Technology in the Elementary Classroom

Remember overhead projectors that your teachers used in elementary school? Light projectors that projected transparencies up onto the board so that you could follow along with what the teacher was doing. Document cameras are the new and improved overhead projectors.  Basically, they are mini cameras that a teacher can put anything under to enlarge onto the board. Now, instead of having to make transparent copies of every worksheet to use on the overhead, a teacher can simply put anything (books, regular paper, objects, hands, pencils, anything!) under the document camera and it is enlarged and shown on the board.  Document cameras are just another new and convenient technology in the classroom making lessons far easier then ever before. 

Document Camera

Check out this YouTube video that gives you the 101 about document cameras. Enjoy!

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

For Intro to Writing Arts, we were asked to explore a website called We Feel Fine.  In August 2005 Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar created this website that takes every single weblog post that includes the words “I feel” or “I am feeling” and puts them into one huge database.  When the website  finds a phrase with these words, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence. You are able to sort these posts by the emotion, age, gender and location of the blogger as well as the weather condition at the time of post.  All of this information is saved.

This website is basically a database of human emotion that gets bigger every minute.  If one wants to find out when women in their 20′s in Europe feel most stressed, they are able to. Does the weather effect how people feel? Do women feel certain emotions more than men? Do people in Africa feel happier more often than people in Sweden? This website helps others to research and explore different human emotion over time.  They can read each others blogs and connect, communicate and interact with people who they probably would never meet in real life. 

People are also able to search blogs through this website.  By clicking on the sentence, you are brought to the weblog that the sentence was taken from.  Another great thing about this website is that it is fun to look at and play with.  The interface is colorful, bright and interactive. According to the creators, ”at its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.”

We Feel Fine categories

Colorful Interface