STaRT Tech Learning Community

I had posted twice in Blogger so will copy and paste those entries here.
Oct. 25
I went to the training session today with a plan in mind. I definitely want to focus on developing Grade 4 writing skills (and incorporate mini-lessons from the district resource, Developing Writer) and I also want to use the math/literature connection as an activating strategy for the writing activities. (Numeracy is a school goal.) I had picked out ways to integrate technology including word processing, spreadsheets, e-mail, and webpage development. After the presentations and talking with others, I now want to explore using a class conference in FirstClass, the "wiki" idea to collaborate with our keypals in Manitoba, Comic Life, HCK and iMovie. I can see I will have to be attending some tech. workshops. I feel limited by the fact I have no computers in my classroom. A pod of 3-4 computers that students could access throughout the day would be nice.
In my plan, I had separate activities to reach specific math and writing outcomes and had only integrated technology with the writing activities. I had done this because I had (mis)understood that we were to focus on literacy, which I had interpreted as reading, writing, etc. After hearing the wide variety of ideas from other teachers, I am going back to integrate technology into the math activities I had planned.
Oct. 28
I have stumbled my way through creating a Writing Conference for my students in FirstClass and also through creating a webpage with the Home Page Construction Kit. I still have some glitches in the conference set-up. In the writing conference I created 4 subconferences where the students will "hand in" particular pieces of writing. On their desktops, the Writing Conference folder icon appeared, with the 4 sub-conference icons inside. When I worked on the Permissions for the sub-conferences, they then also appeared as icons on the students' desktops. I am wondering if I don't have to list the students as subscribers to the sub-conferences as they are already subscribers to the main conference. I have to check that out on Monday but that leads me to my next question. Is there anyway I could access my students' e-mail accounts as an administrator instead of having to keep a list of their user names (7 digits) and passwords (7 more digits)? HCK was fairly easy as I made myself a hard copy of the Help and walked through it step by step. I was baffled trying to find out the URL but finally found a webpage created by another district teacher, plugged in my own name and there it was. I want the students to create their own pages. I have to see on Monday if they have access to HCK. If they did, could I create a webpage for them in my Home Page Folder and then put it into their Home Page folder? Then they would only have to worry about the content of the page. If they don't have HCK they could still use FirstClass to create webpages but those are a little more frustrating in terms of controlling the lay-out. I am working on the wikispaces website. I plan to use this as a way of collaborating with our keypals in Manitoba. This is a perfect way for us to collaborate on writing as they don't have individual e-mail addresses. We would have all had to work through the teacher's e-mail address.
My premise(s) in developing this writing project is/are that students' writing skills and attitudes about writing will improve because:
a) the activating strategy is "fun" math literature
b) they get to collaborate with each other in the Writing Conference in FirstClass
c) they get to collaborate with another Grade 4 student in another province (wikispaces)
d) they get to present their final product in a variety of ways to a larger audience (word processing, webpage, slideshow)
I have played with iPhoto this week. I need a program that they can use to write and illustrate poems and stories as books or slideshows and then publish to the web. If I was doing it all, I would use PPT, but I want them to be involved in the process. I may need some help on this one. I'm not sure what we have at school that they could use. I find that Slideshow in Appleworks is easy for students to use, so I need something like that. I don't want to bother with a digital camera right now so we will be inserting free clipart/graphics. The graphics I tried in iPhoto didn't always work so that would be very frustrating and time consuming for the students, and thus for me.
It looks like I am now getting some computers in my classroom. That will make things so much easier.
Nov. 6
Interesting to read over my previous comments/questions as I "blog" tonight and find I now have some answers to my original problems, and inevitably, more questions and problems.