Week 12

Get a Voki now!



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:

Get a Voki now!


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

Get a Voki now!



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.

Week 10

VIDEO: We didn't start the fire

I really liked the video selection this week about a brief history of the United States.  As a teacher I plan on showing movies like this with my class because I think it is a really good change for them and gives a change of learning atmosphere.  I think that when kids are given mnemonic devices like this to remember information they can retain it a lot longer than just cramming right before the test.  Events and time periods tend to be really hard to remember and if the students listened to it everyday for a week they would probably have it memorized.  I remember in high school I learned a stupid little rhyme to remember how to spell onomatopoeia and I can still remember it.  I liked this movie because it was put to modern music that most people know the tune to.  Another reason that I liked this movie is because it gave not only events that happened in the government, but also music trends, fashion, books, and more.  I think that when kids learn about history they should learn more than just Harry Truman was president in 1949 but South Pacific was released, Joe Dimaggio became famous etc.  It is helpful to correlate all of this information together because I think it is much easier to remember.  

Reflection: I am not sure if I am supposed to blog for week 8 or week 10, but I guess I will just talk about the internet how it is useful/distracting/dangerous/safe for teachers, parents and most of all the students because that has been what I thought about this week.  I think that the internet is one of the greatest creations of all time.  It is amazing that we can keep in contact with people around the world daily.  It is one of the most convenient and efficient ways of sharing, spreading, and discussing information.  Even though it is very beneficial it is also very dangerous.  I think that teenagers and kids are being targeted to get into situations on the internet that are not safe.  Identity theft is a huge crime that is continuing to rise across the world made possible because of the internet.  Whenever students use the internet it is so important to be cautious of the information that they share including pictures and other personal information such as name, age, telephone number, home town, credit card, social security numbers and more.  I use the internet daily for school projects, home work, research, and pleasure.  It can be a very addictive thing so I think it is important to notify our students that only so much time should be spent on the internet per day.  The internet is useful for students to share and exchange information through blogs, instant messaging, facebook, email and more.  It is also very useful for obtaining information and doing research it is much easier to find information than going to the library and searching through shelves and shelves then pages and pages of books.  The only problem with obtaining information from the internet is making sure that it is valid and reliable, although sources like wikipedia are really easy and quick to find information with sometimes the information is written by John Doe a 30 year old high school drop out.  Resources that are very reliable for students are database sites like pioneer.org which includes a variety of databases from ebsco and sirs to the worldbook encyclopedia.  As a teacher I will utilize the internet to keep in contact with the parents, students, and my colleagues.  I will also use it to help me plan lessons and obtain information I need for those lessons.  The internet is a very crucial tool that can be used by parents, students and us teacher but must be used with caution.  

Week 7

VIDEO

All I have to say is, "Wow." That movie is really crazy.  I have an ipod touch and it utilizes the same technology and I know that there are touch screen computers like that now, but some of the things they said in that clip made me think that a lot more is to come in the future.  It was interesting to hear him say that one day our kitchen tables might be made from surface computers like that, or even our coffee tables and we will control our televisions with them, and at the end he even went as far as saying our walls will be made out of these surface computing devices.  The most interesting part of the movie was when he took the photo placed the camera on the surface and it took the picture off the camera and put it on the screen then took the photo from the screen and put it on a wireless device like a cell phone.  I think that in the future kids' desks might be made out of these devices and they will laugh when we tell them that our desks were just made out of wood.  This technology could definitely have an effect on the way that I teach in the future and the interactions I have with my students and the interactions they have with each other.  

UEN REFLECTION

The Utah Education Network is very useful for students and teachers. I want to use it to enrich my classroom. As a new teacher I will use it often so that my lessons are focused on the core curriculum for the grade I teach. I like how they break it down into subjects and grades so the information is easily accessible, organized and user friendly. I think it is really helpful that they give lesson plans because as a new teacher it will be really useful to have all the resources I can get. The lessons are nicely outlined. I like how it lists all the materials that are needed and if you need pictures it provides those as well. These lesson plans will save a lot of time and relieve stress for me as a new teacher. There are a lot of resources that UEN provides for students, teachers, and parents. One of the really useful tools for students is the Pioneer Library. This website is full of reliable databases that are really useful for students in doing research projects, studying, reading, exploring, and it even has games for younger grades. On the UEN website it has a feature called interactives. There are many different interactive websites and games to help students of all levels with different subjects such as math (see left, help George estimate the height of things), reading, writing, listening, health and more. A couple other things that I found interesting were that through UEN students have access to TIME Magazine for Kids, CNN Students News, and Who’s Who and What’s What Weekly Quiz. These all help kids to keep current with the world and news on their own level and understanding. The second thing that I found was the Bill Nye The Science Guy, I think that these are really helpful in the classroom, when I was a student I loved these movies because they were entertaining but helped me understand the information.