nancytryzelaar

The five courses in technology I have taken this summer have had a profound effect on me. While I will always be an “immigrant” in the tech world, I am now no longer afraid of it. In each class, I have gained knowledge that has helped me better understand the new learning in the next class. This week, “Technology, Learning and Assessment” has been a wonderful way to end my summer by tying everything together. I am especially looking forward to using the spreadsheets. I plan to share this knowledge with the other kindergarten teachers in my school, who also have to do the same assessments.

WHY:  Four times a year I do various assessments  in math and reading  (Sept., Nov., Mar., and June). In the past I have recorded the scores on paper grids with my class list, but have always found it difficult and time consuming to use that data to give me the information I wanted,  for example,  changing the list from alphabetical order of their names to numerical order of correct answers.  I had heard that using the technology of Excel spreadsheets might allow me to do this and give me many ways to use these assessments to guide my teaching of individual students and wanted to try it.

WHAT:  For my Final Project, I have developed several Excel spreadsheets that I plan to begin using in September with my incoming students.  One is just an alphabetical list by last name which also includes birth dates, health issues and other family information.  I like the fact that I now when I get new students it will be easy to add their name in the right place without redoing the whole list.  The other sheets are for the assessments.

HOW:  Not only will using this technology save me a lot of time, I have discovered that Excel not only allows me to sort out my lists in different ways, it will also make graphs of that information.  So I made other spreadsheets which will record the assessment information over time (e.g. letter identification in Sept., Nov., Mar., and June).  I can graph this information to see the learning of the whole class and even more exciting, I can graph the progress of individual children and share this with parents.  This will be especially meaningful to my ESL parents.

I am so glad that I’ve had a chance to have taken those other courses, so that I am able to find my way around the blogs, wikis and so on without getting entirely lost.  I just take several detours!

A kindergarten teacher in New Hampshire has a wonderful blog that includes children’s writing and drawings. I hope to get many ideas from it. http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=51141

I am interested in developing a method that would allow me to record information about my class, including their assessment scores. I would then like to be able to rearrange that information in different ways: alphabetical, by numeral order and so on. I have heard that I can use an Excel spreadsheet for that, so I was interested in looking at the “Collab. Spreadsheets” on the tool list. I will post links to two of the sites I found very useful. The Alice Christie site has wonderful examples of very many ways teachers can use spreadsheets in their classrooms (something I never would have thought of doing, but will try now). The other site is actually a Microsoft Excel reference guide, which I will have to study if I am ever going to be able to use Excel.

http://www.alicechristie.org/edtech/ss/

http://www.internet4classrooms.com/on-line_excel.htm#sample 

I found this article to be somewhat discouraging.  While I can agree that Project Based Learning (PBJ) when taught well and appropriately can better prepare today’s students for the future, I can’t see this happening in my school system at any time soon because there is no time or money to train teachers how to do this!

(after I put in the link to my project, I couldn’t type any more and couldn’t figure out why – so I decided to just add a post. I miss all my helpers and Alice!) Back to the project:

I plan to add to the blog each week and hope that parents will collaborate with me by making comments or asking questions they may have. In addition to giving parents information about what we will be doing in school, that blog also includes links to sites that parents may find interesting or have learning games and activities for children. As I find other appropriate sites I will link them in the blog.

I opened a special Del.icio.us account that I plan to use in our school Computer Lab. On it I have links that I think are appropriate for my class to use. I have included a link to that account on my parent blog so they will also be able to access it. I will hyperlink it for you to see, but I most likely won’t be able to figure out how to write after that, so I’ll first wish you all a great rest of the summer!!!    http://del.icio.us/mrstryzelaar

I have always sent home a letter to parents every Monday, explaining what we would be doing that week and giving them other information about what was going on in our school. In turn, if parents wanted to contact me, they would send a note, call the school, or stop by to talk with me. I wanted to use some of the technology I learned about this week to begin a new way for parents and me to communicate with each other.

So I developed a blog, http://mrstryzelaarsclass.blogspot.com.II a d k

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so much! While I have been learning a lot this summer about how computers work and some of the fun things you can do with them, I still felt very lost about the world of technology. But because of this class I now have two different blogs, a wiki, a blogline and del.icio.us accounts. A week ago I didn’t really have any idea of what they were! I am still at a very low level of understanding of how to use them, but with practice I hope to become better able to do so. This is especially true of my “Mrs. Tryzelaar’s Class” blog and my del.icio.us account – both of which I plan to use this year.

I have always sent home a parent letter every Monday to let them know what we will be doing during  that week.  This year I want to offer it as a class blog for those parents who have internet access.  This blog would be a not only be a place that informs parents of our plans and activities at school, it would also provide them a way to communicate with me and with other parents.  I will be doing this on the other blog I have set up as “Mrs. Tryzelaar’s Class”.