Weekly Blog Number Nine

This week for our technology articles assignment I chose to use the online tool Imeem and to also use e-mail. We all know the purpose of e-mail is to send messages/mail over the Internet. The benefit of this is that you can contact people much faster than using regular mail.

Imeem is a online tool that allows people to create an account and listen to music that they like using a search engine. This is very neat, because you can listen to music for free, and you can make play lists with the music that you have chosen.

I wanted my first graders to learn and be able to be in contact with other students there age in a different state. First, I thought it would be fun to have pen pals, like I did when I was in elementary. Then I thought what is the best way to do this but to involve technology? So I decided that it would be fun to have a class "pen pal" and use e-mail instead of actual mail. I thought that it would be fun to write to another first grade class once a week. We could as a class decide what we wanted to say, and what kind of questions we would want to ask the students. I would do the typing, but I could put it up on a projector screen and that way the students could see what was going on and be involved. I think it would also show them how to send and compose an e-mail. By the end they may even be able to send an e-mail to an individual student themselves. I think that this would be very beneficial for the students. It would help them to learn at any early age to be caring towards other people and it would help them to become more familiar with e-mail. I think that a con of this e-mail pen pals would be that maybe students might get bored if they are not the ones doing the typing, and maybe they would think that it would be dumb. But as a whole I think this could be very fun.


Another thing that I wanted to do with my students was to learn about music. To learn about different types of music, find out what they like and dis-like. I thought it would be fun to talk about why they like or dis-like the music that they do. We could also talk about cultural music and music that uses specific instruments. It may even be good to show them certain types of music that would introduce a instrument for the first time to a student. So, I decided that Imeem would be a good tool to use. Imeem is very neat, because you can search for songs that you like and know, and it also suggests songs that you may like that are like the song you have selected. It would be fun as a class to look for their favorite songs. I could make a play list of all their favorite songs and as a reward we could listen to it at some point in the day. I really thought that using Imeem would be a good way of introducing different types of cultural music to my students. It would be very useful when we are studying a certain country. The only downfall of using Imeem would be that sometimes the site is a little faulty and doesn't display the music. Another con with Imeem is their is no way to know what all the lyrics of a song are before playing them. But I as the teacher could get the names of their songs beforehand and listen to them without the class to make sure that the lyrics are age appropriate.

The videos this week were not available, so I found my own. I found a video on Teacher Tube called How Not to Use Power Point. It was a pretty funny little video. It was a stand up comedy about the ways people use power point. It was really funny, but it also had a lot of good tips. It talked about how it's boring when people put up there whole lesson word for word on their slides of their power point presentation. It also talked about how people can use too many bullets on a slide. It was very fun. I enjoyed it. Here is the Url:http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=6102&title=How_NOT_To_Use_PowerPoint