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.