Final Post

Our project has taken several unexpected turns since the day we first started our planning.

After learning about curation tools in class, Amy, Katie and I began the process of collecting/curating games and activities to use with our Kindergartners during math centers.  In order to allow for more academic choice, we wanted to have a selection of activities that were appropriate for Kindergartners and in which students could be relatively independent while we worked with small groups.

This part of our project is still in the development phase as we have only just recently begun our math centers routines.  In the weeks to come, we will be fine-tuning the routines and activities that we are introducing to our students.  Cathy will be helping us to develop a website from which students will be selecting online games to reinforce concepts taught.

As our project began to unfold, we found ourselves wishing that our Kindergartners could have access to ipads for math centers as they are much more intuitive and easy to manage for young children.  So, as an additional component of our project, we decided to write a YEF grant proposal for ipads in Kindergarten.

Unrelated to math centers, but certainly a pertinent component of our project, we have begun "tweeting" with our Kindergartners.  We all now have a Twitter feed on our classroom blogs.  At the close of each day, together with our students, we come up with a few short phrases that help to describe our day.  These are meant to be conversation starters for families and so far they LOVE it!  We have received wonderful feedback from parents.  Thank you to Todd Abbott for the idea!

Finally, we started a You-Tube channel for the Kindergarten team on which we have been collecting and organizing short but powerful videos that reinforce what we are teaching in class.  This, I believe, has been the most immediately gratifying component of our project.  All six K teachers have been adding to the channel and benefitting from it daily.

Our project has really been a 4-part endeavor and I am feeling great about what we have accomplished and where we are headed.  From here on out, we will be seeing our math centers come to fruition and hopefully see positive effects on our students as we will be better able to differentiate our instruction.

Response to Research

My research began with watching a quick video about learning in the 21st century.  In the video, the term "gamer" was used, a term that I have been hearing quite a bit lately.  It prompted me to do some research into the various "labels" the kids are using in middle and highschool to "organize" themselves socially and stratify their population.  I recall a conversation I had with my cousin over the summer about her middle school daughter.  Her daughter had been expressing concern about how kids were labelled at school by their peers.
 I read a few articles on this topic and found a Newsweek article called "The Legacy of High School Cliques: How the labels we get as teenagers shape the rest of our lives, and why social networking and the economy are changing the way a generation  deals with those early stereotypes."  This article discussed how these labels shape who we become, especially in an age when social networking make these labels and social implications so ever-present and difficult to escape.  This is an interesting, and concerning notion.  The article also claimed that kids of this generation are "taking longer to grow up and establish themselves as adults."  The author suggests that this "extended adolescence" could give kids more time to shed their labels and define who they truly are and what their goals are in life.  An interesting angle...

Update on project

My team members and I have continued our work to find and curate math games and activities for what we hope to be more effective, engaging, organized but more academically flexible, and (in some cases) technological math centers.  We spent a fair amount of time collecting the hands-on materials that we will use with students for the first couple months of school.  We still have work to do, which will include preparing our Kindergarteners for being successful during this self-directed time.  This can take time. 

As sort of a side project, we have added a twitter feed to our blogs with the intention of using it to report out a few quick tidbits/conversation starters about each day for parents.  I am anxious to start doing this as a closing circle with my students (what a great built-in shared writing experience too).  I think it will help to hold me accountable for what I believe to be a very important (yet too often rushed) part of our day.

Response to Research

I have spent an hour exploring and creating a favorites list and folders on the PBS Learning Media website.  I am so excited to make use of this website this year.  It is a great place to collect short videos, interactive games, and professional information.  There is a wealth of resources!  I also plan to add this sight to my list of links on my blog so that my families can learn about it as well.

Response to Research

I watched two TED talks.  The one that spoke to me the most was Stuart Brown's talk on the importance of play in our lives.  Even as a Kindergarten teacher, I find myself having to work very hard (and at times, admittedly, to sacrifice curriculum) to maintain the level of play in my classroom that I know is so vitally important to my student's cognitive and social development.  Stuart Brown's talk was empowering and affirming.  A goal for years to come will be to harness my five-year-old students' natural tendency for play to help develop ways of making our curriculum even more engaging.

Response to Research

Ted Talks:  Synchrony in Nature:
At first, I wondered what this particular talk would have to do with education.  Then, as I watched the gorgeous videos on fish schooling and birds flocking and moving in synchrony, I realized that this is, on some level, what I try to achieve in my classroom through Responsive Classroom techniques and community building strategies and activities.  At some point in the year, I inevitably find myself sitting back and watching with amazement the synchrony that my students have achieved.  Certainly, depending on the year and the particular group, the level of synchrony varies.  However, this speaker got me thinking about how we are naturally attracted to one another and if we learn how to work together and respond to each other, a group of individuals are capable of "dancing" (learning) together in beautiful synchrony.

June 19th Course Response

I am very much still in the beginning stage of learning with many of these curation tools.  I do feel lucky to be in a profession in which I will continually practice and be exposed to the latest trends in technology.  As a parent I feel this will become more and more important as my children get older.  As a Kindergarten teacher, it is a fun challenge to think about how to best expose my students to current uses of technology and use technology to bring information to my students. 

I have been using Pinterest frequently for collecting ideas for my classroom as well as for my personal life.  I find this tool to be very user friendly and inviting.  As a Kindergarten teacher, I like the visuals on Pinterest.  Today I was able to get my boards better organized which will help me to access my pins more effectively.  Amy, Katie and I are working on building math centers board on Pinterest to support our project.

I am looking forward to "Tweeting" next year!  We decided we would include quick daily tweets about key events of the day in our blogs.  Today we were able to get this up and running and ready for September.  I like the idea offered by Todd Abbott to tweet a list of five events from the day, but to use only a couple of words to describe each event.  The idea here is for the list to be less "informational" and more "conversation starters" for families.

I would like to use Feedly as a tool for keeping myself more informed about current events in general.