Comment 4 teachers (week 13 and 14)

This past two weeks I have read through Kathy Cassidy of the Primary Preoccupation blog post. Ms. Cassidy is a first grade teacher in Moose Jaw, SK, Canada. Her goal is to use technology in her classroom to connect, collaborate and learn with her students about other cultures. Some of the things that her students use with technology are blogs, wikis, video, Skype, and other online tools. The classroom has its own class blog and webpage. When reading Ms. Cassidy’s post the two that I enjoyed the most are telling the story with story bird and using video to capture learning.

The first post is called ‘Telling the Story with Story bird’. This post is about Ms. Cassidy getting a response back from her top ten list for tools used in primary school settings. A source that she found to be helpful is storybird. This allows students to embed pictures instead of drawing them. This allows students to not just focus on the image of a book but the writing.

I like this aspect of learning, because I even though art is a good thing in a child’s life, I think that students would color and draw all day instead on paying more attention to the words that should be going with those pictures. Story bird can make the images move and can cause a child to increase their imaginations when seeing the illustrations came to life more that a picture in a book or and picture that was drawn with crayons.

The second post is called ‘Using video to capture learning’. Ms. Cassidy attended an iT summit in Saskatoon and made a presentation call Just Point and Shoot: Using Video to Capture Learning. The presentation was about being able to capture an image of a non-polished idem and how video to help students share their learning with other students. The students are able to rewind and see themselves on the video and get excited but still learn at the same time because they are watching an educational video that they created.

What Ms. Cassidy said “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be at least a million?” As is true to many people, not just students and teachers but parents and child are what happen if video wasn’t around? What happen if no video cameras were invented? We would only have still images and know what to remember the words and actions that were said.