WEEK 4

This week’s assignments have been very informative which seems to be trend with this class. I continue to find new resources which I was not aware of that I will be able to use in my classroom. Of course, I will have to wait until I actually have a classroom before I will be able to use them. The technology explorations this week were very interesting. I really enjoyed tinkering with the tools on the ispeech.com website. I had some fun with the text to speech trial by typing in some of the silly, sometimes gibberish, statements that my three year old makes. I thought it was particularly funny to hear the serious, computer generated, voice say “poop nugget”. I guess when you share a home with two little boys your sense of humor reverts to childlike state. I also found the voicethread.com and scribblar.com sites to be useful. I am not sure that I will be able to use these in the elementary special education classroom where I plan on teaching someday but I can see how they would be beneficial for collaboration and online lessons. One of the resources from the tech explorations that I do plan on using is comiclife.com. I can imagine that an assignment where students are aloud to use their own photos to create a comic in which they are the main character will be fun and entertaining. I enjoyed exploring WWW.TED.com and found several interesting videos while I was there. I have previously visited this site at the coaxing of a friend who had suggested that I check out the Sir Ken Robinson video. This website offers so many interesting and informative talks that would be great to use in a variety of classroom settings. I plan on keeping this site in mind and visiting it frequently for my own entertainment and for using to motivate and inform students. There was so much information in this week’s assignments that will benefit me when I begin teaching.

I am not teaching so in order to complete the PowerPoint assignment I took advantage of the nearest captive audience that I could find that met the criteria of “any school-aged child”. Of course, this was my seven year old son who is in the 1^st grade. The content of my presentation was based on a series of assignments that he has been working on over the past week which involved learning the months. I created a simple 12 slide PowerPoint presentation with each slide representing a different month. Each slide contained a calendar of the month with some added photos and clip-art of related subjects. I also added a text box on each slide with “quick facts” for each month. I was proud of the fact that I was able to incorporate some audio clips to the presentation. I wanted to do more with the presentation but time would not permit. I was able to figure out how to add a brief audio clip of frosty the snowman to the December slide which my son enjoyed. If I were going to redo this presentation and had more time I would try to add some animation and attempt to create an interactive calendar on each slide. It would be cool to have a calendar that my son could actually navigate through and click on icons that would key informative animation or audio.  

Week 2 Blog

This week’s lesson was very informative which seems to be a trend with the material from this class. I guess that my eyes have never truly been opened to all of the technological resources out there and to how they can benefit in the realm of education. I think that it is common for many of us to take technology for granted as we go through our cozy lives without realizing how much technology we use on a daily basis. We have so many things that we use to make our lives easier that we sometimes fail to recognize them. I think it is much the same with educational technology we have a seemingly endless reservoir of resources to use in our classrooms to make learning more successful if we do not fail to look for and implement them in our classrooms.

With that being said this week’s assignment gave me several new resources that I was not aware of that I will use in my classroom. First, the discussion and material on Wikis illustrated how, even in the most rural area, students can have a truly global learning experience. Vicki Davis is an inspiration for any teacher looking to enhance student learning by implementing technology in the classroom. She made a statement about “turning the classroom upside down” referencing the importance of letting students be more involved in the learning experience which I thought was a very good point. Students that have more input in the learning experience become empowered and our more successful in the classroom. I like the idea of a more student centered classroom.

Another part of this week’s assignment that stood out to me was the Monty Python clip. I used to be quite a fan of Monty Python earlier in my life and it was fun to revisit those days if only briefly while watching the clip. Sadly, the piece spoke volumes about the state of our modern society. I think that we become far too focused on things putting them before people in the order of importance.

The information on spreadsheets and data bases form this week’s assignment was beneficial. I use spreadsheets frequently in my work and also use data bases. However, I have never really considered how they could be used in the classroom other than as organizational tools for teachers. It was good to see that educators are using these tools as part of student assignments as well as it helps them to develop some higher order thinking skills. During my web search of databases and spreadsheets in the classroom I found that there are numerous ideas for creating lesson plans that implement the use of these tools. One website that I found really informative was http://www.alicechristie.org/edtech/ss/. This website has many ideas for using spreadsheets and databases in the K-12 classroom. I found this website very helpful as I plan on teaching special education in the elementary or middle school areas.

The entire lesson for this week was helpful and I will implement many of the ideas and resources in my classroom when I begin teaching.

Week 3 Blog.

This week’s assignments focused on the use of Word Processors and Desk Top Publishing software in the classroom. To me these tools have more obvious, yet no more useful, applications within education than some of the earlier tools that we have discussed so far in this class. Word processing tools have been around for a long time. I can still remember using a machine that appeared to be an electric typewriter that was referred to as a "word processor". I can remember the using the word processor to complete school projects and thinking about how much better it was to use this device than it was using a standard typewriter. I could input the material in its entirety into the machine, save it, and make needed corrections and additions before letting the machine print out the document. I could have never imagined the advancements that have now occurred with word processing software and programs. I have become so dependent up on this technology that I often question whether or not I can write anything by hand at this point. This weeks assignments helped me to explore a little more thoroughly the tools and accessories available in current word processing technology. I have felt like I have been fairly proficient with using the Microsoft Word tools to create high quality written documents but now that I have done a little further exploration I realize that there is so much more available to assist me with my writing. The text explorations that we have completed for this week were also very informative and insightful.  I can see many applications for most of these resources within my classroom the text to speech applications will be beneficial with working with speech and visually impaired students or with students with dyslexia. I really like the idea of using the Powertalk application from http://fullmeasure.co.uk to allow students to create stories and present them to the class.

I am not teaching so the assignment for reviewing the newsletter and etc was a difficult one. The only time that I use anything like this is at church for creating schedules for nursery workers. I usually assist my wife with creating a word document that just lists the individual nursery worker with the dates that they cover the nursery out to the side. We post this in the church and a copy is given to the workers.  For the purpose of this assignment I used Micro Soft Office Publisher to create a calendar from the existing document for the current month.  The nursery schedule is pictured to the right. 

This week's assignments were informative and will be beneficial to me as I begin my career as a teacher. 

So this is blogging!

I never thought I would be a blogger but I guess you never know what life will throw at you. So, I was thinking from my narrow understanding of what it means to blog, that blogging would be like a cool inner monologue from a good movie. I could envision blogging as an ultra smooth outpouring of my deepest thoughts. Then, I had the sudden realization that no one would be interested in a blog about obscure medical facts and food. So……I was glad that this weeks reading and text explorations gave me a better understanding of blogging.

This week’s assignments also introduced me to a number of technological applications that I will be able to use in my classroom that will help me to enhance student learning and make my job as teacher easier. It is good to see that there are so many resources available that I will be able to use in my classroom in the future. Of course, if I were teaching now I would not have to wait for the “future”. However, being a social worker I will not have the privilege of applying what I’ve learned for at least a little while longer. 

The discussion on the ISTE National Educational Technology Standards (NETS *T) and Performance Indicators for Teachers was interesting as I was unaware that standards for integrating technology in the classroom had been established or put in place. I believe that it is really important to use technology in the classroom as students need to have experiences that are relevant to the world in which they live.  It is important to make sure that students obtain a level of technological literacy that will allow them to thrive in our digital world. I think that the Youtube video “A Vision of Today’s Students” made a poignant statement about the need to adjust curriculum delivery to suit the students of a digital world.

The technology explorations were particularly informative as they introduced me to several new resources that will be easy to utilize within my classroom when I start teaching. The PB Works site will be very helpful for setting up a classroom workspace for students and parents to utilize. The Tikatok and Tumblebooks websites also appeared to be useful resources for using in my classroom. It will be fun to allow students to place themselves with in their own story books. I think it will increase student interest and make reading more fun for them.

Overall this weeks reading and assignments were very informative and provided lots of useful information that I will be able to easily apply within my classroom. I really cannot recognize any challenges for implementing the resources in my classroom. All and all I think it will just be a matter of staying motivated and actively seek out new/useful technologies and applying them in the classroom.

 

I have no idea what I am doing! This should be interesting.