Monday, January 19, 2009

Martin Luther King Junior

To celebrate and learn about the life of Martin Luther King, jr. my primary classes watched a Brainpop video. After discussing the video and the impact Mr. King made on our country, we used Audacity to record our own dream. I used podOmatic to share our mp3 file. It was very easy to create and use the website.

I Have a Dream
by the Burrton Primary Students





My upper elementary classes were challenged to spend some time becoming experts about Martin Luther King, jr. The third graders started listing major events in King's life taking turns discussing and verifying information the students were discovering on the web. I wanted to use Timetoast to create a time line. Class ended before we had enough time to complete our time line. So Mrs. Schmidt returned to her classroom and later finished up the TimeToast time line in her classroom with her third graders using laptop computers.



Earlier in the day, I used our Polycom system to talk with teachers at Wheatland. I tried to review material and answer questions that anyone might have had from a previous technology in-service that I gave back in October.

In October, we covered various topics like blogging, Google docs and Google Forms.



I also covered public learning networks (Twitter, Plurk, Ning, Delicious, etc..) and a few web2.0 applications (Animoto, Voicethread, Mixbook etc..).

One of the teachers was looking for a free quiz application that he could embed in his blog. I usually use Google Forms to create quizzes and embed into my blog, so I decided to do some research and see what else was available as I know there are several quiz creators out there. I decided to give ProProfs a try. It looked interesting and after I explored the site a little, I think it has potential. I like that you can embed video pictures and external links into your quiz. I wish the site was a less cluttered with ads, as it seems to take away from the sites good qualities. I found ProProf easy to use. I ended up creating a three question quiz to go along with Martin Luther King, jr's famed, "I Have a Dream" speech. I embedded the sample quiz into my blog.

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