The past couple of weeks our class has been working on making Web Quests. My partner for this activity was Christina and she was the key in figuring out what our topic would be. Christina has a love of the Arts and is determined to inform teachers and students about artists and art history and how to fit it into their curriculum.
The main purpose for our Web Quest, Become an Artist at http://zunal.com/webquest.php?user=7191, was to peak student interest about what types of art they like to look at and create. Having the internet as a tool to quickly show students different mediums is a big time and money advantage over having to create the art in the classroom. Using the internet, students are exposed to more art styles and are able to experiment a little more than if actually painting or drawing in the classroom. It is still a concrete learning experience that the students will remember more than just reading about it.

My experience with zunal.com was wonderful. I really cannot believe how easy it was to create a Web Quest. It was so much fun! As a future teacher it is important for me to remember that I need to keep up with educational tools and not become complacent with the routine. Sometimes it is easy to make excuses and say that there is not enough money in the budget, or not enough time to add it to the curriculum. Now that I have explored the internet a little bit more I know that those excuses are not valid. There is lots of free information and tools that can easily be added to enhance almost any lesson.

One more note that I want to add is that Webquests can be a good method to reach the individual needs of our students. Webquests can be created to reach all levels of learners where they are at in their learning of the content. This was a big aha for me.

One thing that I would like to have added to zunal.com is a notice about the amount of time before it “times out” and does not save work. Yes, you guessed it. We took too long creating our task page and had to go back and add everything back in. Next time I will have everything written out in advance and have all of the web pages bookmarked so that I don’t take as much time creating the task page. Our solution was just to save every few minutes. This was such a great experience that I look forward to creating my next Web Quest!

Wow, what an easy gradebook to use! This was much easier than my last experience. Talk about user friendly. I like that there is no guesswork as to how to get started and fixing something is very simple. I see no reason for a teacher to reject the idea if an administrator wanted all teachers to use a computer based grade keeper. Computer gradebooks take the guesswork out of how to weight an assignment. I know some teachers that only have two types of grades (tests/homework) because they never figured out how to keep grades.

One teacher told me that there is another computer grade keeper (not free!) that has comments that are prewritten and can be added. Teachers from that school use the gradebook for their mid-progress reports. That could be a useful addition to this software.

Students and parents should like this gradebook. Being able to see one student at a time would be good for student and parent conferences. Sometimes it can be confusing to look at a hand-written gradebook. Privacy issues are also solved with the individual viewing option.

It is also great that parents and students can check their grades at any time. Students of all levels should know where they stand. By using Engrade it would save the teacher time from having to discuss with students what they are missing or what they earned. Even here on Saipan parents are becoming connected and have e-mail. It would be great to send automatic reminders for parents to check their child's grades often.

Once I get into the classroom and have some experience I will probably think of more applications that this type of software could help out with. For now though, I see no downside of Engrade!

As an adult I have learned to form an outline or prioritized list in my mind to reach my goal. However, when I rely completely on my mind things are forgotten or a task that I should have started at the beginning ends up being put towards the end. Using the mind mapping software to help me formulate ideas for what I need to accomplish for the Flat Stanley project has really helped me see different directions that I could go with for the project and also helped me see the various tasks that I need to start on right away.

The reason that I like mind mapping more than creating an outline is that 1) not everybody is a logical, sequential learner and 2) it is easy to add information to when brainstorming as a class. Sometimes I feel that when doing a formal outline students get hung up on the finality of it. For me at least, seeing a map makes it easier to change or add to the plan of attack.

If you have a hard time seeing my mind map you can go to http://www.screencast.com/t/UVGhriatP to get a better view. This was the one problem that I had- getting a good picture up on my blog. Maybe I can learn from some other people when we are finished this week. I used FreeMind , http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page to make the graphic organizer. I just downloaded the trial. It is not as pretty as some of the other mind mapping products but I found it to be very user friendly. Something that is important to me. I did try out Head Case, too, and liked the way it looks, especially for high school or adult students use.

Everything I did in this activity was new to me. I think that once I saw the completed project that I created I understood how important and effective a tool like this could be in the classroom.

As I mentioned, the only thing that I did not enjoy was trying to get a good picture up onto my blog. I used the jing project http://jingproject.com/ , to take a screen shot of my mind map but when I went to put it on my blog it was too big. I tried several other routes but none of them seemed to work. I think that if I knew a little more about html and programming it would have been easy but I kept getting an error. I will keep trying!

I really would not do anything differently next time. Actually I am going to try it out again for another project to fine tune my new skills! If I only do it once I will probably forget in a few weeks. Please feel free to post helpful hints for me in the future. I enjoy POSITIVE feedback.

My first blog!

Finally my first blog. I am just trying things out and hoping that they work. The picture that I have included is from a family trip to Bali. My boys were young then, almost 2 years ago actually! We went to the Bali zoo. My family gives me inspiration and determination. Going back to college after 15 years is a difficult task. NMC has brought lots of wonderful people to my path though and I am thankful for all of the beautiful friendships and people that I have met through this experience.

I am excited to learn from NMC's educational technology class as I am one of the few that does not have a cell phone, myspace account, and never im'd until last week! This will be an exciting and hopefully not too bumpy ride.

Although this second picture is not the most flattering it is more representative of my life here on Saipan! We try to take in the beach or waterpark as much as we can. Saipan is full of magnificent scenery and I really hope that my boys are able to remember a fragment of it when we have to move back to the mainland.