Nate and Megan Excited about GPS!!














Kirsten and I didn't find the Geocache, and Nate and Megan couldn't find it either.

















Kirsten and I with our Cache, that we found with the help of this guy and Nate and Megan's hint.

Some difficulties that we found when looking for the cache was not looking in the right place. Apparently we were really close to our first one, but it was by the CAC and not Strayerwood Theatre where it appeared to be on our GPS. Heading in the right direction in the first place was a little difficult at first, but then we got the hang of it. In the classroom this could be used for a Geography/Social Studies class. Especially when talking about direction of places. And when students are learning about longitude and latitude.

Delicious

Delicious is a useful tool to provide different tags with various bookmarks. As a teacher I would use it as a resource center for my students. I could show them how to create their own and if we were doing some type of research project I would provide them with various links so they could all share the resources that they found. I would also use my own Delicious as a help center. Where my students would have different tutorials to remind them how to do their homework or what I talked about in the lesson that day.

Geometer's Sketchpad on Prezi and Jing

Here is the link to my Geometer's Sketchpad Prezi/Jing video. It was frustrating to make! I think I made this video 5 times!!

Zotero

Zotero is a good way to organize your resources. You can add highlighting to the pages. You can also add little notes or tags to your page. You can save different things like books and web pages. It is pretty neat. This can be used as an online resource or not an online resource. You have to upload or export the information that you found though, so that's a little different. Try it out.

Google Sketchup Study Area

This is a picture of my idea study area. I used Google Sketchup, which was interesting at times to use. This is a useful use of software if you need to draw different things frequently. As you can see, I have a desk, chair computer, bean bag chair, and a book shelf with some books. I had some difficulties making some of the things for a while, but then I got the hang of things. There were some really neat things in the 3D warehouse, which is where the beanbag and the laptop from. I think that you should try it out, make sure to watch some video's first though!!

Twitter

The twitter application that I found was DreamTweet.

This application allows people to answer the question What Are You Dreaming? This allows people to talk about nightmares or just dreams they have had in a dream log. This could be used in a classroom instead of a journal. If you would have a section you were journaling on about dreams. I would think this would be useful for a creative writing class. You could tweet about your dreams, but at the same time you can also read about other peoples dreams. If you would use it for creative writing you could look at others dreams and write a story about them or even your own dream. Since you have limited space for a tweet, this will allow the student to be creative and come up with different cenarios. By having the journal/dreams on the web, you can access it from anywhere. Students always have a problem with leaving things at school. Since it would be online, they will be able to access it anywhere.

Personally, twitter is different. It is nice to connect with people who are half way around the world or in different states. If I was teaching English and not math, I would use Dream Tweet for journaling. I would probably even use just Twitter for journaling. I think that the Dream Tweet would be a good use for story ideas. It's kind of like brainstorming, but with your dreams. I like the fact that you can go to other Twitters and read what their dreams are.

This provides an interesting way for students to be creative in the classroom.