Hands on Experience at the YETC

Today we were given the OPPORTUNITY to experience all of the resources that the YETC has to offer. Instead of just learning and listening about these things we were given the opportunity to actually EXPERIENCE them!

One of my favorite resources that I was able to navigate today was the GUTENBERG PROJECT. I love to read, and I am hoping to instill this love with my students as well. As I was looking through all of the resources they had, I was totally impressed by how broad the collection was. I found a book that I could use for every holiday. For Halloween....The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. By clicking on the link "HTML" the book appeared on my screen in seconds. The children could easily follow along, or obtain their own copies if they were all seated at a computer. Because this particular story isn't illustrated, children could create their own illustrations, and insert them into the text.

Another interesting page that I found as I was exploring was NATHAN SMITHS EDUCATIONAL TREASURES. The link to this page is found under the main YETC resource page, or by following this link, http://teacherlink.ed.usu.edu/tlresources/nathan/index.html. This page, which is updated yearly provides many useful websites, and their links. I found several sites, that I have bookmarked for future use.
For a math lesson, I could use http://www.hbschool.com/activity/calculator_gr1/.
This site provides a fun tutorial on how to use a calculator. The site also provides many fun math games, with topics and themes that would be interesting to children.
For a disorganized person like myself, an organizational system would be perfect. Based on the sticky post it notes that are commonly seen posted on computers, http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/stickies/index.html, this site provides an electronic form of sticky notes.
As a teacher, a common resource is other teachers. Ann Brundige, a teacher who has worked for many high profile companies has created a free teacher resouce found at http://www.annbrundigestudio.com. This link provides many resources for teachers, including activities for each grade level, clipart and how-to activities.

Another really interesting resource is STELLARIUM. This very pleasing resources is found at www.stellerium.org. This is essentially a virtual solarium right on your computer. You can localize the view of the sky to personalize it for your students. However, my very favorite part of stellaruim, is the link that has various cultures interpretations of the constellations. More and more we are learing how we need to have multi-cultural classrooms. This provides such a great opportunity to do so. Stars are a universal concept, which all students are familiar with. Using common ground to learn about different cultures I feel is the best way to go about multi-cultural education.

YETC Resources

Today we visited and learned about all of the resources that the YETC offers. As we all know, there are many useful resources there, with an ever helpful staff. I was impressed by how much there was to see, and how willing and anxious Nate was to help.

I would love to gather some of the resources to use in a future classroom. I believe the password protected area of the YETC website, will be especially useful. I feel that I should gather as many materials as I can now, before I am graduated and can no longer take part in these wonderful opportunities. I am excited to watch some of the training videos. I love to watch how real classrooms are putting the principles that we discuss into use. Also, I am really enthused about the clip art collection. I feel I have wasted so much time searching for clip art on the web. Now I have a resource, that will narrow down my search field, so I can spend more time on the content parts of my lesson, rather than the supporting pictures.

I also really liked learning about the add on's. Especially the video downloader. I never knew that something like this existed. I think this is an excellent resource. I would love to be able to create a digital library of videos for my future classroom. I so often times find videos, that I would love to save. However instead of saving the url, I now know that I will be able to save the videos to a thumb drive.

I would also love to obtain a show, from Microvision for my classroom. I believe this would be such a useful resource. This thing is so neat. I would specifically use this piece of equipment in place of a general overhead projector. Not only is it tiny, so it doesn't take up useful classroom space, but you can upload anything from your computer or i pod and have it at your fingertips. This device will project on anything, not just a white screen. Even if we were on the bus going on a field trip, I could bring this piece of equipment, and share in a learning expeience with the children on the way to our destination.

I am excited to use all of the new resources that I have learned about today!