Week 16: Final Reflection

Wow! We made it guys! Haha!

This class has definately pushed me to become a better student, better teacher, and more confident using technology in my everyday routine. I really liked that we had the opportunity to directly apply all that we learned within a classroom and using lessons and activities that we had made ourselves. I learned so much information and gained numerous skills in the field of educational technology.

I think that having our "blog buddies" along the way was useful. At first I didn't see the potential of the blogging each week. Once the semester was underway and the assignments were building and the pressure starting to build with all that we had to do, it was nice to vent/discuss/share/etc. with each other. Thanks for all the great ideas and words of encouragement from my group! It seemed like a long road, but we made it!

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday break! :)

Week 14

No blog this week.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! :)

Week 13: Other Digital Citizenship Projects

The Digital Citizenship Projects from this week were wonderful! I learned a lot of new and interesting information. I'll give a few examples of my favorite highlights. Lance & Sarah's presentation about netiquette was something I feel so strongly about. I think that everyone, especially people who take online classes, should have to watch a presentation like the one you gave about netiquette. It blows my mind how inappropriate some adults can be when using the internet in any way, shape, or form. It's almost as if they just lose their minds! TYPING IN ALL CAPS, or using unprofessional fonts/language/etc, or friending their coworkers/students/bosses/etc. are all examples of how seldom people actually stop and think about what they are doing. (I'm on my soapbox now, I think!) You two did a great job presenting such valuable information in an entertaining way. Way to go!

Also, Richard and Clayton's presentation about social networking was something that, until very recently, has not been given enough attention in the public eye. I think that it is important to show the effects of what can happen when social networking goes too far with the wrong people. I also think that by showing how social networking can be a great professional tool when used correctly was a good point. It's just important to keep personal networking and business networking as far apart as you can, because in some cases it can cost you a friend or a job.

The other presentation about copyright information was something that I didn't realize how little I knew about. I think as teachers it easy to forget that something we pull off the web to use in class could be something that has laws protecting it. I didn't know how far back copyright laws went, how strict they had become, etc. I learned a lot from Chrissi and Marianne's presentation. Even something like sharing music with your students can involve copyright laws! Wow!

Everyone did such a great job!

Week 12: Progress

My progress is about to be underway. I have arranged for the activity with the PowerPoint and the videos to take place at the end of this week. The day that the students are going to be presenting their videos to each other will be November 16. I am pretty excited! On Tuesday of this week, I got the chance to actually sub for the class that will be carrying out this project. I was able to see how much they have learned so far and gauge whether or not this project will be difficult for them to complete. They seemed to be doing a pretty good job! I hope that this project will be something that will help them review and at the same time give them the opportunity to showcase their creative side. I'm kind of excited (and relieved) that this will be taking place soon!

Week 11

No class = no blog? :)

Week 10: Critical Thinking

I believe that critical thinking skills are very important to teach students, especially in early elementary grades. There are many skills that can be beneficial for students to begin practicing early on so that they become habitual, and therefore they have the potential to become great students. So far, I model critical thinking in the classes that I substitute for, since I don't yet have my own classroom. When there is an assignment, I often use subnotes in the teacher's textbook that allow for deeper thinking/critical thinking of a subject so that students can make connections as they learn. If students make these connections, they have a better chance of recalling the information and retaining the information later. If I did have my own class, I would need to learn the content from every angle, so that I could find teachable moments to have my students think about the content from every angle. In doing so, I believe that the students will better understand what they are learning. For the time being, as a substitute, finding teachable moments and/or incorporating critical thinkg involving the learning is more stimulating for me as well, since the day of a sub can become monotonous quickly. :)

Week 9: Resources

I have found a lot of great resources to add to my resource collection. Some of them I plan on using very often. One of my favorites is www.teach-nology.com. I think this will be the one I most frequently use because of all of the resources found there. At this site you can find lessons and worksheets, but you can also make your own rubrics. There are a number of rubrics already made for so many different subjects. You can also use the website to create your own rubric based on the standards, objectives and expectations of your assignment/project. Since I plan on being an elementary teacher and use different types of projects in my classroom, I see myself using this link often and creating my own rubrics that meet the different needs of my students.

Week 8 Reflection: Creativity & Innovation

For my project, students will be working with a template in mind of what they are supposed to be doing. For example, they are going to be editing sentences using PowerPoint and creating a presentation, but they will be doing so by using the slides the teacher has previously showed them as their guide. The teacher and I are encouring them to not give their slides background colors or designs because it could interfere with the colors they are using to edit and diagram the sentences on their slides. So, in an effort to try to encourage the students to be more creative, we have two routes. The first one is for students to create sentences that are creative, witty, or even funny to use as the sentence they will be disecting and correcting. The second one is for them to give a creative performance when they are being videotaped as they show their sentence slides to the class and "teach" the class. The only trouble with option two is that they are middle school students who may be either apathetic to this whole thing or may be a little too dramatic/comedic to the point where the focus is no longer on their sentences/slides but on them being actors in videos.

For that last point mentioned, I may even take out the video aspect of the project. However, my teacher seems to like the idea so she may want to keep it.

Any thoughts or comments?

Week 7 Reflection

This week I will talk a little bit more about my project. I have decided to combine PowerPoint presentations with video assessing. My teacher will be teaching her students about simple, complex and compound sentence structures during the time frame that this project will be implemented. Her students will be working in pairs (most likely, that's still up in the air) and they will be creating PowerPoint slides that show two things: the first slide will be a sentence that is not grammatically correct, and the second will be a slide with the sentence completely corrected. Each correction, however, will be an individual action (i.e. a "click"). The video will be used to record the students "teaching" the rest of the class what they are doing while explaining why. Think of it as a cooking show, but instead of Paula Dean making a recipe and having food at the end, the students will be proofreading and having a corrected sentence at the end. They will do this process with all four types of sentences (we think so far) which include simple, complex, compound, and compound-complex. The students will be explaining their thought process the entire way, so Cognitivism will be utilized during this process.

The students will be the audience, similar to Paula Dean now that I think about it :), but they will also be an active part of the evaluation process. The rubric and the assessment guide is still underway, but I think that I now have a more clear idea of where we are going! I welcome ANY feedback from you guys.

The idea is that once the students fully understand

Week 6 Reflection: PowerPoint Games Rdg.

This week I've decided to talk about one of our readings for this week that I feel could be integrated into an elementary classroom fairly easily. Homemade PowerPoint games were the topic of one of our readings, and I had a couple of opinions on their use in the classroom, particularly the elementary classroom. I have progressively become fond of using PowerPoint games as interactive tools for students. I like that they can be informal, yet they can provide a great deal of content and study material in the process. In this particular reading, the focus was on the students becoming more involved in the process by actually designing and creating their own PowerPoint games (or WebQuests, etc) to use. I agree that this would definately enhance the students' comprehension as they make these games and as they play other games that their classmates have made as well.

However, I think that this task of creating a PowerPoint game might be a skill that is better suited for fifth graders and up, given the amount of time and information it would take to make one along with the knowledge of how to create the game actions using the software. Using homemade PowerPoints in an earlier grade (such as first) would be possible, though. If the text that is used is appropriate for their reading levels, I believe that the number of games I could make as a teacher are endless. As a teacher making my own PowerPoint games, I could differentiate the games for my different reading groups/levels, and I could create games for any subject throughout the year. They could also be emailed to my students' parents if the parents wanted some extra material for the students to practice with at home. Of course as these students move into higher grades, the PowerPoint games can become more complex and can include more instruction. This could progress until they are ready to learn how to create their own at an older grade, and by this time they will have been playing the different games for so many years that they could have a number of examples to guide them while designing their own PowerPoint game.

I kind of feel like I just rambled about this one, but I did start thinking a lot more about this subject this week after our discussions and readings. I'd love to hear you guys' thoughts on my thoughts! (Plus you kind of have to! haha)

Week 5 Reflection: Project Based Learning

This week we have learned a great deal about Project Based Learning, which is something that is a little intimidating to me as I work with elementary students from first grade to fifth grade. It is intimidating because of the amount of independence that is expected from the students. Since most of the questions come from the natural curiousity of the students, I am interested to research and see how this type of learning has been successfully integrated into the early childhood classroom. My take on PBL is that it is a great way for students to really get involved in their own learning and takes the "lecture" aspect out of the classroom. As a teacher, I want to provide an environment that in indusive to learning, whether that means that I am personally teaching my students or whether I am supporting their learning as best I can.

PBL is slightly similar to research based learning, which I am pretty familiar with from 6400. RBL was the only learning style that I really got to learn about in depth, and the focus is more on the actual obtaining of the information through researching than through the project at the end. However, I am hoping that in this class, with the large amount of teacher in it, I can learn ways of implementing (successfully) project based learning with younger students.

This week I don't really have anything "new" to report on my project for this class. So as the week progresses I might have more to post so that my group has something on which to comment!

Reflection on LoTI

This week in class we discussed Levels of Technology Implementation, and we also discussed the differences and characteristics of each level. So far I think LoTI is a useful framework to refer to and to learn about. When looking for different lesson plans for our last assignment, I noticed that it can be difficult to find lessons for elementary students that go beyond a level 3, which is Infusion. At first I thought one reason for this would be the skill levels that accompany technological tools within the lesson. After learning more about LoTI, however, I have seen that the skill level of the teacher is really what can make a difference in how high the level of implementation and integration is. That made me feel a little better, since I will soon be an elementary school teacher and I have hopes of integrating various forms of technology.

Another thing this week that I found very interesting was my result on the LoTI survey of Personal Computer Use. According to that survey, my PCU was higher than average, which surprised me. The results portrayed me as a confident user of most technological tools. I hadn't thought about my level of PCU before, but now I am happy to see that it is higher than average because hopefully that will spill over into my future classroom with integration.

My project is still to use the video camera and record students showing and teaching what they know and have learned. I am still talking with the teacher whose classroom I will be using (since I don't have my very own) about what the topic will be. Hopefully I will have that posted in the next few days so that I can get some feedback from my group!

On a sidenote, I am eager to see this week's Cool Tools Demo to get some more ideas on how to incorporate technology in the classroom!

Initial Project Ideas

My project idea is to create a website that goes along with a curriculum with resources included to help students learn more effectively. I don't have a classroom of my own, however, my mom is a teacher at a local middle school and she is very interested in having this type of project implemented in her class. I have recently found a lot of interesting ways to introduce and implement technology into a classroom. Some that I liked involved using videos and digital cameras to record the students teaching their own lesson or making their own projects to show what they have learned. Something that I am interested is having the students "show what they know" so that I can gauge how well they really learned and how deep the learning actually took place. I think that with the group that I will be working with, middle schoolers, it will also be interesting to see how motivated they are to actually do well. I've learned that a great way to see if students have learned is to have them teach the subject matter themselves. I'd like to find a way to make this a major focus in my project.

As far as the subject matter goes, I think that I will use a section or lesson that comes from their extensive unit on grammar and have them create an interactive game or webquest on their own and then walk the class through the game, teaching them how to play it as the assessment.

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