Stress Relief

Donkeys are fun and make me laugh when I am stressed. Here is a video of a donkeys at a refuge in Ireland. The song is by the band Great Big Sea.

Go Glog Yourself!

Glogster is an online poster application that has a lot of potential beyond social networking and scrapbooking! As a future teacher, you will be asked to consider those possibilities. I created a glog to introduce myself to students this semester — to let them get to know me outside the classroom.

Examples of Media/Visual Literacy Project (Due March 31)

So are you struggling with ideas for your Media-Visual Literacy Project? Check out this Wiki on Bigtimers: Trojan Condoms. Now that made you look!

Check out this blog to make you think about energy drinks! Thirsty yet?

Technology Survey

Surveys are a terrific means of gathering information on your students. You might collect information ranging from their needs to their attitudes about a topic or text you want to incorporate into your ELA curriculum.

Survey Monkey is a semi-free online survey collection tool. By semi-free, I mean that there are small surveys you can create with it by opening a free account; however, to create longer, more complex surveys, you have to subscribe to the service. Survey Monkey also collects and analyzes the data for you, saving you some work in the process of gathering information on your students.

To explore and practice with Survey Monkey let’s do the following:

1). Take the survey I created for this course

2). Create your own survey on anything you want (consider interesting things you might want to learn about me and your classmates). When you create your survey, try using three different question formats to “play” with the options available.

3). Send the link to your survey to five classmates and to me. To do this, copy the link by highlighting it and right clicking on it, then select “copy.” Either through Vista or through a web-based email service, create an email message. Select the five classmates you are exchanging surveys with and me as recipients of your email. In the subject line of your email, write your last name and 3241 Survey (i.e., Dail 3241 Survey). In the body of the email, greet your classmates and me and kindly ask us to complete your survey. Then right click with your mouse and select paste; that should drop the link to your survey into the body of your email. Sign your name, and send the email.

4). Once you receive emails from your five classmates, follow the links (you will likely have to copy and paste them into your browser and then hit enter) to their surveys and respond to them.

5). Once everyone you sent your survey to has responded to it, log back into Survey Monkey and select my surveys, then select the analyze results tab.

6). In a Word document, write a brief reflection about how you might use this tool in your instructional practices in your classroom. Save the file to your flash drive.. When you create your blog later today, you will copy and paste your Word file to create your first post! Time will likely not permit you to post this today, but you will have an opportunity to on Wednesday, January 14 as we continue to work with blogging. Be sure to bring your flash drive with the saved file to class then, too!