrival time. You can also tell whether or not you are speeding, because the time will change to an earlier one if you are. Overall, I was pleased with the Garmin and my experience with a new piece of technology. It was like receiving a new toy!

Learning is....

Learning means a lot of things to me. I think learning is any new information taken from an experience. For example, I went to Academy tonight to look for a tennis racquet. Like anything else in life for sell, there are items that are more expensive than others. I knew that the name-brand racquet must be more, however I wasn't sure why. After holding several tennis racquets, I realized that the more expensive rackets were lighter and more comfortable to hold. Bingo! That is why they were double the amount. I will consider this what I learned today! Pretty neat learning for Spring Break. It just happened to be the most recent thought on my mind.
I was interested to see the other definitions of learning shared from my group members. I agreed with their definitions, however I did not think to word them the same way. I think the important thing to remember when we think about children learning-is how we are teaching. I know I personally respond better to hands-on/visual experiences. Some children, on the other hand, are more abstract and prefer more straight-forward teaching. As long as we keep a healthy variety of teaching methods, I think we are always reaching out to our children's needs!

photo story & audacity

Audacity and Photo Story are two programs that I have been learning about lately. The social studies course I am currently taking required us to do a group presentation this week in class. We were each given articles to read, do research on, and share in the form of a presentation. We decided to survey several children and ask them what they think a good social studies teacher does. In order to share their responses, I had to download a program to record their voices. This was going fine until I inserted their clips into my group's power point and emailed it back to her. What do you know... and the clips were not working from my group member's computer. I had saved the files incorrectly. So, we finally discoverd that I needed to email them to her so she could save them to her computer and then reinsert them in the power point. That solved the problem and we were able to successfully present our power point. I plan to use audacity now! I really like its simplicity. It is easy to use and easily accessible.
Photo Story is the other program I am working toward learning how to use. Our class recently published a book. I want to record each child reading their page of the book while viewing the pages being turned in the book. A girl in my social studies class did this with Is There Really A Human Race? It was precious! I am hoping to scan the photos in this weekend and get started on it. I think it would make a great literacy center for my kindergarten children to visit as well as a sweet end of the year gift to my children. After all, this is their book!