LAST WEEK!

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This class has taught me a lot about technology. I liked just figuring new things out and discovering how to use several different tools rather than being taught step by step. When I have my own classroom I plan on making my students little technology gurus. They will know how to use all the tools that we have learned about and will be able to show their families and friends how to use them too. My favorite thing that I have learned about that I truly think I will utilize in my life whether I become a teacher or not is all of the little in's and out's about google sites. I loved learning about google docs, google presentations, google sites, google calendar and much more. It is so useful and I don't think a lot of people realize that you can collaborate so easy when writing papers or creating presentations through gmail. I really liked the UEN scavenger hunt because we had to figure out how to use UEN and it made me realize how much it has to offer students, and teachers. I loved looking at all of the lesson plans and actually thinking about having my own class and how I would incorporate it into my lessons; it made teaching 'real.' When thinking about becoming a teacher, I didn't really think about technology or how I would use it in my class. But this course has changed my view and perspective about teaching. Kids love technology so it is really important to utilize in our class. If kids want a job when they get older they really need to know how to use technology and improve it to make the world a more functional place. Thanks for truly instilling in me the spirit of discovery this semester, it has been a joy and pleasure to be in your class!

Lesson 15

This week we worked on Power Point presentations. This tool is very useful and there are hundreds of different ways to utilize them in planning lessons and activities. I really liked looking through the 50 power point activities book and seeing all of the different fabulous ideas that I plan on using when I teach. I like how the book gives you ideas but you can use the ideas for whichever grade you are teaching and just modify it to fit your lesson plan. After watching the video it helped me to realize the important roles that we play in students lives. They look up to teachers so much, they go to them when they need help with family, friends, or school problems. Teachers should always be there to dry their eyes, give them a hug, pat them on the back, and give them the encouraging word that they need to hear. If we don't believe in our students then who will? The future generation is in our hands! If we raise them up believing that they can achieve great things then they will, if we believe they can influence other people they will, if we believe that they are capable of hard things they will be able to conquer the hard things that come there way. I was talking to my mom the other day about "self evaluations" and how sometimes even if you know you have fulfilled all the requirements you put a 4/5 or 8/10 on something because you don't want to look cocky. She told me that when she was evaluating herself on a job some years ago she gave herself 5/5 on all of the questions. When her boss told her that he had never seen anyone give themselves full points like this before she told him how her dad told her "if you don't think of yourself highly than who will." I think that this can be related to the movie clip because if we don't think highly of ourselves as teachers and our teaching abilities and capacity then our students won't think highly of us either and vice versa. If we don't think highly of our students then who will? But by building their self esteem and showing that we care about them, believe and trust them then we can help to build a fabulous generation for the future.

Week ?

This week because there was no class I was just thinking about all the technology tools that we have learned and how I can utilize them in my classroom. I think that technology can be very beneficial to a classroom but I think it that if we're not careful it can ruin the learning atmosphere in a classroom. I was read a newspaper article yesterday about texting. I have been thinking about teaching high school so this article really made me think. It talked about how the superintendent sent an email to teachers saying that instead of restricting the use of technology that teachers should embrace it and welcome it in the classroom. I think that is true, well this Chemistry teacher gave her class an assignment. She told her class that they would be writing a summary about a paragraph in the Chemistry book, concerning Phospholipids. But here’s the twist. They would be required to write the summary in text message form (whatever that is) and to use abbreviation wherever possible. A student told her that some people use T-9 and/or predictive text input and don’t really abbreviate. She then told me that I should just use bad grammar and instead of writing, for example, “you” to write the letter u. And to use things like lol and cu8tr. I that this is a major concern in the school system because if teachers are promoting the use of "texting language" how are students going to learn when it is appropriate to use "texting language" and when not to. The promotional use of this language could soon mean that students can't really decipher between what is slang or abbreviations vs. real english. Although technology can be a benefit to the classroom how much is too much? What happens to the students who text during a lecture and never learn about the basics of algebra, chemistry, or the human body because there mind is elsewhere? What about the kid that gets all of his answers to tests through text messages and he goes to take the SAT/ACT and completely fails because he doesn't know any of the basics- making it harder to get into college. Technology can enhance a student's education or destroy it depending on how teachers utilize and allow it in the classroom.

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Week 12

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Reflection: This week in class we learned about two new tools, Kidspiration and Inspiration. Kidspiration will help me teach my students because it has many fun tools that students can use to create documents, complete assignments, or just play games. Kidspiration has many different activities including some in math, science, geography, history, and writing. I would use some of these assignments to give my students another fun way to complete an assignment. To teach them about different ways to brainstorm for a paper I would show them how to use the spiderweb or mind map, they can add pictures, change colors, type, size and arrangement. This will help students be excited about a paper they are writing or for research. There are many other tools including storyboarding that will help students get excited about writing. Another activity that I really liked was the history ones, when I was in elementary school history never really got me excited. But the tools that Kidspiration has will definitely get kids excited about the past and finding out more about it. There was a variety of assignments from filling in a timeline, to filling in a worksheet about different presidents, students can do a puzzle of the states, or acessorize people for different outings and occasions. The only thing that I don't really like about this program is that it doesn't correct the assignments with right/wrong answers. I also don't like how you can't submit it for a grade, instead they have to print it out... If students want this program at home then they have to purchase it. Kidspiration is a very useful tool that helps students learn about different subjects and lets them integrate what they have learned with what they already know. This program boosts confidence and opens students to a wide variety of innovative activities.

Week 11

Reflection: There are many presentation tools that will enrich and benefit my students, their parents, and other teachers. Some of these presentation tools are PowerPoint and Google Presentations. These programs are helpful in creating presentations that can be used over and over again and are easy to share with others. Picasa, PowerPoint, and Google Presentations will help me teach my students in many different ways. PowerPoint can be used to create games like Jeopardy for a fun and interactive review game. PowerPoint can also be used to simply present information that can include pictures, text, audio and video. Google Presentations can be used basicly the same way as PowerPoint but it is much easier to collaborate with other people while creating it and publish it online than PowerPoint is. I will instruct and suggest that my students use Google Presentations if they are creating a presentation for a group project or assignment. This enables the students to work together without having to get together physically. If I ask my students to do a project or assignment using digital photos I will teach them how to use Picasa photo editing tool because it is very user friendly and accessible. It is easy to share your edited photos online with others as well. I will use Picasa to edit my own photos when I use digital pictures in my class for instructions, roll, presentations, books, posters etc. the pictures will then look more professional than just regular photos. These tools will help me help my colleagues and other students. I will use PowerPoint if I am giving a presentation to my colleagues or directing a meeting. If I have created a review game like Jeopardy for my class and another teacher would like to utilize it, it is very easy to just save it to a disk so they can have their own copy of it. I will use Google Presentations with other teachers if we are building our curriculum lessons and would all like to use the same lesson. Instead of just one person dominating the project and everyone else mooching off them, we can all work together and collaborate at our own time on our own computer. The presentation would be much better because several people included their ideas and knowledge rather than just one. In many classrooms, teachers are sticking to classic ways of teaching using the blackboard, maybe transparencies, if their lucky a movie clip here and there. I plan on embracing on the technology tools that I have available including Picasa, PowerPoint, and Google Presentations to reach beyond expectations, empowering my students to learn the tools and benefit from their functions. These tools present information in very visual forms which can empower students alone. I have listed multiple benefits of these tools but some of the drawbacks can include the amount of time invested in using them. Sometimes it is easy to get so involved in creating a presentation that you don't realize 4 hours have gone by, in this case I don't think that the presentation is necessarily serving its function properly. If I use Picasa to edit photos and post them on the web it is crucial that the albums are private or don't include any personal information or photos of students that might spread across the internet. Students, teachers, and parents have the right to privacy and pictures shouldn't be published of whatever, wherever. Picasa, PowerPoint, and Google Presentations are all very useful tools that will benefit me, my students, parents, and colleagues.

Video: I thought that the video was quite entertaining because everyone has seen those presentations that are just awful. Each slide includes massive amounts of information, the background hurts your eyes, and half their words are spelled wrong. I think that when creating a PowerPoint everyone should know that 1. You don't have to put every word you are going to say on the slide. 2. Use spell checker 3. Avoid excessive bullet points. 4. Don't use bold or obnoxious color schemes. 5. Less data is MORE. 6. Animations- use them carefully and not too many, if any at all. 7. Font analysis- use fonts that are readable and fit the data of your presentation. When a presentation is made following these guidelines it will be more understandable for your viewer and won't be embarrassing to you or your colleagues.

Week 9

Video:

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Reflection:
Digital Cameras can be very helpful, useful, and beneficial in the classroom. Digital Cameras allow teachers to take pictures, edit, delete, and upload within minutes. The pictures taken can quickly be put on the computer for easy access to all students. Digital Cameras can help me teach my students in thousands of ways. I can take photos or videos and use them for step by step directions, use photos for an attendance chart, take photos or videos of art concepts- line, shape, texture, form and color, use photos to create postcards, for thank you cards or invitations, for journal entries and many many more things. I think that photos are very useful in the classroom because they teach students by actual images, photos can be used in hundreds of ways. Digital cameras are very user friendly so even the students can take photos of each other, experiments, lessons, field trips etc. These photos can then be posted on a private blog for parents to see the variety of activities and lessons that their students are participating in in the classroom. I can also take photos of the students work and post them. Digital cameras can help me to communicate with my other colleagues because I can take photos during different lessons so that they can get ideas or use similar lesson plans. If I take digital pictures for a certain lesson I can easily copy those images onto a disk and other teachers can use them as well. There are many different ways that Digital Cameras can achieve classroom objectives. One idea I think that is really fun is to have students take 4 or 5 pictures and write a story using those pictures to illustrate their book. Another idea that I think is really fun for a first grade class is to assign each child a letter of the alphabet and have them hold a couple objects starting with that letter and create an alphabet book for the classroom. There are many pros to using digital cameras but some of the drawbacks are that a lot of times there are technical problems that can be very time consuming to figure out. Another issue with using digital cameras is privacy, if the images are placed on the internet a lot of precautions should be accounted for to ensure that students get their privacy.

Week 8

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Internet Safety Reflection:
As a teacher I believe that although the Internet can be very dangerous it is a very useful tool that should be used every classroom. The Internet is extremely useful for many reasons. The communication that it provides between people all around the world is unprecedented. It is so incredible that we can search, study, and interact within the click of a mouse. Students can take virtual tours of the ocean, learn about Africa then use Google Earth and other simulation programs to actually see it and explore it, students can research topics at home and much more with the Internet. Although the Internet has many uses there are a lot of drawbacks as well. One of the major issues with using the Internet in a classroom is safety. There are a lot of predators, cyber bullies, and many other safety issues with using the Internet. As a teacher of young vulnerable children I plan on monitoring their Internet very closely. I will also teach them an Internet Safety course just like we teach about Stranger Safety. Students will learn how they should never give out personal information online, correct etiquette, what they should do if they read something that is inappropriate or strange in anyway, and how to avoid cyber bullies and viruses. Because there is so much garbage and useless information on the Internet it is important to evaluate the sites that we use. Evaluating every website that we use will ensure that accurate information will be obtained, the author and source are credible and reliable, and most of all that it is safe and useful. The questions we should ask ourselves when evaluating a website can be remembered by the 5 Ws: 1.WHO: Who wrote the information and are they an expert? Does the website contain an online biography of the author or an email address? 2. WHAT: What doest the author say? What is the purpose of the site? Is the information biased? What organization sponsors the page? Is it an ad disguised as information? Does it contradict other information? 3. WHEN: When was the site created and last updated? 4. WHERE: Where does the information come from? Where can I find out more information about the sponsor or organization the author is affiliated with? In the URL look for personal names like jdoe or johndoe, ~ or %, or the words "users," "members" or "people," 5. WHY: Why is this information useful for my purpose? Why is this page or site better than other pages or sites? By following these guidelines and teaching our students Internet Safety we can ensure that they receive the most out of the time they spend on the Internet while still being safe.