@Twitter

60 Inspiring Examples of Twitter in the Classroom

As an early childhood educator, I could use the following with twitter:

1. As a parent communication tool - ask parent to sign up and received tweets on daily activities and projects, what has been learned in the classroom
2. Share news, inspirations, ideas (using #) with other educators, parents
3. Network with other professionals, search using keyword in the twitter search engine, eg. teachingtechnology, fundraising ideas.  Follow people and start communicating. 
4. Connect with other pre-school or kindergarten around the world to collaborate projects, children can also learn different classroom and cultural protocols
5. Subscribe to #educhat and participate
6. Ask for help & advice

Follow @l_wendy


Other useful twitter tools:

•   Twittermap - shows on a world map of people twitting, search by username, keywords, hashtag..etc. 
• Twitterfall - show a list of results on search term by keywords, hashtag

Twitter cheat sheet - Learn about what all the symbols  (@, RT, #) mean and tricks of the trade.

e-portfolio

Imagine a scenario for parents, they've just picked up their child in a centre or kindergarten,

'How's your day been?'

'.....'

'Who did you played with?'

'.... I had banana and yoyo .....'

An e-portfolio is a great tool to partner with parents for their child(ren)'s learning, educator can record videos.  It's nice to keep children's drawings for parents to take home, but the most important part is what the children were saying while drawing the picture.

A nice presentation on e-portfolio found in Prezi: An introduction to e-portfolio

e-portfolio - Celebrating Learning

How I use my iphone to enhance my pracitce?

Before I upgraded my old phone to a smart phone, my life was miserable.  A lot of things were on my mind but always on the 'To-do" list.  I'm sharing and reflecting on how my iphone can make my personal and professional life more efficient:

• Calendar to arrange things and set reminders for important events, share events with parents
• Music player for movement experiences, I actually got the portable speaker so the songs can project quite far in the classroom and even outside.  And it can easily extend an interest by searching itunes for music, let's say the interest is on horse, I could search music or stories to plan for a dance, drama or music experience.
• I can store all my books in iBooks & kindle
• The built-in camera allows me to take photos of a learning experience and do a learning story instantly (how spontaneous is that!) with the Comiclife apps, or update the children's blog with blogger or wordpress apps

• Evernotes to add & sync notes on all my devices
• I can check multiple email accounts (that I accumulated over my lifetime) instantly, without typing different usernames and passwords, some mail service log you out when you're accessing different email accounts (e.g. email1@gmail.com and email2@gmail.com)
• Can access to the internet, so today, my 4 year-old was watching Bubble Guppies and it's a story of a sphinx without a nose, after watching the episode, she said she wanted to make a pyramid.  So I went on the internet to search for a pyramid template, print it out and there she was drawing, colouring, folding, glueing the pyramid.  I then, just out of interest, search on images.google.com for some sphinx images, she looked with me and wanted to print out 2 of those without the nose. Then we had a bit of an exploration as of why it hasn't got a nose, how we could make a nose...etc.
• There's an app for almost topic!  Have a look at this article: There's an App for almost everything 

I've got lots more other uses with apps, will share it later, stay tuned!

Some resources for utilizing Technology in Early childhood education:

  Child care Administrator 2.0 - scroll down to the bottom

  Technology and Young Children Interest Forum - Tech Tool for Educators

  A Self-Reflection Framework for Technology Use by Classroom Teachers of Young Learners

Creative environment

How do we create educational environments that maximize how students harness their creative and problem-solving potential?

There's a good series on iTunesU on this creative problem solving.

Note on Tim Brown on creativity and play: 

• Playfulness open up possibilites
• Adult's self-judgement or fear of criticism kills creativity
• Role play is experimenting with design of a service or social interactions (what is it like to be a fireman)
• Role play act as a tool to teach empathy (camera recording what a patient sees in the hospital)
• Building prototype helps us explain our creation
• Question to reflect: How can we transition children through this play?
• we need TRUST to play, to be creative
• exploration (going for quantity), building (and thinking) with our hands, role play (acting out)

MoMA Art Lab ipad apps

Here's how Manaia Kindergarten use  the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) Art Lab apps to initiate collaborate of artwork for a group of three children.


MoMA - MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art

Teaching in the Digital Age - Smart Tools for age 3 to Grade 3

Lots of inspirations from this book, showing teachers from kindergarten to Grade 3 how to integrate technology into the classroom, using photos, images, projectos, audio, videoconferencing, webcams, ipads and lots more.   Also got some useful form on planning and assessment, QR code for easy access.

Take a snapshot of chapter 1 introduction: http://www.redleafpress.org/tech/1-1.aspx

Here's an example of a music teacher using the ipad as a teaching tool: http://www.redleafpress.org/tech/8-2.aspx

Education Apps for your ipad

Here's a blog post for some education apps that make teaching more efficient.

20 Apps for Play-based learning

Using Google sites for children's e-portfolio, for FREE

I'm testing out on Google sites to see if it's possible to have the children's portfolios loaded online with privacy.

This is the site I created for public views: J's Portfolio

The website is basically like a document in Google Drive, which different educators, parents, family, extended family can collaborate children's learning together, and the best thing is, I can set it to be private, viewable only to the person I added.

For any early childhood centres seriously wanting to implement e-portfolio, I strongly recommend Google Apps for Education.




It's free for licensed education institutes, and the thing I like the most is that educators can post videos in private and only viewable by those within the domain.  I just learned a term ubiquitous, meaning existing or being everywhere, Google Apps is that, you can collaborate, plan, with anyone anywhere in any devices that have access to the internet.

Although Google Apps is so awesome, I'm also testing wordpress and blogger to see how effective it is in practice, as for Google sites, the webpage needs to be updated when there's an internet connection, sometimes I only have my iphone with me, and the screen is a bit small for me to edit the page wherever I like.

Wordpress and blogger blogs can also protect the children's privacy by setting the blog to private (or viewable only to parents & teachers), and it also has iphone apps which I can update anytime.  Wordpress iphone apps is very easy to use, and I can pretty much type up a learning story on the spot simultaneously when the learning is happening.  All I do is take photos with the iphone camera (ok, it might not be the best camera choice, but it's ok), upload to the blog and add comments and assessment.

Healthy Food Choice for Pre-schoolers

I'm planning for some learning experiences to show children to make healthy food choices, I use Google Drive to do my research, which I can also share and collaborate with my co-workers to co-create the lesson plans.

Here's the link to my document.


Using Google drive is an easy way to brainstorm with colleagues on current interests, it's real-time, just like in a meeting, but better than a meeting is that we don't need to get a time that suits all, we can still brainstorm whenever we have the time to go on the internet, or waiting in a queue if you have a smart phone.