Social, Creative, and Curative Websites

Digging Deeper into the Mainstays

     The most exciting part of this assignment was the fact that it has ignited my desire to explore and sample any site that could be used to enhance my classroom. The only downside is I now have about 40 new log-ins and passwords to remember along with about 100 new e-mails a day. This is something that I'm attempting to learn how to organize quickly. I never realized how many resources are out there. Although many of them are not what I was hoping for, it is still very cool to feed off some ideas or learn what to look for or what to avoid while exploring for websites. I would like share with you a brief report of a single site that I am using from each topic area.

Social

  The main problem with using social media and websites in our district is that they are ALL blocked. I use the word all very loosly there, but anything from Facebook to Twitter is blocked. You can find some lesser known social media sites available, but they are limited. After speaking with some administrators in the district as well as some other teachers, I have learned that starting next year there is a plan in place to allow the use of at least facebook within the district. I am assuming this is to utilize the benefits of social media in the classroom.
  I have learned that teachers in other districts are using social media such as twitter to begin discussions on class topics, pose a daily question, or even communicate to each other as a class while not in school. Although I would not use this in the first grade classroom that I am currently in, it is very exciting to see how it is being used and I am still brainstorming possibilities of how to use it in the classroom.
  The one "social" site that I have decided to try out in my classroom is ClassDojo.com. This is far from a social site but it is being used in that type of manner in my classroom. After creating a quick log-in I was able to enter my students names and create an avatar for each student. There are tabs to create positive and negative behaviors and award or take away points for each student when those behaviors or modeled. I am amazed at the response my students have made since introducing this only a few days ago. At the end of the day we look at each student's report as a class and discuss the positives AND the negatives and how they affected us throughout the day. Although it takes about 10 minutes to get through, student accountability is already making a noticeable difference in the classroom. I was even able to make a class for when we play games in the classroom and label the student names as colors for teams. It helps me to log points during games in our class and the students really enjoy seeing it on the screen during that time. The coolest part about this site is that it allows you to download a report in a PDF as well as print out a ticket to send home to parents that creates a students specific log-in and password so parents can view their child's behavior for the day, week, or month. IT'S ALL FREE! The stock avatars are very elementary but this tool could easily be adapted to use at any grade level.

Creative

  I have not personally used any creative technologies in my classroom with students except for simple creative activities within sites such as abcya.com. There are a few creative opportunities for the students within the site, but nothing worth raving about. Voicethread seems to be the popular vote for Creative websites used within the school setting, and I am in the process of exploring the site along with the possibilities of using it at a lower grade level, but again, nothing great to report yet.
  The one site I can offer that I use as an educator and which I know other colleagues use in their classroom is GoogleDocs. I don't know if you would exactly consider this a creative website, but many teachers are using is as a social/creative tool in their classroom. Teachers can post assignments or discussions and students can team up to work on them together from remote locations. Another similar tool that blends creative and social is google hangout. This is similar to skype but is much easier to use in groups and also offers other tools to use.
  As a district, we use google docs to share files and add to them such as our schedules or responses on how to approach professional development activities. Again, although I do not currently use any within my classroom, I am heavily searching and sampling sites that I could use at the primary level.

Curration

   It took me a while but I finally bought into it. I am on Pinterest. Although amazingly skeptical at first and even had quite a few jokes to sling at my girlfriend as she spent countless hours on it, I had to buy in after she began turning out amazing decorations for the house and filling my stomach with new delicious recipes. I also quickly noticed that she had some incredible ideas to use within her own classroom and when she shared that many of them had come from Pinterest, I had to check it out. It is a great site and although I don't use it heavily, it certainly is worth checking from time to time and using others great ideas.
  While exploring new curration websites to use Symbaloo grabbed my attention quickly. Bookmarking was always frustrating for me because no matter how hard I tried I always struggled to stay organized and couldn't always access if I wasn't on my computer. Although logging into google chrome allows me to access my bookmarks from any computer, the computer must have google chrome, which we don't have on school computers. Enter SYMBALOO!  Bookmarking you can use anywhere. And not just bookmarking, pages of appstyle icons that allow you to see all your sites on one nice neat IPAD looking page. You can also create webmixes which allow you to design pages of bookmarks for specific content areas or parts of your life. I coach basketball so I can have a webmix page full of links for basketball coaching sites. I can have one strictly for use in my first grade, or professional development, or just silly sites I like to look at. Easy to stay organized, plus my first graders only need to see the sites that I want them to see. I am still creating my webmixes but am excited to continue using this heavily. If you haven't tried it out yet I suggest giving it a whirl. Very user friendly and worth the time.

All in all, I have learned that my understanding of possible tools to use was very limited. My problem now is that I want to stay up all night looking at websites and how to use them in my classroom. My ipad has been used heavily in my bedroom late night. I plan on reposting again on this topic in the near future so stay tuned!