Jose Rodriguez

The It's Elementary team shares the successes and challenges of their year.

Points of interest:

• Technology is not a something separate, but an integral part of our teaching
• We use it to help kids make connections to the rest of the world
• Some issues were how to get kids used to writing, and not just playing on computers, how to plan and allocate time on the computers, and how much choice to give kids.
• How annoying, and brain-dead e-rate filtering programs are to deal with.

Special invitation to all that are interested in learning webcasting in Spanish. Our Open House will be on Friday June 6 at 6 p.m. Pacific. Check your local time. at http://puentesalmundo.net/live On this program I (Jose Rodriguez) and Alan Acevedo share what Webcasting is all about and what we expect from our session starting soon. In our Open House we will be giving an orientation to the Moodle course at http://webcastacademy.com and answer any questions you may have. For more information visit our worldbridges spanish site: http://puentesalmundo.net Spread the News!!!!

We welcomed Mathew Needleman who discussed Video in the Classroom. Maria was unable to join us due to her mother's birthday (happy birthday to you!), Alice discussed attending Mathew's presentation at CUE last week. Her blog post is here it includes links to his presentation. We touched on...

• Why to use video in the classroom
• How to structure projects for success
• Resources to help you with projects
• Problems we had, and how to deal with them

Links

Mathew's video work: http://www.videointheclassroom.com
Digital Storytelling by Room36 Jose:
http://ia340929.us.archive.org/2/items/JoseRodriguezADigitalStoryAboutStorytelling/HumphreysDigitalStory.mov

Royalty Free Images for projects
http://www.pics4learning.com
http://www.morguefile.com
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons

Content Links/Tutorials
http://www.flickschool.com, Marco Torres's site
http://www.videointheclassroom.com for monthly digital storytelling carnival
http:www.unitedstreaming.com for AFI's training films
Microsoft MovieMaker
Microsoft PhotoStory

Visit our blog at http://itselementary.edublogs.org

Chat Below

Our guest, Jennifer Dorman, gave lots of great information about using RSS in education.

1. We defined RSS feeds (sorta like a magazine subscription, but online);
2. We discussed why you would want to use it as a teacher, and in your classroom;
3. We shared examples of how we use it (sometimes for ourselves and our professional development, sometimes to automate information given to and from students); and
4. We talked about opportunities and challenges.

You can find our planning wiki here.

Some featured bookmarks from the show are here:

• From Jennifer Dorman:
  RSS for Educators wiki page
  RSS Presentation file
• RSS in Plain English (from Lee LeFever at CommonCraft, examples it really simply)

A more extensive list of bookmark is here on Diigo.

One issue that came up was the lack of RSS on content pages geared towards students. We've used feeds from Highlights, and Discovery Science. If you have other elementary-age content that has an RSS feed, please share it on in our Diigo group, or here as a comment. Thanks!

Chat Log Below

Come and listen as we talk about our projects. This is our Back to School Special. The It's Elementary Team; Lisa Durff, Maria Knee, Alice Mercer and Jose Rodriguez. As the Webcastathon begins to wind down the Chat Room was buzzing. We had some of our regulars and special visitors from New Zealand. Hope you enjoy the show!

Chat Log Below