Chapter 10

People don't use cds anymore, music is downloaded onto an ipod mainly and played off of that. Now, they are putting books online as well that you can download. I don't like that idea, I want to have a item in hand that I can read, I don't like to read off of a computer screen. Its crazy to me to see how far the world has come in terms of schooling. It used to be you had to look everything up in a book at the library, etc. Now, you just google everything. Weather one way is better than the other, I don't know but I know that google is A LOT faster than book. When i'm a teacher I will for sure use the web to be able to connect with other teachers, I think that it is awesome to be able to connect with teachers from different states and countries. Its also nice that you can get different ideas on a specific lesson. I will also use the web so that my students can present their completed assignments. I think that it allows students to be proud of themselves and their work because they have a larger audience to present to. One thing as a teacher that I have always enjoyed doing for an english class for example is to give my students a notebook that they can write down their thoughts,ideas, etc. in any form, just to allow them to have that one security in their life that they can tell anything to. But after takin this class I don't have to use a notebook, I can use a blog for example and still be able to document that my students are doing their assignment. I think that students like having that one thing to turn to when they need to get their thoughts out and maybe their home life isn't so great so they can't tell someone their. I want my students to know that NO MATTER WHAT they are always welcome to talk to me about anything. Granted, i'll be working with elementary students but I want to work with 3-5th grade so about that age they can start having issues and being able to express them openly i think.

Class 10/28

First and foremost I want to say that IT IS TOO COLD!
After seeing Nicks' deilcious account, I realized I needed to step it up a little bit. He had over 100 links saved. Thats crazy!
The group that presented today did a good job of conducting a student to student interaction. Also, they allowed us to see what everyone thought and both sides of the sepctrum. One thing that I think they did that none of the other groups have done was to bring the whole class together and recap what was said during the discussion. They had really good enthusiasm for presenting this.
Some things that they could improve on were to watch the uhms, anticipate group sizes (more for for vs. against), clearer expectations/directions for discussions, and DON'T say the end.
Funding is available for those with initiative. The government obviously is not going to give you the money without a little work! You have to lay out a game plan that you can receive money or funding for technology.
If you don't have initiative then the students aren't going to have initiative. *****
I thought the webinar was AWESOME! It was so interesting being able to interact wtih EVERYONE in the class at one time. Thats really cool that you can talk to people to or atleast that they can hear you, i'm sure in the next few years it will be upgraded so that you can interact with eachother with talking.
Podcasting:
I really like the idea of podcasting and I think this is one of the activites that i'm very excited about.
Contemporary issues
k-12
Articles can be paper based but online based might be better and will have more resources.
Once you find an article you need to write a script.
1. Big Picutre, why is it important?
2. What is the point of the article?
3. Your commentary, what do you think, what does that mean as a future teacher?
MUST have clear, audible speech! Its a waste of time if we can't understand what your saying.
We are supposed to be spending 9 hours on this one class, if we have 5, 3 credit classes that is 45 hours all together! THERE AREN'T THAT MANY HOURS IN A DAY!
Dont' get me wrong, I really like the lessons that we have to do in this class, but it becomes overwhelming when they all start overlapping with eachother and each week, we get another one piled on. Sometimes I feel like you should let us fully complete one assignment and then add another. Its fine if a coupel of them overlap but haveing 5 of them all at once to work on, and also having a million other tings to work on in other classes, that is when stress starts piling up, tears come out and being frustrated takes over!
Looking at all the assignments that we have assigned for this class, I could spend an entire week just working on this class!
SWOT Analysis
Strenghts
opportunities
weaknesses
threats

What may be lost and what may be gained

This chapter had a lot of good points that were brought up. I think one of the main points that it brought up, that I will incorporate as a teacher is to keep the students motivated to learn. If the students are motivated and want to be there rather than because they have to be there then thats where a lot of the behavioral issues and the drug problems decline. You have to show to your students that you care, that you want them to succeed in life, and that you will do anything for them to reach that goal. There are a lot of parents out there who don't care about their childrens' schooling which is very sad to me. But since I knew I wanted to be a teacher that was my main philosophy; to be that one person that those students turn to when the rest of the world has shut them out. I want to be the teacher that they look back on in life and say "she is the reason why i am the way i am today" I think that if parents want to take over there children's learning environment by homeschooling or private tutors, etc. then that is their perogitive, but I feel that they should look at all aspects before making that decision. Will their child be socially awkward? Will they succeed even more than if they were in public schooling? etc. What really frustrates me is the parents who think they can just buy everything to get ahead in the world. This goes for everything, while I was in school both of my brothers played hockey. They played youth hockey all the way through high school and when try outs came around the kids whose parents had money always wound up on the A teams weather they were good enough to be there or not. The same is true in the classroom, students whose parents have money, will spend it on all the technology that they possibly can so that their student can get ahead. Don't get me wrong i'm glad they care, but are they doing the work for their student, is their student actually learning something, or are they just blowing their money away? I think that too an extent students should get an option of what they want to learn, but I also believe that they need to have the fundamentals to get them through life even if they are boring.

Chapter 8 Blogs,Wikis, Podcasts

I am so intrigued by podcasts. I don't know why, but I think they are so cool. I think its awesome that anybody and everybody can just babble on about nothing if they wanted, turn it into a podcast and post it for the world to listen to. I mean I can babble about a whole lot of nothing for people to listen to, give wonderful opinions on any topic, I think thats right up my ally. On another note, I also like that you can use podcasts in the classroom, you can just record the whole class so whoever misses it can hear what happened, or you can use it as a tool for your students in other ways as well. I never heard of teachertube.com but I like the idea. I think when I become a teacher, I would like to use videocasting. I think that the students would enjoy it, and if I say gave them assignment that they had to present on a certain topic, they could go back and view themselves. One of my biggest fears is public speaking. After I took comm 101 that fear was lessened because 1. I had no choice but to overcome it otherwise I fail! 2. They taped every speech and you were able to view yourself after the fact, and I got to see how many times I said "Um, like", played with my hair, fidgeted, etc. It was a great way to get useful feedback on my performance. Next, I LOVE THE IDEA OF LIVE STREAMING! I think that working with elementary students they are so open to do anything and try anything. Especially to tell them were creating our own tv show, HOW COOL IS THAT!? They wold love it! This chapter was useful because it gave me more interactive ways to interact with my students in and out of that classroom and I love that!

Get out of class slip

At the beginning of the semester I didn't like the idea of not having point systems for grading. Now that we are half way through the semester I have decided that I really like that its all about expectations and the work that you put into the project vs. points. I think that it allows us to fully expand our thinking and know that we will get graded based on the hard work that we put into the project. Is it possible to incoorporate that into an elementary classroom?
The group that presented today did a good job overall, I had a hard time hearing them sitting in the back of the classroom. I liked the way they split the groups with different flavors of suckers, that was very creative. They did a good job, going around and talking to the groups, and also they were very prepared and you could tell! They also did a good job about integrating their background knowledge into the presentation. Used the timer. Jigsaw, allows the students to interact more with each other than teacher student interaction. Each student becomes an expert in something and each student gets to share their expertise wtih each other.

We then moved onto tips for the SMART board. Locking an object allows it so that objects can't be moved. When I go back to revising my interactive white board lesson; lock any objects that is appropriate. Next, grouping objects together, high light both objects and use the drop down menu and click on grouping. Cloner, drop down menu, click on infinite cloner. Think about color choices; bright colors are not projected as bright like on  the computer! Watch out that you didn't put too much text on your pages; especially depending on the grade level that you chose. Rule of thumb for text size; smallest would be 24-36+. No more than 36 words on the slide.
I really appreciated getting help wtih my IRLO, you were very helpful and understanding. I really like that you don't treat us like "idiots" because we don't know how to do the technology that you do.

Scratch

Oh my goodness where do I begin? Scratch, is very complicated but exciting at the same time. I had a great idea but it turned out to be too complex. I was going to work work on Area teaching third graders and the game that I wanted to create was tetris. But, that was too complex for this assignment so I broke it down with Jeff's help into creating shapes and asking the students to figure out the answer. If the students get the answer correct then it says "nice job" if they get it incorrect it says "oops try again." Once I got started and knew how to create everything I went to down and it went really well. But when I first started it took me a long time to figure it out and fully understand it. I think that if I were to take this into a job interview I think that it would boost my chances of getting a job; first because its using a different program that many teachers have no idea how to use. Also, it shows that I have interactive ways of teaching the children. I do think that I would use this in my classroom and just tweak it so that it was developmentally appropriate for whatever grade I get to teach.

Interactive White Board Lesson

I really liked creating my own interactive white board lesson. At first, I had an idea of what I wanted to do; work with language arts. But I wasn't sure what to do, so I put many different activities together and said I was done. But then once, I thought about it I decided to make a lesson that I can actually use in my future classroom. So I chose to work with subject and preticate and present the information that I would explain to them what it is, give examples, etc and then I created some different activities for them to complete. It took me a while to create all this but I am very happy with the outcome. This impacts my future teaching because it allows me to think about the different steps that I'm going to have to take to teach these children something new, Its different because I know it so I have to think about all the different ways that they may not understand, etc.

Chapter 6

I don't like how they kept saying that homeschooling its making its way back to be the social norm. I understand and agree that people should learn what they want to learn, but at the same time, some of the things that a parent will teach their child may not be as useful as what they wold learn in school for example, if parents start teaching their children about farming and house chorse like back during the american revolution, that does not benefit society in a large way at all. I think that children should have to go to Elementary school to get the basica knowledge of life; writing, sentences, A,B,C's, etc. and then after that if their parents feel it neccessary to still homeschol htem, then that is their choice. I also agree, when it says that as a teacher you need to show them how to do it and then let them do it; you need to be their to offer assistance NOT to do it for them. Then you test them on what you worked out to make sure that they understand and are learning. Today in 381 we went over standards and what not and he said that you need to teach and then you have yoru assessment and I always hated tests but being the "teacher" now, I understand why you give out tests, I don't think it will be my sole way of assessment in my classroom but its nice to understand it now.

Out of class slip

I had to present chapter 5 today, and I was very nervous! But overall, I think that it went well. People said that they liked that we had a different way of grouping the people together, they got to work with other people that they might not have otherwise. While at the same time we should have chosen specific locations for groups to go. They also liked that we were loud and had good movement and interaction with all the groups. We also distributed the work fairly! The activity was very organized that we had paper and marker provided. We had them choose what they thought was important with each category. We did a great job of facilitating a group discussion! Needed to give the other groups more opportunity to put their opinions in on the other topics. Timing is key! If you have an important point maybe write it down if a teacher does not allow time to open the floor to other opinions. A little more in depth reaction to each of the topics and pros and cons. While we were having this discussion about what they did well and didn't do well, I know when we sat down to put this presentation together, we put a lot of thought into some of these categories like how we could split up the groups in a new way, spliting the talking fairly, using the elmo to change it up a little bit. Overall, I am very proud of my group and how well we did, and everyone else seemed to think it was overall a good presentation!
Next, we went into talking about scratch and our irlo projects. The main point Boyer said is that we NEED to make sure that it is developmentally appropriate! Don't put a lot of text if your intending this to be for a kindergarten class! Scratch seems to be intimidating because its new. To start you need to create any objects you want in your Irlo. One way to do this is to draw your own (star with a paint brush), you can also use the existing sprite library (folder and a star), lastly, you click the random sprite button (star with a question mark). This is a great way to put yourself into the project! Encourageing to create all sprites NOW! You then have to make some controls on what you want all these sprites to do or say. Then you need to put it all together! I liek that you can go on the scratch website and learn how someone else creaeted their project. I feel like that will be a very helpful tool.
Homework: Read the next chapter (6), create a rough draft of irlo, and review interactive whiteboards.

Book Chapter

My group did chapter 5 and we struggled trying to think of an activity that we could present to the class. This chapter was all about the new seeds of education such as homeschooling and education in the work place, etc. We wanted our presentation to be different than what has already been preseneted. I think that we found a new way than what everyone has done but our activity may be similar. I think that it is very important for peers to present to peers; especially because were all going into teaching it gives us an opportunity to experience the feelings of a teacher; nervousness, excited, etc. Also, it gives everyone were teaching a different perspective than what the professor may have presented.

Fun With Flickr

I like the idea of using Flickr to share images and learn different styles from around the world. You could have a cultural unit in the classroom and be able to talk, share photos and ideas from all over the world. Also, who doens't like photos, i love to take pictures, be in pictures and share pictures with people. So this is an opportunity to show parents what is really going on in the classroom; kinda like behind closed doors of a classroom. Children come home everyday and tell their parents they didn't learn or do anything in school that day, now this is living proof that they did DO something that day! I think that it is awesome that it works like delicious. You can type in a link and find pictures about it. In the reading they talked about pictures from main events in history, 9/11, hurricane katrina, etc. One of the activities I did in fifth grade consisted of creating a newspaper all about me; in the reasing they talked about being able to create a Magazine Cover by using Flickr Magazine Cover. I think that would be a fun activity for students to do, also a way for all the kids to get to know each other. A great beginning of the year activity. I think that I will use this in my classroom for presentations, and also allowing the students to create masterpieces.

Social Networking

The one question I have is, when do teachers find all the time to do all this technological stuff; Twitters, wikis, blogs, etc. I feel like I don't have time now as a student, I don't know if I'll have more time when i'm in my career but as I read these chapters its a lot of time! But as I read on further, I liked how they talked about using twitter to find information adn be a resource for students to use.
I never heard about social bookmarking until I took this class, but I really like using the delicious account. I feel that its more organzied that if I were to just save all the websites to my favorites. I will being using this in my classroom and teaching students about social bookmarking.

Get out of class slip

Today in class we got to write on the SMARTBoard for attendence.
The group that presented today did a good job, the activity that they used was helpful to find an alternative way to go about using tests, textbooks, etc. It also was a great way to encoorporate student to student interaction and also teacher to student interaction. The one thing that group could have improved was that they need to learn to be louder!! I sat in the back of the classroom today and I could not hear anything that they said.
The textbook is dead, i don't know if I believe in this, I don't like the idea of not having a text book. For me personally, I don't like to read things off of a computer, I would rather have it on paper so that I can make notes in/on it.
60% of students are graduating from high school. THATS TERRIBLE! If a high school is too big that students are getting lost, then we should fix it! Maybe they need to build another high school so that students can have smaller classes.
Debrief:
Positive:
Ums/likes
encourage deeper thinking
repeat and summarize what someone had said
New presentation tool
Filling out the table
Negative:
Speak UP!
How to group your peers
redirect peers
setting expectations
We then moved on to start talking about the iRLO and when I first read the directions for this assignment, I because nervous. I was unsure what this was, and how I was going to do it. Once Boyer showed us examples of some iRLO's I feel much better about this and feel that it won't be that complicated. I think it will be a fun activity to create. I think that I will for sure use this in a classroom; especially for students who are visual learners.

Chapter 4 Rethinking Education

This chapter I think was very interesting because it gave the background on where the education system came from, the struggles that it went through, and how it has changed and evolved. I liked how it showed that history always repeats itself, in the 19th century there was a transformation in education and now we are experiencing one ourselves; the technology transformation. My thought on technology's role in teaching and learning is that you need to role with the punches. Times are changing, you must change with it or you WILL get left behind. Its as simple as that. Times aren't going to wait for you to make up your mind, its going to happen with or without you! Children are coming into the classrooms already knowing a good amount of technological advances and my thought is that as a future educator I want to be at least a step ahead of these children, I don't want to be the teacher that the students are waiting on to learn how to do soemthing. The one thing that scares me, will schools eventually go back to being based on the homes because of the violence, drugs, etc? Will their always be room for human teachers? Something that I will do differently is not only be the teacher that has to show up and work 8-5 to get my hours, I want to teach these children the curriculum, life skills, and be that support for children that a lot may not have at home. I want to encoorporate technology into my classroom because that is what is happening in the world, my students can work with students in other countries because of technology. I feel that these are experiences that if there not in the classroom they won't ever achieve! Its important!

Wiki's

I found this chapter really useful. It gave a lot of detailed background knowledge on where wiki's started from, how they are changing, and what type of people are using them. I liked how it gave a lot of resources to create your own wiki in your classroom. I really liked how it answered the question "if anyone can edit anything on the site any time they wan, how in the world can you trust what you read there?" I believe that is the question everyone asks to themselves. Professors and teachers say not to use Wikipedia but in here it says that its one of the best resources you will find!? And I was astounded when I read that wikipedia edits
appear as a rate of around 400,000 a day! Thats incredible. That also means that is a lot of people sitting on a computer and doing a lot of research! I didn't know that wikipedia offereed wikitionary, wikinews,wikispecies, and wikiquotes. I guess I have never spent that much time on wikipedia. Also, I didn't know that there is a discussion tab where you can chat with people about the information that you read in wikis. I thought it was funny when it said that teachers should spend some time checking wikipedia's accuracy on their own, because teachers have all the time in the world to be spending on wikipedia right? I think not, I mean if its a site that you think would be useful for your children I guess I would check the accuracy of the information but just to go on there and look over a ton of different pages, no thanks! I think students should be encouraged to contribute their own accurate information to wiki's, I think that helps them to be responsible and be more confident in their learning. Its a way fro them to see what other people think . I really liked all the websites they provided for different wikis. And I really liked when they talked about the teacher that is working with another classroom in bangledash. Thats awesome that we have to opportunity to work with kids and classrooms all over the world!