My World Got Bigger

 What a fun month I have had. There is so much to think about that I don't even have time to take a picture of the perfect shoe for this post. I think Santa's boots would work perfect about now! We had 5 snow days between Thanksgiving and Christmas Break. It was fun to actually have snow but made it a little hard to get back into the swing of things when your only full week of school since Thanksgiving was the week before Christmas AND a full moon. My 2/3rd grade classes finished learning about the rainforest and made their mom's a present with recycled material. My 4th graders are still working on their Going Global unit & will finally be ready to Mystery Skype a class in January. I will share more about this later! My 5th graders have been doing amazing things with Rubik's cubes and making mosaics with them. My 6th graders finished their CSI Arson Unit and both classes convicted the correct suspect.
This year I wanted my focus to be Going Global with all of my classes. Learning to collaborate on line and learning more about the world around them. Little did I know this would not only change my classroom but my home. Through a chain of interesting events we were blessed with a foreign exchange student from Japan! Miki will be living with us until June and we are so excited to have her. Technology is a life saver with all of this! We all have apps now to translate because English is still a struggle and we know zero Japanese. We wanted to see where she lived in Japan so we got on Google Earth. She was so excited to see where she lived, she said she had never looked at it before on line. She gets to Skype with her friends and family so she doesn't get homesick. Then, we are learning all about her culture. I wouldn't have thought that they eat Mexican and Italian food in Japan. I don't know why that surprised me so much! So adjusting to food choices has not been as big of a problem as I thought it might be. We still haven't been able to have traditional Japanese food but we are going to a large city this weekend that has a good Asian market so she can get some things to make the kind of sushi she likes.
This was my last week of assignments for my tech class. I looked into 4 different web tools this week which I had never tried before: BigHugeLabs.com- I spent WAY to much time here. I loved the cubes you can make with pictures and knocked out a few Christmas presents while I was playing. There were tons of fun things to do on this site! Slideshare-I thought it would allow me to do more with powerpoints but it really just lets me store them there so I feel Goggle Drive would be just as good. Letterpop.com looked like an easy 1 stop place for newsletters. The only thing is with Twitter and my class website I haven't been doing class newsletters. Something I would use if I went back to newsletters however. Voki-was another thing I had fun playing with for probably too long! I have seen them more and more lately and Facebook even has something like it now so I was interested. I think this would be good for kids to make as a profile pic on Google Drive or even Edmodo. It doesn't put their name with a real face that way.
I also finished up my tech class. Here are some of my reflections on the subject:
How did the course assist me in my personal learning goals? The class held me accountable for blogging. I thought I could do it weekly like some of the people I follow on Twitter. I quickly found out that I am more of a monthly blogger because I have so many things going on with school and family. I also wanted to learn about more tools to use with my students and that happened weekly!
What were some of my favorite experiences or discoveries from the course? My favorite mostly useful thing was probably Feedly. It makes it so much easier to keep up with the blogs I love! The last week I had fun messing with BigHugeLabs.com & Voki which I had never tried before. I think my students would like both. I might set up a class account so they can upload pictures and have some fun with it. They could even incorporate them into their presentations that we have coming up in January. So 1 of my favorites has been great for time saving and 2 of my favorites have become time suckers. LOL
What are my thoughts on the course format? The class I took was all on line and do it at your own pace. I LOVED this. I wish more PD was offered in this manner.
What additional elements would I like to see in the course? It would have been nice to meet face to face 1 time toward the end. I enjoy talking through things with someone as I'm learning and many times when I see someone excited about something that they tried it makes me more willing to give it a try.
How would I describe my learning experience in one sentence ? 21 Things for 21st Century Educators was a great work at your own pace course where every week there was something new to learn and the video tutorials made it easy to understand. (super long run on sentence I know)
 I am so blessed with this holiday season upon us! Take time away from school and enjoy your loved ones and family. Learn something new together and have fun doing it! Make your world a little bigger this holiday season by sharing life with others.