7/26 Reflections

As most of my interaction with students is in helping them with research and creating in them a love of reading, I am always looking for new ways to help reach those goals. I am anxious to see how I can best use Shelfari with my students to provide reading lists for them as well as providing a place for them to share what they read in the book discussion area. I want to share this with my English teachers as well, as many of them have different activities throughout the year that ask students to participate in small group/literature circle discussions. I think Shelfari is something they will find useful. From the research perspective, I have used Glogster with a few classes this past year, and hope to use it with more this coming year. This is a great way to get students away from the typical pen/paper research report. It allows them to move into the higher order thinking skills by making them identify the most important information from their research and then to locate other resources to present their research facts. It also makes them think about how they logically need to present their information so that it makes sense. I am also hoping to use more video creation software to allow them to present their research through video as well