Group items tagged

This blog is written by an early childhood teacher out of Australia. He uses it to share his experiences in his own classroom and offer ideas to other teachers or early childhood specialists from a Montessori perspective.

This is an example of a WordPress Blog written by a teacher from Austrailia who uses this to share his experiences in his early childhood classroom. This is a great resource for anyone working in a classroom because he offers great recipes to use in activity plans and shares his ideas on how an early childhood classroom should be run form a Montessori perspective.

Minnetonka Early Childhood Family Education (ECFE) teachers are using a lot of technology in their classrooms.

I found this website to be very confusing to use. It doesn't seem like it would be very appropriate for young children. There is a chance that a teacher could use it in a early childhood classroom, but overall, most children that young would have a hard time listening to a presentation, even if it was a cool one. Also, Prezi costs money to use so that is definitely a draw back. However, if you were a college professor or even high school teacher, Prezi may be worth the money.

Madelyn, you are right- this is not for use by young children. It is a new type of presentation tool which shifts from the typical slideshow type presentation to one that organizes all of the information components on a single document, and allows the presenter to zoom in on sections of the content, and particulars, to help share ideas. There is a free download version available, which is the one I have started to explore. For example, I have documented the development of our use of Diigo in early childhood settings, and created an image map. That is not visually interesting/accessible when shared as a whole, but might be transferable into a Prezi document which would be. We will see...

Good resource for both parents/ teachers. Hours of fun for kids!

This is a great site for parents, teachers, and kids. It is filled with lesson plans, craft ideas, and thousands of coloring pages.

Totlol is a site that caters movies to a younger audience that sites like Youtube tend to neglect. Users can upload videos and moderate each other's videos. The downside to this is that you must pay in order to have a membership, which is necessary to view the videos. Examples of the videos include videos of children's songs and stories.

This site is child-friendly and would be great for making your own website. It is easy to use, and it gives you many ways to create a unique, colorful, and educational website. There are many examples of websites that can be viewed as well.

This looks like a wonderful website! The design layout was very clear to understand, and there are so many options (personal, business, etc.) I liked that there were websites to view, because I am not a very creative person, and I need a little help occasionally! :)

Only useful if someone contacts you to edit a document, or if you upload a document and contact them. More person to person, then person to internet community.

Writeboard is a collaborative document creation tool that can be used between a number of people. This tool quick for anyone to start up. On the homepage you can create your document to be edited by naming the document, then provide your email address. Once the wrtieboard is created you can begin typing! Once the document is complete you can invite people to view and edit your document as well as leave comments. Once the document has been edited by another person, you will be able to compare your document with the newest edited document. One of the challenges I faced when using this tool is the format of the document when typing. In order to indent or make a word bold or italic, a special code needed to be entered. For example, to make the word "Introduction" bold, you would have to type *Introduction*. This actually slowed my typing down, but I feel if this is a tool that you use often, these are codes you could catch on to. The strength of this tool is the option to invite anyone to edit. I feel that this would be useful for teachers to communicate back and forth to share activities and edit them. Or it could be useful as an assignment for students to share a paper and to edit the others. This would help their editing skills. I also like the option to compare and contrast your original document with one that has been recently edited. I think this would be helpful in seeing what improvments were made and choose whether or not you'd like to accept them. I think that this tool would be better for high-school students, or any teacher. The tool would be difficult for anyone younger to use.

I spent some time searching for apps for my granddaughter. I was disappointed to see that there was so many apps focused on letter recognition, number recognition, and shapes, yet not enough open-ended apps that encourage creative and divergent thinking. The iPad has so much potential, but if the software isn't appropriate, it will be of little value.