donnad4

I am a second grade teacher in a challenging environment of open concept and disadvantaged students. I have 2 grown daughters. One is local and lives on her own. The other lives in Wisconsin because her husband is working on his Phd in physics. I like to bake and provide appetizers at parties. I'm know for my carmelized bacon. Looking forward to vacation. The first in five years.

Toolbox Time 1 Edmodo seemed interesting. I was wondering, since many of the students don't have computers at home and we're limited to how many we have for the classroom, if they could use it during class... maybe a morning prompt or quick quiz. Or even as a tattletale page. I liked the idea about pinterest - of creating a board on a particular topic of study. I was really interested in grooveshark to make playlists to use during class, and all for free!

Toolbox Time 2 A lot of interesting things. I want to further explore GoogleDocs, Dabblebooard or CoSketch, and iKeepBookMarks. We are unpacking the Common Core Standards and creating units with common formative assessments. GoogleDocs would be a good way to share documents without emailing back and forth and having to meet face to face all the time. CoSketch - I might be able to use for math. Sometimes I draw sketches for the students to explain a concept they don't understand. If these can be saved and used again another year, this would be a great time saver.

Toolbox Time 3 What a wealth of information. The 3 UDL principles, recognition, strategic, and affective networks are explained in great detail. Then there are links to various websites to help one follow the 3 UDL principles. A bit overwhelming. The Effective Color Contrast site was interesting. I had taken another class and was told the best colors for retention of information was red on white. This site did not say that but explained what colors are best to use to make the text clearer.

Toolbox Time 4 This continuation of exploring the websites for the 3 UDL principles continued to be overwhelming. I thought Kerpoof, Voicte Thread, Scratch, the Goal Setting Worksheets were sites I would like to investigate more thoroughly for possible use in my class. The problem I may encounter is that the computers we have accessible for second grade are the older models and may not be capable of supporting the sites. We'll see once school starts.

Toolbox TIme 5 Again, a lot of sites. I've found a few times that some links are out-of-date - one receives an error message. Interesting to me in this tool box were KIDBLOG or Class Press and Weebly. With the limited use of technology, this might work where the students could use the two computers in the classroom at different times.

Toolbox Time 6 Go animate looks like something I might use to make videos to introduce and reinforce concepts. I want to look further into voice thread to see if students could read a story to it.