Elevators are Magic Doors

Scavenger hunts- who doesn't love a good one every now and then?

In class we were presented a list of concepts (a verb, an abbreviation) to find out on the UT campus. It was like a breath of fresh air, getting out of that classroom and actually moving. ACTIVE LEARNING-- I am such a believer in it. I cannot wait to do something like this with my class! I just hope that my school will have the technology needed to pull this off; if not, I guess I could always let the students use my personal camera and do one group a day, or something like that.

Here is my Literacy Scavenger Hunt presentation:


We also had a way of organizing these photos as well! Here is how my file for the scavenger hunt photos was managed-- see how I get into my Tech 486 folder, then Chapter 7 images, then the Hunt subfolder, and there are all my JPG files:

like Picasso in Picasa

This is my image collection that was gathered 5 different ways: the web (a free image), scanner, digital camera, CD collection, and a screenshot. After gathering these images, I then had to resize them and organize them into my file. Here is a slideshow of my images! (Check out my cat-- adorable!)




So there you have it. The resizing part is a bit tedious, but not too hard. Once I got the steps down, it was super easy. We also used Picasa, a great photosharing site provided by Google.

Here is my organization for the image collection:

Teacherpedia

So we finished creating our wikis. The English wiki looked amazing! We used an awesome image from Wordle to lure weary students and teachers in to browse our collection of sites we believe are useful. I really think the shared wiki is a great way to collaborate when time and location pose problems.

In regards to using a wiki with my classroom, I would definitely do this if the resources were available! I think it would take a lot of pressure off my students if they were able to contribute to classroom discussion and participation through the internet, a place where most feel comfortable. If I were to do this in my classroom, I would probably take away some of the... housekeeping necessities that were of importance in my experience with creating a wiki. I would most definitely keep the requirement that everything be in ABC order; however, font face and a lot of other finicky cosmetic issues would not concern me. Of course, I would want to be able to understand my students' contributions, but I think that 2-3 varying fonts would surely not keep me from doing so.

I may even consider creating a wiki during class with my students. This could be useful if computers were limited, because all students would be there actually participating in deciding what to put on the wiki and so on, the only difference being that they would not be the ones actually on the computer themselves adding to it. Perhaps I could do this, and then if computers were available we could THEN create wikis with each person individually contributing.

I love where technology is taking my future classroom!