Blog Post 11:

I had actually never used Excel before except when learning how to navigate around in it a bit through a computer class in middle school.  I found the use of charts to be pretty easy, but figuring out the formulas such as IF was a bit challenging, especially for the Cold, Warm, Hot options.  

One website I found on my classmate’s blog, https://wordpress.com/read/blog/id/82860287/, talked about a website called commtechlab where you could take your kids on virtual field trips  and other educational resources. I think this would prove to be an effective website to learn to navigate and learn so that you can share an educational tool with your students.

For the future, I feel that keeping my Twitter that was used for this class would be very smart! I’ve already found an array of educational tools and opportunities to educate my future students with.  With social media only growing with information, I feel that this would be the best way to keep me on my toes and up to date with the knowledge on educational technology.

The two blogs I commented on this week are:

Can you excel in the Excel program?

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Blog Post 10

Blog Post 10:

Peripherals, such as printers, scanners, cameras, probes, etc are all different types of devices that provide input and output to and from computers.  In an article for my EDF 2085 class titled “Youth Perspective on Multicultural Education,” children were given camera phones to take pictures of things they perceived as being cultural. I feel like this would be a great exercise to use with any subject matter and you could project the results from each child’s camera onto the board to establish a discussion-based presentation.

One web-based resource I found really interesting that I found out about this year is called CPALMS.  This website is also especially helpful since we live in Florida and it’s set for Florida’s Teaching Standards.  This website includes subject areas, learning objectives, state standards, and also different lesson plans for whatever you’re planning to teach.

This resource would be especially helpful for all teachers that might need help figuring out a way to go about teaching a certain lesson.  It provides a multitude of ideas, while still giving the teacher their academic freedom when it comes to specifics.  Another great plus to this website, besides it being highly organized and categorized, is that you know all the lesson plans are state approved already! The website is: http://www.cpalms.org/Public/

One major use I think I’ll get from Excel will be recording my student’s grades.  Excel provides a wonderful and neat spreadsheet that really helps keep everything in track and makes it easy to input numbers.  It also provides algorithms for finding the total percentage of the sum of the student’s grades to provide them with a final grade. This computer-based productivity tool will be more effective in organization especially for what I plan to teach, such as Kindergarten or 1st grade, where you have many papers, pamphlets, and activities that children have completed.  I also believe emailing will be a must because it eliminated the loss of paper communication that has been known to happen with children.  As long as parents, administration, and other teachers have access, it’s a wonderful way to communicate and keep people updated!

I made a Jeopardy game for 3rd grade vocabulary for my Interactive PowerPoint.  This seemed a bit challenging than any powerpoint I had done before. Some skills I acquired were inputting sound into the powerpoint, pictures for each vocabulary word (mind you, there were 53 slides), and finding fun transitions, gender neutral colors, and animations for each slide! I also had to figure out how to make a new slide appear when you clicked one of the buttons that told you the points (ex. 100, 200, etc.) Altogether, I enjoyed creating this powerpoint and I think it would be an effective game to learn vocabulary words as well but I never realized how tedious making one of these was.  I definitely appreciate my teachers who have used this method in their classes because it took a lot of time and work just for one powerpoint!

The two blogs that I commented on this week are:

Module 9

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The Digital Divide

Blog Post 9:

I feel that with anything, you will always get some positive and some negatives, especially when implementing these things in a classroom because every student learns differently. With that being said, I think having visual learners in the classroom will be the biggest advantage for using presentation software in a k-12 classroom. Another advantage is that it gives you a creative liberty to put whatever you want to show your class to keep them captivated, such as a video, graphic, animation, or any other sounds.  I think the main disadvantage to using presentation software in the classroom would be the people who are not visual learners. If you focus every lesson around a powerpoint, the people who aren’t visual learners might have trouble catching up. Also another disadvantage that I’ve seen is that there can be problems with projectors, such as them taking what seems like forever to heat up, or even sometimes not working at all.  This can always impact your lesson when using presentation software so sometimes it’s good to have a backup plan!

I think other future teachers and myself should fight to abolish the digital divide.  It’s becoming increasingly important to educate children on the use of technology and make sure that they have the same opportunities, regardless of their socioeconomic status and home-life.  I believe it’s only fair that each child gets the same learning opportunities to build the confidence they’ll need in the future.  I think the digital divide will definitely play a role in my future classroom because all children don’t have the same technological accessibility and opportunities, but I will fight to get it for them if they don’t have access in school. One solution would be to bring an educational technology proposal to the school board in hopes of gaining access.  However, no students in my classroom will be penalized for not being able to turn something in over the computer or printed out. I believe all students should get the chance to turn something in neatly written out if they don’t have the access.  Also for presentations, instead of using software like powerpoint or Inspiration, students can make collages with cut out pictures from magazines or other pictures provided by me.

I think that learning about the digital divide definitely makes me think this is one of the most important issues related to educational technology today.  Not all children have the same access to computers and I think it’s hard to be able to provide that technology in school as well if you don’t have access to it.  However, we learn that even just having access to it doesn’t mean that it’s functioning at it’s best.  Most schools that do have computers still operate on broadband speeds, which take away from valuable class time when booting up and getting on the internet.  Below is an article that discusses how different types of internet can increase educational technology productivity.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/03/the-schools-where-kids-cant-go-online/387589/

These are the two blogs I commented on this week:

Module 8

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PowerPoints, Yay or Nay?

Blog Post 8:

The three knowledge dimensions are factual, conceptual, and procedural.  The book states that for the factual component, you can gather facts for the presentation, reformat information for a multimedia format, use your technology skills to create multimedia, compare facts student have gathered for conflicts and differences, and create an accurate representation of the facts students gathered. For the conceptual component, you can sort out relationships among facts in order to organize the presentation, flowchart and concept mapping before building the presentation, storyboarding from the flowcharts and concept maps that students have built, observing other students’ projects, and creating a finished presentation that is logical and appealing.  For the procedural component, you can make a flowchart or concept map while utilizing graphics sound and video for a multimedia creation tool, work with other students to solve technical problems, observe others presentations, and lastly, create a finished presentation that works.

Adaptive technologies are technologies that help people with disabilities use computing equipment more effectively.  I have not ever known anyone that has had to use adaptive technologies. The challenge of using adaptive technologies in your classroom is to make sure that they’re ALL accessible to each and every student in your classroom, even if certain disabilities vary.  If you have a classroom with multiple learning disabilities, it might be a challenge to include adaptive technologies for each individual disability. I believe that while it might be a little time consuming, it will be appreciated by the student you’re doing it for.

I loved the Web Quest activity! I found it to be a very creative way to build a lesson for future students and definitely know I’ll use it in my classroom at some point.  It wasn’t hard to figure out and was easy to tweak the web site so that it can be personalized to what you want to teach and illustrate! This assignment let me learn that not only can teachers do Web Quests, but it would be a great assignment for kids to come up with their own as well!

The two blog posts I commented on this week were:

Blog Post 7

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Blog #7

Blog Post 7:

I believe that I’d like to maintain a course Web site in my classroom because they are important in keeping students and parents informed, while also utilizing technology as well.  I also believe that they are useful and worth the effort or trouble you go through to make them because they are a go-to source for information that will always be there.  For example, if you gave a handout of what your child’s homework was and the handout was lost, the child would be penalized for not be able to do their homework in most cases. However, if you have a Twitter Account per say, that lists all the homework assignments and deadlines each week, then parents and students will be able to always see what those are because they will always be posted to the course Web site!

I really enjoyed http://www.videoscribe.co and think I’d use these when teaching certain lesson. It’s a whiteboard animated video and allows you to spice up your lessons with an illustration while providing voice feedback to what you’re teaching as well. While you do have a 7-day free trial, the pricing after that is a bit expensive. You can pay $16.50 a month and complete all the lessons you wish to in this month (ideal for summer when you have a bit of free time) or you can pay the yearly fee which is a bit pricey at $198.00 and enjoy the time to complete a video anytime you want. So how is this web 2.0? It’s a more passive way of getting kids involved if you’re just using it to demonstrate a lesson, allowing a discussion afterwards amongst the students.  However, maybe for one homework assignment, you can have your students download the free trial and come up with their own whiteboard animated video! This is a great way to get students involved with the technology and would work great for a project.

I think web 2.0 is very useful in K-12 education because it gets people involved.  This technology involves interaction in the classroom, whether kids are in school or at home.  I think blogs, wikis, twitter, and diigo are all useful tools in this classroom. These give teachers a plethora of ways to get students involved with incorporating technology. It supports teacher professional development because it gives teachers the liberty to plan lessons around technological tools and gives students the freedom of being creative in their learning.  Teachers also have the ability to control safety students by using a common classroom account, having the teacher control the content by reviewing students post before they are published, and using a password protected sites.

The new skills I acquired while working on the Web Evaluation was that I was able to effectively evaluate the content a certain web site publishes and determine its validity. I was also able to evaluate how students will learn from the website due to the visualization the web site provides. I thought the Web Evaluation assignment proved to be a wonderful tool and it’s something I look forward to using in the classroom. Depending on what grade I teach, it would also be a great tool to show students how to evaluate their content for the sources they use for papers and projects as well.

These are the two blog posts I commented on this week:

Blog #6

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Module 6

Why Everyone Wants a Piece of Ed Tech!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9aNWg04Kqw

Blog Post 6:

As a teacher, I believe I’ll still have a Twitter during my career.  Especially with the use of #edtech, you can already find some great new ideas to spice up your classroom using technology that you’ve never thought of before. Using blogs, twitter, and other webpages are great because not only can you acquire ideas to contribute to the classroom and develop your PLN, but you can also be the provider for ideas among your other fellow teachers.  This allows you to be creative and share your imagination with the world! For example, I don’t think I’ll interactively use Twitter with my Kindergarten students, but various hashtags could help better me as a teacher to help my children learn. As stated in the podcast, I also think keeping a blog with homework and other important announcements for the parents to go on and see would be helpful in my classroom as well!

For the most part when I was younger, I just remember typing things into Google because it was easiest to get a semi-relative result.  However, over the years I’ve seen an array of inappropriate things from using this search engine, because it wasn’t filtered for my eyes. I think Google Scholar would be more appropriate for children locating things on the Web, or many of the other websites that the book listed, one for example being AskJeeves for Kids.  I also believe that when young children are searching any internet search engine, a parent or teacher should be present to monitor their results and safety. For example, we learned that WhiteHouse.com was a pornography site, which could very easily be entered by a young child to research the actual White House. This is important so that children are not exposed to things harmful to them or their learning.

The blog posts I commented on this week are:

Blog Post # 6

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Post #6

During the Web Hunt assignment, I learned that your first search and link that you click on will not always be the one that is most relevant to what you’re searching for! Many of the times, the link I clicked took me to another link where I would find a reasonable answer to my search.  I did feel like the assignment was a bit too repetitive, after I got through about 10 searches I was over it.  It was fairly easy though if you know how to search certain things though, so I liked that about it! I can improve by using an array of search engines next time, rather than just using Google. In the future, I can use what I learned from the assignment to help better the searches for my Kindergarten class when they go to the computer lab for various things.

Blog Post 5:

One web-based resource I really liked that was talked about in the book was that of the web-quest. I think it’s a wonderful idea for students, especially with the video-conferencing option available as well.  This could be a good way to integrate various limited access careers such as an astronaut’s or maybe a member of congress’ perspective on things such as career day and when doing research regarding what every child wants to be when they grow up! Also, I liked that the book listed search engines that were developed for children. I had never known that these existed and in school, we always just used google which could sometimes generate inappropriate sources or images for children.  I think Ask Jeeves for Kids, KidsClick, Looksmart’s Kids Directory, and Yahooligans would be very appropriate to use in the classroom and especially when going to computer lab! You might even be able to suggest these search engines to parents who haven’t heard of this before.

During our assignment for this week, I felt that the internet did an excellent job in retrieving what was needed for those 20 different search topics.  For this activity, I think it was useful for both student research and my own research because some of those examples were kid-based.  One thing I think using the Internet is not useful for would be something that I saw used way too much growing up by other children. SparkNotes. While this is an excellent website to summarize what happened throughout the book, it doesn’t give you the same effect as reading it and many kids misused it for this purpose.  I think for additional understanding of main concepts, it’s very useful! However, for trying to cheat your way through by not reading the material.. not very useful at all!

In middle school and high school, all my research for school work were based around Google. That was the go-to search engine for all my request. In college, things are much different. While Google Scholar is an adequate resource, I love that I’m able to sign into my FSU account and look through all their databases for web-based scholarly journal articles. This helps so much because once you type in what you’re looking for in the database, it’s much more likely to come up with something relative to your topic than say if you just typed it into Google. Also, like stated in the podcast, you know that the journal article is reliable because it has been published in a journal and also for the same reason, that it is a stable article.

I LOVED using Inspiration! It was so much fun and brought me back to when I used to use it in elementary school during computer lab when we had to do book reports and show the chronological order of how the book developed.  Next time, I can improve by using more pictures rather just bubbles.  In the future, I will use this in my classroom for various activities and will also try to get my students involved with this as well! I believe these concepts maps are easy to follow and that most children will be able to visually learn from them.

The two blogs I commented on this week are:

Blog #4

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https://mrc142015.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/blog-post-4/comment-page-1/#comment-9

Blog Post 4:

The link that I’m about to provide a visual critique on is: http://highered.mheducation.com/sites/9834092339/student_view0/chapter11/meiosis_with_crossing_over.html

I’m providing this critique based on the rules that were presented in chapter six.  The website stood true to most of rule 1: the use of general design principles.  The website included a paragraph of the topic, including also an animation that was narrated as well.  For Rule 2: I felt that this website did well in orienting it’s users.  Level one, two, and three items were all different distinct colors and sizes to show what they represented. This post obeyed Rule 3 because everything was left justified.  For Rule 4,  style types were limited and didn’t produce a busy screen.  For Rule 5, colors were limited to headings, subheadings, and to show navigation.  It obeys Rule 6 because there is a set color scheme of four colors, red, blue, orange, and black.  Rule 7 was included by providing an animation for the material, which made it not boring.  I believe that Rule 8 was obeyed because everything on the screen had a meaning and I didn’t see anything that seemed out of place.  Rule 9 was included by never using all capital letters, making the website easier to read.  Rule 10 was iffy because some text lines were much longer than others when going into explanations about the subject.  Rule 11 was obeyed because single spacing was used.  Rule 12 was included because the information had a “student center” which helped navigate through the entire website.  Every page listed in the student center was set up exactly the same, which didn’t make you feel like you had to “hunt” for information.  Rule 13 was obeyed because there was only one idea per screen. Rule 14 was used because bold letters were used to emphasize a question. Rule 15 was included because the audience was intended to be for people looking for information on this certain topic, which the website made it very clear and explanatory by being informative. Rule 16 was obeyed, there was no flashing text.  Rule 17 was used because the “student center” used bullets to point out the different pages you could go to for the different topics.  Rule 18 was included because the “student center” or navigation part stayed consistent on every page.  Rule 19 was used because there was never any stacked text.  Rule 20 was semi-used because it included an animation, but that was all.  Rule 21 was obeyed because everything was grouped together according to it’s meaning and to provide clarity on the subject.  Rule 22 was included because the website included different text sizes when showing the heading, subheading, and regular texts.  Lastly, rule 23 was semi-used as well because as I felt that all the information was important, I was more inclined to view and felt more informed after viewing the animation with the narrator speaking along.  This animation was also placed after the regular text so this rule was a bit iffy too.

I believe that visual tools can help support learners because it gives them clarity on the importance of certain things and how they relate to the subject that they’re trying to learn.  For instance, if you have to brush up on a topic but don’t have enough time to read the entire thing, the different colors, different text sizes, different emphases, and different pictures, animations, or narrations can help you figure out which information is most important.

I think it’s important to use open content in the classroom. There are so many other teachers out there that, through trial and error, have found what information works best to get their students motivated in learning in the classroom.  Using open content allows other teachers to adopt and adapt this information to their own classroom, which could ultimately lead to the shaping of better classrooms everywhere.  I also think it’s important to use open sources because it allows anybody to use this software, regardless of budget for the most part. Educators can benefit from open sources because they can use things like blackboard to put information up for students and record their grades.  I would use open content and open sources in my classroom because I believe I would highly benefit from them! As for contributing, if I find something that works and find it to be helpful to the education community, of course I would!

I’ve never made a newsletter before this week so it was a fun learning experience for me! I really enjoyed being creative and it got me excited to be able to do this in my classroom one day. There was nothing I didn’t like about this assignment! It was very fun! Next time I could improve upon the quality of content to put in a newsletter, as I was just trying to fill spaces rather than really create one for an actual classroom.  All in all, I learned how to create and awesome newsletter and definitely believe this will be attributable to when I become a teacher. I’d love to create a class newsletter!

The blogs I commented on are listed below: 

Post 3

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Blog Post #3

Blog Post 3:

• As a student, I’ve used Microsoft Word for various things.  I remember generally using MS word to type up book reports when I was younger. Now, I primarily use it for essays, although I have also used it for other things such as building my resumé and creating brochures for assigned projects. I’ve seen teachers use MS Word for an array of reasons as well. In the beginning of each semester, teachers will usually use MS Word to create their syllabus for the class they’re teaching – some hand it out, others make it accessible online. Throughout the semester, teachers will type up assignments and prompts for papers using MS word as well! A new idea I got from chapter nine was how much different a research report is than creating a newspaper. We see how formatting is completely different and even the structure of the writing style as well.  I would love to create a newspaper with my class! I think this would not only be a teachable technology moment but also a great interactive way to get the entire class involved.

• In an educational environment, I’ve always had to use TurnItIn.com when submitting papers or projects. Teachers are very strict about plagiarism, which is a good thing. This gives the opportunity for the student to use his/her mind to plant their own words down rather than copying and pasting. As a teacher, I believe I’d make my students go through this process as well because I strongly believe that it’s creating individual creativity and not the copying of someone else’s original work. I believe that it’s okay to also borrow outside sources from the classroom to teach the class as long as it’s within the guidelines, it’s legitimate, and you’re referencing the original source. I also would strongly encourage students to gather a vast pool of information from credible sources, as long as they are to cite properly. I think as long as you stay within the legal perimeters and give credit where it’s due, everything is acceptable!

• This week’s assignment was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed it! Word Graphics 1 helped me to learn how to format a quiz/test, which I had never done before. One thing I could’ve improved upon was the alignment of the answers that included pictures. This will allow me to create tests in the future when I am finally a teacher.

Also, the blogs I commented on this week are:

Blog #2

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Blog Post 2