My first post

Hello, and welcome to my first blog post!

I became a teacher in 2010, so I don't remember a time in my career without teaching blogs. I love reading blogs for inspiration in the field, lesson ideas, and innovative ways to integrate technology in the classroom. While this blog was created as part of a graduate course, I hope to continue on with it and add to the educational community.

This week we talked about RSS, Feedly, and a really great tool called Adobe Spark. Here is a little run-down of all of the tools.

RSS is a way to connect to blogs and other sites that you follow and run them through a feeder so that you can access all of your information in one easy place. One feeder that is simple to use and has a nice interface to it is Feedly. Using feedly, I can organize my blogs based on specific categories. I just got started, but here is a screenshot of my feedly account so far.

If Feedly is new to you, here is a great tutorial for learning how to get started.

My favorite thing we have learned about this week is an app called Adobe Spark. Users can easily create posts, stories, and videos using this free app. Here is an example post I made on the app. It only took me a couple of minutes, and it looks professional.

I teach second grade, and I could see myself using this to teach vocabulary by using words to match with the picture libary, publish short stories using their pages tool, and even produce videos about animals that students research in science. One downfall I see would be that Spark does require the user to have an account, such as Google, to sign up. So this might be something that you would have to do in a small group with younger students. However, my district does give google accounts to all of our students, so if I taught upper grades this wouldn't be as much of an issue. It just gets tricky having 7-year-olds logging in with email accounts!

Want some help getting started with Spark? Check out this tutorial.

I hope you enjoyed my first blog post! I am going to leave you with a couple of links to some pretty great blogs I like to follow.

Step into 2nd Grade

Sweet Sweet Primary

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