Hello everyone, I've included this video as part of my service project. I found it to be an excellent video that described very well a frog's natural life cycle. Swetha and Cassandra seemed to enjoy it very much! Hope you do as well.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Service Project Final Day!
Hello again! So today was the last time I meet with Swetha, and Ms. Garcia with Cassandra, and oh what a day it was! I received Swetha's results of the survey we had sent out with them, and began to develop a spreadsheet with all the information. They already had a good concept of what a graph was, so they were surprised that they could create a graph on the computer. It is a simple graph that is not too complex, that way Swetha and Cassandra could be able to read and understand it.
We got down to business with the VoiceThread and had them interact with each other's short productions. Since they are young students, I created most of the VoiceThread myself and just had Swetha watch and participate in it. She did help me out in deciding what could be good questions to ask in each slide. Her eyes would always light up whenever it was her turn to talk. Then we had each of our students participate in the other one's VoiceThread- so if you hear a second little girl's voice it is Cassandra's. We did come across bumps in the road... especially when my Internet failed to connect and I had to use Ms. Garcia's computer, but all in all we were able to accomplish this task!
I must say this whole service project really opened up my eyes. I realized with Swetha and Cassandra that children are always excited to learn new things, and technology should never be considered a barrier! Swetha picked on pretty fast on all the assignments I would give her. I hope you have enjoyed reading this journey I- as well as Ms. Garcia- embarked on with these two little girls!
Here is the Frog's Life Cycle on VoiceThread... Enjoy!
We got down to business with the VoiceThread and had them interact with each other's short productions. Since they are young students, I created most of the VoiceThread myself and just had Swetha watch and participate in it. She did help me out in deciding what could be good questions to ask in each slide. Her eyes would always light up whenever it was her turn to talk. Then we had each of our students participate in the other one's VoiceThread- so if you hear a second little girl's voice it is Cassandra's. We did come across bumps in the road... especially when my Internet failed to connect and I had to use Ms. Garcia's computer, but all in all we were able to accomplish this task!
I must say this whole service project really opened up my eyes. I realized with Swetha and Cassandra that children are always excited to learn new things, and technology should never be considered a barrier! Swetha picked on pretty fast on all the assignments I would give her. I hope you have enjoyed reading this journey I- as well as Ms. Garcia- embarked on with these two little girls!
Here is the Frog's Life Cycle on VoiceThread... Enjoy!
Monday, April 4, 2011
Service Project Day 2
I am so thrilled to share with you today's events! I meet with Swetha once again to continue our journey into the technology world, and I felt so motivated at the end of our session! Let me first explain what we did... Today we focused on looking up internet resources that could help us learn more about the life cycle of frogs, whether it is in websites, videos, or pictures. Together, Swetha and I created a GoogleDoc page with our discoveries. I told Swetha that the internet is an excellent place to find information in different forms.
After that, Ms. Garcia and I gave our students an assignment- to survey their close friends about life cycles. We mentioned that with the survey we could create a spreadsheet to better organize our ideas. In their survey, Swetha and Cassandra are to ask 'What animal would you most like to learn about the life cycle of?' They felt so excited to get their assignment done and I can't wait for them to come back with the results and create a graph with them! As Ms. Garcia and I were about to leave, they eagerly asked if we would be going the next day... that just motivated me and showed me that technology is fun and anyone is capable of doing it. That is all for today!
After that, Ms. Garcia and I gave our students an assignment- to survey their close friends about life cycles. We mentioned that with the survey we could create a spreadsheet to better organize our ideas. In their survey, Swetha and Cassandra are to ask 'What animal would you most like to learn about the life cycle of?' They felt so excited to get their assignment done and I can't wait for them to come back with the results and create a graph with them! As Ms. Garcia and I were about to leave, they eagerly asked if we would be going the next day... that just motivated me and showed me that technology is fun and anyone is capable of doing it. That is all for today!
Friday, April 1, 2011
Service Project Day 1
Hello everyone! So today I meet with young Swetha, a kindergartener at a local school. Swetha is my new "adopted" student, with who I will be working with the next few days. All my prior posts have been over VoiceThread, internet resources, spreadsheets, and so on. So what I will be doing with Swetha is teaching her how she can use all this technology to learn new things. I will also be working with Ms. Garcia who is working with Cassandra, one of Swetha's classmates. They both are learning about the life cycles, so we decided to relate all of our findings to a frog's life cycle, which Swetha and I are working on, and a chicken's cycle, which Ms. Garcia and Cassandra are working with. We started them off by creating a blog for them, and Swetha was very excited about her blog. Afterward, we had Swetha and Cassandra fill out a K-W-L Chart and with that we challenged them to think of some essential questions that could apply to what we're focusing on. Today was more of an introductory session, and next time we will get down to business!! Until then!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)