Virtual Newscast

I've made a commitment to improve the technology experience of my students this year. My newest endeavor is to make our morning broadcast live over the web so everyone can enjoy. We will be broadcasting on Ustream and our channel is called JVTV2012.  The exciting thing is that parents and family members can watch us live without having to come to school. The shows can be recorded so folks can log in and watch us any time and the shows will be there in the archives all year. No longer will our students miss the broadcast because their class was having to go to p.e. while we were live. I am so excited for this technology and basically we can use a webcam and just present. Ustream also has some software that we plan to purchase. The software will allow us to switch between cameras, use green screen technology to place our broadcasters in different settings, and we'll be able to put captions on the screen, and even play recorded videos within the broadcast.  I am so excited to be able to move a lot of old equipment out of my room and that we can travel around school and broadcast easily because the equipment is mobile.
Next, I have finally used Edmodo to communicate with my students in Math and assign them quizzes and other assignments. I have some worksheets that I scanned and posted them on the questions of the quizzes. I also took photos of worksheets and posted them on quiz questions. My students have been excited that we are doing a Frog Olympics in Math class. I posted directions on Edmodo of how to make origami frogs and let them make 3 from any type paper they wanted. Today we had the long jump-we will do the high jump tomorrow. I taught them how to use Excel to create a chart to log in their data from the frog jumps. We ran out of time to share data in class, but they shared their data over Edmodo and could complete their Excel assignment and post it to me. Now that is way cool! I happened to visit our local Sweet Frog yogurt shop this afternoon and I have 3 free yogurt coupons to give to my winners tomorrow.