Final: Reflective Post

This is our final post for the semester and I have really enjoyed this class. I talked about this in my last post, how this class has changed in just the span of 12 years. This class is essential for us "Tech Generation" kids as we become teachers. We have learned a lot in this class.

We learned about utilizing technology in web based projects. Our main projects that have incorporated this was Collaborative Lesson Plan, WebQuest, and our last project our Web page. Our lesson plan was a group project. I worked with 3 other intelligent women. Our lesson plan was on telling time and it was for 2nd graders. Our main source of technology was the interactive white board. This is a whiteboard mounted to a wall and connected to a computer and projector. You can use your finger or a pen to operate the whiteboard and can operate things such as websites, games, and PowerPoint presentations (Maloy, 2013). WebQuest are awesome projects that allows your students to learn somewhat independently as they look and learn resources that you provide for them by themselves. I used mine to teach a subject I taught my middle school after school students, which was the 7 habits. Our last project was to make a webpage as teachers for our students and their families to access. I don't know any teacher that has done this (and by this time you know I know a lot of teachers). I think it is an amazing thing and I will incorporate it in my teaching career.

We learned how to critique in the beginning of class. We critiqued an educational website. I chose to critique pbslearningmedia.org. The purpose of this  project was to teach us how to make a rubric. Which between this class and my Intro to Ed class this semester, I feel like I am a rubric making pro. The first time I heard about rubrics, I was against them. I am one of those people who can't stand how education has become a performance to the state more than it is to teach students. And the rubric seemed to me to be the critic of the performance. After doing them a couple of times, I realize, they are more common sense than anything else. If a student does bad, he gets a lower grade. If he does good, he gets a higher grade. Rubrics just emphasize this. It also holds the students (and in this case PBS learning media website) to a high standard.

We learned about legal issues such as copyright and cyberbullying. I personally learned that you need to make sure that all of your pictures and post that you post on the internet isn't copyrighted and that cyberbullying is illegal. Here is a link that I found very interesting about cyberbullying and it helped me to write my post for our Legal and Ethical discussion. 

We created portfolio type projects like our Webpage and WebQuest, as well as our wiki page. Our Wiki page was another group effort. I worked again with some amazing girls as we introduced a few of Marzano's Strategies. We were able to add videos, graphics, charts, and links to further discuss our strategy that we had picked.

We researched websites that help us with integrating technology in our own classrooms. This was one of the first projects that we did, but it came in handy because we had to research for almost everything we had to do here. I chose three articles that I believe helped me then and will help me in the future. They are: How to integrate tech when it keeps changing, Why should I integrate multimedia resources into my teaching, and How 5 inspiring tablet classrooms are changing education. I know these helped me and they will be helpful to anyone who reads them.

We discussed how to teach with tech to ELL and ESE kids. Our main project for that was our collaborative lesson plan, and our discussion for that was Assistive/Adaptive Technology for students. In our discussion we had to chose a profile of a student with a disability. I have had experience with teaching a deaf student and I used most of our techniques to discuss in this post. I relied pretty heavily on website and that was signsavvy.com. For our ELL discussion we had the same kind of discussion where we had to chose a profile of a ELL student. I chose someone who had came to America from Mexico. I talked about using other spanish speaking students as well as Google Translate. My two references that I used for this post were: Supporting English Language Learners with Technology, and How to Integrate Technology with Teaching ELL Students.

 All in All, I would like to say that I have learned a lot in this class and I have enjoyed it thoroughly! I hope this is what I can expect in all of my education classes. I cannot wait to become a teacher with all of this knowledge of technology.

References:
Maloy, R., O’Loughlin, R., Edwards, S., & Woolf, B. (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc.

Digital Badge # L

For this final blog post, we read chapter 12. I was reading this chapter, a few things stuck out to me.

The first thing was one on one laptop computing. This are something that I hope more and more schools start to integrate. Unfortunately, While I think most schools do have the want to convert their schools to one on one laptop computing schools, no one has the funds for this. My mother, who is an art teacher for Eastside Elementary School in Clewiston, Florida, wants to get a grant to fund a set of maybe 25-30 labtops on a cart, so that all of the enrichment teachers (Art, Music, P.E., and Library/Media Center) can use them in their classrooms. Which is a bit difficult and tedious. So some schools just stick with one or a few computer labs instead of a laptop for each student.

Speaking of grants, this was also a section in our book. As I have just said, it's tedious and difficult to write and obtain a grant. Both of my parents are teachers and have written numerous grants in order to get things for their classrooms. My mother has gotten supplies like canvas', clay, paint, and other art supplies. My father has received a grant that gave him money to take his students on a field trip. Even though they agree that it's hard work to write a grant that you may or may not get, it's very much worth it. The possibility of getting a grant and using it to teach your students in a unique way out weighs not even trying to get one, and having nothing to teach with.

I have talked about me coming up in a BYOD school and this chapter talks about schools like this. I have had issues with kids asking me if they could charge their phones. So I constantly had phones plugged into a wall. Phones went missing, one day there was a fight out on the plaza and an iPod Touch got smashed, the parents of the kid who smashed it had to buy a new one for the other kid, Once I got my middle school kids in line and some one had a school owned nook (the book club had bought about 40 Nooks (probably with a grant) and rented them out to all of the club members). While in line, one of the girl's head phone came out of the headphone jack and the music started playing out loud. I am not sure what the name of the song was, but the chorus had the same word repeated a few times, which was "Ass." I had to take the nook back to the teacher that headed up the book club and tell him what was on school property. There are many problems in this program, however, none of the problems I have mentioned are new problems that schools are facing. Cursing, fighting, interruptions in teaching and learning, these are all things that teachers have dealt with since the beginning of time. In fact, students bringing their own devices helps students to use their own technology while doing school work. Which teaches students that there are more things to do on their phones and tablets than just Candy Crush. My father is now a high school teacher at Clewiston High School in Clewiston, Fl. His students just ended a big project that they could use their phones for. He had a CSI murder senario and his students had to take pictures of a crime scene set up by him. I got to sit in on his class and watch the students excitedly try to figure out "Who killed Mr. Harn?" It was amazing, I had never been this excited in science ever. But it was technology rich and the students had a blast while learning something.

I have had a great time in this class. When I was in middle school and high school, my parents were going to college. While I was in high school they both decided to be teachers. They started to take New Technologies for Education. I asked them what to expect in the class. Keep in mind that they took this class in 2004. They told me Microsoft Office. That was it. Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel. That was it. My point with this story is I can't imagine me going in as a teacher and not using technology. I use technology everyday. And so do most of the people in my generation. However, I am very grateful for this class. I know people in the other class that this school offers that are bored in their class. This class has had so many projects and learning possibilities for me, even though I am pretty tech savvy, I believe I can be more efficient in technology now that I have taken this class.
Resorces: Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Digital Badge #K

For Digital Badge #K we read chapter 6. The three things that I want to discuss is WebQuests, Virtual Field trips, and Virtual Schools.

I chose to write about webquests because we just had a major project on webquest. I thought I had a great understanding of webquest and was really excited about making mine. I realized that I was off a bit on the purpose of a webquest. I probably should have read the text book before I made one. Anyway, I see that the true purpose of a webquest is really awesome for students. I think that the webquest makes for an amazing activity in of itself and would be great to incorporate in lesson plans.

Virtual field trips are also an amazing activity to incorporate into lesson plans. I got to observe a class this semester that had two different virtual field trips to Italy and Russia via Google Maps. The students asked questions about the cars in Italy and the buildings in Russia. It was a great way for the kids to learn about different cultures in a more interactive way. Other websites let you have virtual tours of museums and art gallery. These are great ideas and a great way to use technology in class.

The last thing I would like to talk about is virtual schools. When I was in 2nd grade, my mom and Aunt had decided that they wanted to home school us and my two cousins. My two cousins went the whole year in home school but my mom (after about 3 months) put us in public school. Fast forward 20 years and my husband and I have discussed the kind of schools that we want our (future) kids to go to. We are both Christians and neither one of us want our kids to go to a Christian school. My mother-in-law would kill us if we sent them to a charter school. Home school isn't an option. So it looks like we will be sending our non existent children to public school. I have often thought about virtual school and I have had three (different from before) cousins who go to virtual school. I am not opposed to virtual school. In fact, I know that students can and have succeeded beyond their expectations (one of my cousin's actually skipped a grade). But one of the reasons why we don't want our kids to go to a Christian school, and is the same reason for virtual school, is that we believe that the better school socially is a public school. And there are pros virtual school. Some of the pros would be that they work at their own pace as well as their being a larger selection of subjects to chose from. These are reasons enough for me to consider it in the future. However, there are some other reasons to not consider it either.

In conclusion, Webquest and Virtual field trips are something that I may use a lot in my teaching. I and my class can benefit very well from them. And virtual schools may be an amazing venture for your and your children, but approach the idea with caution.


References: Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Digital Badge #J

In this blog I will discuss a few things from chapter 11. The things that I found most interesting in this chapter was digital portfolios for teachers, digital portfolios for students, and online preassesment surveys.

In a world where digital is all over the place it's a smart idea to keep a digital portfolio handy for any job. I went to a trade school where I learned to be a multimedia designer. One of the projects that I had to do was to make a digital portfolio. I had my actual one that showed print, but the digital portfolio showed my print, web and video making skills. This was a must in order to be hired as anything multimedia related. As a child of two teachers, I have witnessed my parents getting together portfolios so that they could show the principals what they could offer, especially my mother who is an art teacher. Teachers can benefit from having a digital portfolio, or an eportfolio, because it shows principals (or who ever hires you in that district) that you are not only creative but also adaptive of technology.

Digital portfolios for students are also a great way of keeping students in check with themselves. I cannot remember if I talked about this in this class or in my other education class I am taking this semester, but while I was teaching in the after school program at the school I worked at, I had students keep a online data notebook. This way, when the students had student-led conferences, they could show their parents and teachers their progress. It displayed their ambitions for their school year, there own personal mission statement, the progress of their grades, behavior, and goals during the year, and it gave them a chance to create it in the way that they chose. These were really great because the students who did well were excited about keeping up with their grades as did the students who were improving. It gave the students a goal to shoot from. While what we did was just a portion of a digital portfolio, it's a great idea for students to document what they do so that they can move forward in their progress.

The last thing I want to discuss is Online preassesment surveys. In the three years of tutoring and summer camp that I have done, pre and post surveys were mandatory. I personally didn't like doing them and tried to make them as easy as I could. I believed that I could teach students and that they could learn because what I was teaching was relatively interesting. I taught technology, photography, film, and photoshop. Everything they would have to learn (i.e, how to operate a camera, different acting jobs, and how to use basic tools in photoshop) would be done everyday, and that it was ridiculous to give a pen and paper to a middle school student and tell them to guess the best that they could during the summer or after they got back from a big test. As a future teacher I see a difference in having it in the classroom where as having it in extracurricular activities is just awful. If it had been online, I think my students wouldn't have minded very much but having being sat down and given a pencil the first time they saw me I think made them a little uneasy.

In conclusion, I am looking forward to sitting up a digital portfolio, I think digital portfolios are great for students and keeping up with their progress, and I think online surveys are much better than hand written surveys because they allow the students to have a change of pace.

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Reference:

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Digital Badge #I

For this blog my classmates read and blogged about chapter 4. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention and a few weeks ago, my teacher alerted me and told me that I had done the wrong chapter. So since I have already blogged about chapter 4, I am going to blog about the chapter that I should have done a few weeks ago, which is chapter 5. The things in Chapter 5 that I would like to discuss is Wikipedia being used in classrooms, Copyright infringement, and cyber bulling.

I always feel like I go back to previous blogs I have posted and I state the same things over and over again, however, I feel that these blogs are in conjunction with each other. So with that said, I am a child of the 90s. I remember doing middle school projects and having to go to the library to look up things in world book encyclopedias. Even when I was in high school (I graduated in 2005) I had to have 4 reference from books and 2 from the internet. It was a widely common knowledge that the things on the internet were not as factual back in the day. Fast forward to today, and we have many viable options as far as internet research goes. Wikipedia is a very controversial topic among teachers and professors. The fact that it is a community written encyclopedia is often the factor that many educators have a problem with. For example, a few years ago, comedian Sinbad had woke up with calls from his daughter. His daughter asked him if he was ok. After assureing her he was fine, his daughter told him that his Wikipedia page had stated that he had died. After getting it cleared up, it was reported (again) that he had died of an heart attack. Anybody can put information on this site, which is why this is an highly controversial site. I personally think that most of the information is true on Wikipedia, but question what is and what isn't. So as a future educator, I would allow students to use Wikipedia, only if they could back it up with another viable source.

Copyright material is always a very scary thing to me. I value my education and have many times been passed with plagiarism and copying/cheating while in college. Once because I simply didn't know. I had copied sentences from a book for homework and didn't cite my material. My teacher let me off the hook because she genuinely believed that I had no idea (which I, being 18 at the time, was very grateful for this). Then while in Art history, we had to review the movie Psycho. I got mixed up and gave a summary of the movie. My art history teacher accused me of copying and pasting my information from websites. This I knew was wrong. I had spent hours working on this and coming up with a great summary with my own words. And I was not going to get in trouble with plagiarism again. I wrote her a strongly worded letter apologizing to her for the misunderstanding of a review and summary and would understand any docking of grade for this, but that I had put in a lot of work and hours in to writing a summary in my own words, and if she thought I had plagiarized then she needed to come up with the proof and there wouldn't be any. I believe I got a B- on the homework. A year later a friend copied a test paper word for word with mine, and of course I was in the dean's office. I was thankful my friend had came clean and told them that she had copied me, But after these situations, I have decided that I am done with these problems. I try to stay clear of anything that can become copyright issues. I know that after doing these blogs that you can only use domain free items and is happy to do this.

The last thing I would like to talk about is cyber bulling. This isn't something I had to deal with growing up with too much. The main ways students are cyber bulling others are through sites such as facebook, snapchat, twitter, and instagram. I didn't have any of these when I was a kid. Although we did have chat rooms, I wasn't allowed on them and there for, I didn't notice it too much. I know as an adult and a fan of youtube, that people can be mean when they are not face to face with you. They tend to feel a little more powerful behind a keyboard. I know I have talked about this recently, but I was able to teach technology in a summer program a few years ago. In this class the kids were able to maintain a kidblog. They were given strict orders to be careful with what they put on these blogs and that I had the power to see all of their post. They knew if they wrote bad things about another camp member than I would report them and they were kicked out of the program. Unfortunately, the district that we were in wanted me (a non teacher in their county) to be kicked out of a technology program. I later became the photography teacher and I did that for the rest of the summer so we only were able to do two weeks of blogging. But the kids had a blast and they were very well behaved. I know that is not the case, and especially when you think no one is watching you write horrible stuff about someone. One of my campers a family friend of mine and she had me as a friend on facebook. I noticed that she and another girl were tearing this other girl apart. The things that they said about this girl were awful. The extremely sad thing was they were in 5th 6th and 7th grade. To put that in another perspective, they were 10, 11, and 13 years old. I am an adult and I don't say the words they were saying about the 10 year old. I told (the family friend) what she was doing was awful and even if the other girl was saying it, she was agreeing and how it would make my friend feel she was the one being bullied. I think I resolved the issue, but there are many more cases out there that turn deadly and for a 10 year old to have to experience this is just plain heartbreaking.

In conclusion, as a future educator, I will do my best to be fair with Wikipedia, teach my students about copyrights and the importance of copyright in college, and bullying in general, but also online bullying.

Reference:
Maloy, R., O’Loughlin, R., Edwards, S., & Woolf, B. (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc.

Digital Badge # H

For this digital badge #H, we had to read chapter 9. Three topics that I would like to discuss are power point strategies, YouTube and online streaming video websites, and video editing software in the class room.

PowerPoint and Prezis are very popular in teaching. As I have stated before, my parents (who are teachers) use PowerPoint and Prezi on a weekly basis. These are great tools for teaching, as well as great for students and projects. Some presentations that I have been able to teach using PowerPoint are about me (the students) and something we called Personal Electronic Data Notebooks. We had the students create PowerPoints that examined their grades, FCAT scores, and behavior for the year. It was a great way to keep the kids in check with themselves as well as put their own influence in the design. Prezi's are great to do this kind of thing as well.

YouTube is a great thing to use for education. At first, my thought was that anything on Youtube has to be examined carefully before showing to students and especially younger students. But I have noticed that YouTube has something called YouTube Education. This allows for safe YouTube streaming. Also, Khan Acadamy and Discovery Education are great educational video streaming that I have used before.

Finally, I would like to discuss video editing. Having being certified in Adobe Premier Pro, and a small side business of making videos for education, graduations, weddings, reunions, and ect; I have used a few video editing software.  All of my computer's in my house are macbooks. So I am very familiar with iMovie. I use iMovie quite a bit. As well as have used Microsoft Movie Maker in the past. Like I just said, I am certified in Premier Pro, so I now use an editing software that's a little more expensive, but I can say, for movie making in the class room, that iMovie and Microsoft Movie Maker is just as impacting as Premier Pro for what students can use it for.

References:
Discovery Education streaming. (2008, December 4). Retrieved October 19, 2014, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illMlepgrDM


Maloy, R., O’Loughlin, R., Edwards, S., & Woolf, B. (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc.

Digital Badge # G

For this post, we read chapter 10. Chapter 10 was about students with cultural, academic, and physical differences and they way technology can help them in everyday learning. The three things that I chose to talk about today are multicultural students and online language translation services, the digital accommodations of low-tech, mid-tech, and high-tech, and the use of interactive electronic storybooks.

The first thing I would like to elaborate on is multicultural students and online language translations services. I have said many times while on this blog, that I worked as a after school tutor for a local middle school. I have been very discreet about which middle school in which town because of this being on the internet and even though, these post are for grades, I realize that random people are looking at my blog. My Digital Badge #A has around 31 views and I am pretty sure my professor isn't viewing my first blog post that many times. But if my professor is familiar with the local schools in our area, she will know which town I am referring to when I say, I come from a migrant community. This town is a migrant farming community. Our main produce is tomatoes. The diversity of the students are Hispanic (being mainly Mexican and Guatemalan), Haitian, White, and Native American (in that order). All of that to say, As a tutor I am very familiar with online language translations services. By far the one that we used the most was Google translate. This allowed the Spanish speaking and Creole speaking students to communicate with me the problems they were having as well as I communicating with them on what I wanted them to do. The upside to this was that I got to learn a little Creole and Spanish as I went along (I brag that my first words in Creole were close your mouth and sit down.) A small side note, I also worked with a deaf/ hearing impaired student as well. My boss asked us if anyone knew American Sign Language. After no one said anything I told them I knew the alphabet and they sit me with the student. After a year of working closely with her, I was able to sign somewhat fluently with her. I won't go into much detail on it because I talked about it in my disscussion post, but we used a site called Signing Savvy. This sight was an online dictionary for ASL. It did great and I still use it today to look up a word. Going back to Google translate, they now have an app. So it's great to use in classrooms.

Another thing that stuck with me as I was reading this chapter was the low, mid, and high tech accommodations. It seems so simple, but it's really good information. I found myself really going back to the chart and taking notes of situations and their low, mid, and high tech accommodations were. I would also research and in some occasions look closely at some of the apps. These are great solutions to everyday things.

Lastly, I am going to talk about the use of interactive electronic storybooks. This isn't a huge surprise because it seems like I often talk about Reading Rainbow and the app that they have. I do plan on using this when I become a teacher and I am excited about this. But I have talked about Reading Rainbow too often in these blogs, so I will spare you the lecture on it. Instead, I will talk about the use of storybooks and ebooks in the classroom. I don't think that anyone is arguing that online storybooks or ebooks are ruining the classroom. They engage students both visually and audibly, they help students decipher words that they may not know the spelling of, but have heard the word said before, and they teach students to pronounce words phonically. I suppose some would consider it a lackadaisical approach to reading, but I don't see it that way. I see it doing more good than bad. I am not an advocate of ebooks only. I do believe students should be able to pick up an actual book from time to time, but ebooks in the classroom are a very smart decision.  Every post in this blog we have to add a digital tool. We have these tools to chose from and some that I have been looking at using (but haven't really found a good use for it yet) are two digital storytelling sites called Story Bird and Zoo Burst. My grandmother has a book published. Because we are of Christian faith the book is called  Children's Parables: Earthly Stories With Heavenly Lessons for Children. And my shameless plug is that you can buy it and order it from amazon here. So it's no wonder that I wrote a short story a few years ago. I lost it when my computer was stolen and I am rewriting it now. Everyone that had read it told me I should have it published. My dream of course is to get it published one day when it is ready. I believe that these sites (Story Bird and Zoo Burst) are great sites to make story books and have your students read them.

To recap I think that Google Translate is an amazing app and works great with students who speak a different language. The chart in the textbook that shows everyday situations and the low, mid, and high tech accommodations for them are very informative and I will be using these notes for when I am teacher. And lastly, digital storytelling and ebooks are a must for classroom technology.




 References:
Children's Parables: Earthly Stories with Heavenly Lessons for Children Paperback – December 5, 2013. (n.d.). Retrieved October 13, 2014, from http://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Parables-Earthly-Heavenly-Children/dp/1490816755/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1413208276&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=Christian Children Books Karen Frantz

Google Translate. (n.d.). Retrieved October 13, 2014, from https://translate.google.com/

Maloy, R., O’Loughlin, R., Edwards, S., & Woolf, B. (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc.

Storybird. (n.d.). Retrieved October 13, 2014, from http://storybird.com/poetry/poem/48jq26brrw/published/