Great Wall of China

Great Wall of China

Monday, May 16, 2011

GOOD BYE POST

I want to thank everyone for all their hard work. We all will benefit from it. This course was a real learning experience. Thank you Prof. for a very challenging work load. You really made the most of our time. I can honestly say all the work we produced is practical. Our new found knowledge will be useful every day. This course certainly makes me look at lesson planning in a different light. If I get around to actually teaching I most certainly will try to incorporate technology every day and in any way possible. This class should be a required continuing education course for all teachers. Technology is no longer an option for any profession. I am proud that I no longer feel like a dinosaur and I am no longer fearful. I can embrace technology and I am so eager to continue to learn every day. I am happy that this course is a core requirement, it must be. The only negative thing I can say is that I am very sad to have not gotten to know my fellow class mates better (you too Professor). The lack of human interaction is the downside to internet classes. Keeping the blogs definitely helps but that can't replace communicating in person. I hope to meet you all again someday very soon. Congratulations on completing the course and enjoy the summer!

Rosanna

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Butterfly Life Cycle: Introduction

Butterfly Life Cycle: Introduction
Life Cycle of a Butterfly Web Quest

My web quest is on the "The Life Cycle of a Butterfly". My boys loves bugs! All kinds. They started pestering me to order a butterfly kit. This kit helps you to grow caterpillars into butterflies. The goal is to release the butterflies. I thought this would be the perfect web quest for Spring. I was pleasantly surprised to find so much information on this topic. It certainly is fun and a wonder to watch the metamorphosis of a caterpillar. This topic can offer many wonderful extension projects and covers many core curriculum standards. I just love thinking of a room full of children that are excited to come to school everyday to see the changes in their caterpillars. Spring is the most wonderful time of the year explore bugs.

My web quest is for second /third grade students. It is an organized and focused web quest with all the links provided. It is best to keep this age group on task and not exploring the internet too deeply. I expanded on a two very good web quests. I added many internet links and several wonderful videos to the process. My web quest spans about a three week period so I added the reading of "The Butterfly Garden". The story is accessed through an internet link too. The children also will make a model of a caterpillar. I made this model very simple, the original web quest was too involved.
The web quest includes journal writing, drawing, and lots of discussion. Incorporating a filed trip to the Bronx Zoo or the Natural History Museum would be very effective and the timing is perfect. Both venues have live caterpillars exhibits.

This web quest project took a lot of time to create. I am not sure we needed to fill out the teacher's page information but I did anyway.

The most difficult part was changing the appearance. This is not a user friendly function. I could not change the background of the teachers page. I kept going back and fourth and the students page changed but not the teachers page. I am so frustrated but I did get it to look attractive. I still am not sure how this works. Can someone explain?

The website link is at the top of this commentary. Had a hard time adding the website to the blog.