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.

Ideal Classroom Project Reflection

The topic that Megan, Kirsten, and I decided to pick was a regular 10th grade geometry class. I have personally started to like geometry a lot more the past 2 years. It is a different type of math, which seems to be very much about visualization, which is how I learn mostly. I think that my fellow group members woudl agree with me in saying that geometry is pretty cool. We focused our units mostly on triangles and 3D figures. The triangles always seemed to be a big part of geometry in high school in proving congruences. I personally liked this part the most. The 3D figures would go well with that, just because it was something different. We then decided to apply that knowledge into a further Architecture unit. We decided this because there was this video that we watched about a school taking 5 weeks to design a school just using their geometry knowledge. We wanted to create further exploration mostly in the Architecture unit. Since this would be doing something that not most high schools do as an assessment, we thought that it would be a good one to use since it would be a real life situation.

It was very helpful to use the Google Docs worksheet to communicate our ideas over the Spring Break. There were all certain parts that each of us worked on, which made it a lot easier to have just that 1 document that all of us could see and even edit at the same time!!! We did get some of the earlier portions done together in class and then just did the rest in portions. Megan created our classroom set up using a website. While Kirsten worked on the budget. I worked on a few of the other questions. It was neat to see it all come together in the end.

It was difficult at the end when we had to make sure that we had everything the same on the paper and the spreadsheet budget. We also had difficulties thinking about topics other than the triangles and 3D figures. We felt like those were pretty similar and wanted something that could be applied to the outside world. After watching the video, we knew that we could incorporate the Architecture into our unit.

I learned that Google Docs is pretty cool to use when using group projects. I seem to have a lot of group projects right now, and I have tried to use them for my other classes too, but I don't think the other group members are as interested in it as I am. It was also good to look first to see what has been done before, like the Architecture project. This is probably something that I would want to incorporate, maybe not to a full 5 week project, but something still into my classroom. The project was difficult to start out, but in the end, it was fun to create a classroom just how we wanted it to be. As fun and crazy as it was!!