C4T April Summary

I was given Mr. David Warlick and his 2 cents worth blog. I first commented on his blog post What is the Purpose of Education? He discussed what education really was and argued how we are as educators are more concerned with test score, rather than the preparation of future generations. He stated, “The purpose of education is to appropriately prepare our children for their future.” I commented by agreeing with him on how as educators we should be more concerned with our students becoming engaged and motivated in their education. Promoting personal goals and creativity allow student’s to engage directly with their learning creating ownership in their own education. Instead of a lot of information spit back up for a high score.
The second blog post I commented on was The Nextbook Must Be… It was a interesting post where Mr. Warlick discussed his view of what textbooks should be. One of the topics that interested me most, was his view on how textbooks should be comprehensive and cross-disciplined. And how the textbook should provide content in a variety of formats such as text, images, audio, and video selected by the student. I commented how I thought it was a great way to engage and motivate students. by allowing students to use their creative side in which ways they incorporate the various formats in creating their textbooks. Also, if we are able to engage students directly to their work by giving them “no boundaries” we create and give students accountability to their work. It was an excellent blog and posts.

Project #15

PLN Final Report

I have really enjoyed using my PLN. I was really excited to use Symbaloo and organize all of the sites that I visit and use on a regular basis. I have been adding websites to my "favorites" for practical use when working on projects. It is so nice to have them all listed and organized in one central area compared to multiple windows open when doing my work. I plan to continue to use and grow my PLN even after EDM310. I have introduced some of my co-workers to Symbaloo and plan to teach my future students about it for educational use.

Blog Post #13

I have to admit that this weekend was easier for me to do a media fast than usual. My fiancé’ and I were going to my hometown fore wedding showers all weekend so I was not in my regular routine. I began my fast on Thursday night at 8:00 p.m. and it ended Friday night at 8:00 p.m. The drive home was a little strange at first without the radio. But my fiancé and I had a great 3 hour talk! When we got to my parent’s house the T.V. was on and I told them what I was doing and they were glad- because we talked! My first instinct the next morning was to turn on my cell phone and check for any messages and grab my laptop to see any new postings on Facebook. I didn’t though! Throughout the day several of my friends called my fiancé wondering why I wasn’t answering my phone and there were many times throughout the day that I wanted to call someone but there are very few landlines left! I learned from this experience that I am dependent on media not only for my communication with others but for my own entertainment. It killed me not to watch Sports Center for one day. It is why I chose to do the fast before the NBA play-offs started on Saturday. I really missed checking and communicating with my friends on Facebook but I learned I am really dependent on my cell phone. I know that when my students come to me that they will be media-dependent. It has just become a way of life. Google gives us instant answers to most of our questions, Facebook allows us to interact with others without actually being with them and we can just about talk to anyone, anywhere, and this is their world. I hope to utilize the media that is available to teach my students to engage in their own learning by making use of all that is available. I think their reaction to a media-fast will be much harder for them than it was for me because I can still remember when there were no cell phones or laptop computers!

Special Post #12

Creativity and Curiosity: My Thoughts
         I totally agree with the quote, “Curiosity Gave Life to Creativity”. Curiosity is the match (most of the time) that lights the fire of creativity. I used to think that you had to be born with a “creative” gene but I have learned over the years that creativity can be developed like a skill. It has not been my experience that schools think this is a priority. Most of my education has been memorizing facts and doing repetitive skills. Although some teachers have encouraged my curiosity and gave some freedom of creativity, it has not been the norm. Taking this class has exposed me to many creative ideas that I didn’t even know existed in the classroom.
          I think a curriculum could be developed to better intrigue the curiosity of students and allow them to be creative in their learning. I certainly see now that technology would have to be a key component. I think the curriculum should focus more with the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy (evaluation, analysis, synthesis, application) instead of concentrating so much at the bottom with knowledge and comprehension. Questions should be more important than rote answers. If the way we question students sparked their curiosity, with the help of technology, they could creatively express their findings. In a way, this helps give them “ownership” of their knowledge instead of just giving them answers to memorize.
          I think Elli expressed one of the problems that I often face as a student and that is the fear of failure or that my teachers would not like my ideas. I am always comparing my work to others and sometimes don’t feel my work is as good. I think we as teachers need to work hard to make our students to feel confident with their ideas and encourage them to ask questions! We need to give them more freedom to explore things that interest them. I think students would value learning more if their curiosity could be explored and their findings be revealed in a creative way. I think it would be great to have a classroom where there were no “wrong” answers. A wrong answer would be just another stepping stone on the way to the discovery of the right one.

C4K April Summary

The blog I was assigned to was Briana, a middle school student from Fairfax, Vermont. Briana’s first blog post I commented on was about where she was from. It gave me chance to get to know a little about her. She talked about how cold the winters are and how everything is blooming with life during the spring. At the end of her post she talked about wanting to move south to Florida closer to the coast. I was able to give her a few of our own pros and cons living near the coast. How living down near the gulf you always run the risk of being hit by bad weather during hurricane season and how hot it can get during the “Dog days” of summer. I did tell her about the up side of a sunny day only being twenty minutes from beach.
    The second blog post I commented on was about her trip to Disney World. She said she loved the firework show that takes place at the end of the day when the park is closing. How the castle was beautiful lit up with all the fireworks of different colors popping all above it. I was able to relate commenting on how I remembered the fireworks show at night from when I was at Disney World during Christmas on a family trip in 2002. Thinking it was a really cool thing to end on after a fun day riding rides and playing games at the park.
     The last blog post I commented on was on the issue of poverty and hunger. She talked about how she doesn’t understand why people don’t stop what’s causing hunger in the first place. Giving some statistics that were pretty eye opening. How 925 million people are starving and everyday 16,000 children die from hunger related causes. I was really impressed on her knowledge and awareness on such a major issue. I commented agreeing with her, on how important it is to raise awareness about poverty and the things it leads to such as hunger. It is great to see her trying to make a difference in a very creative way by using her blog a platform for hunger and poverty awareness.
    I really enjoyed commenting on Briana’s blog and participating I the World Blog Challenge! Briana seemed to be a great student and a good blogger.

Blog Post #12

While searching the internet for educational teaching tools I found Glogster.  A website that uses a online learning platform for teachers and students to express their creativity, knowledge, ideas, and skills in the classroom. Glogster EDU creates a digital knowledge environment, where teachers and students learn technology in a format that simplifies the educational process and produces relevant results. A Glog is a very easy to use tool that engage students in fun and creative activities. With a Glog you can use a drag and drop interface containing multimedia elements including text, audio, video, images, graphics, drawings, animation and data. Some of the other cool features for teachers were with a Glog you can create projects, assign homework, create students portfolios and teacher presentations. One of the wonderful thing Glog promotes is no more wasteful paper projects to save trees. When you purchase an EDU Premium license, the company will plant a tree in Haiti on your behalf.

For my assignment I would have my students make a Glog on one of their favorite sports athlete to present in class.
Procedures for Glog Project
- Research your favorite sports athlete to gather information.
- Create a poster on Glogster for your favorite sports athlete.
- Include the following multimedia elements in the presentation 
~ Text   
~ Audio
~ Video
~ Image
~ Graphics
~ Drawings
~ Animation
~ Data/career stats of your athlete

Final Project Update

My group is just starting to work on our final project. I am in a group with Anna Darby and Courtney Muse. We have been communicating with each other through email, text messaging, and Skype. We have also met in person to prepare for projects 15 and 16 discussing how we will be communicating with each other while working on this project. We have discussed a few different ideas for our final project, but we have not completely planned out what we are going to do yet.

Blog Post #11

The First Graders in Ms. Cassidy’s Class was a wonderful example of how at ease with technology our students can be if we start them young enough. These kids seemed so confident in what they were doing and seemed to understand what it was teaching them. I was very impressed. For example, they knew that their writing was getting better every time they blogged, the Nintendo D. S. was helping with math facts, the Wikis were helping with their alphabet, and through Skype they were able to communicate with other people. These are just some of the great things Ms. Cassidy was utilizing in her classroom.
You could tell that she had been teaching them responsible computer behavior. One little boy explained you couldn’t say anything mean on someone else’s blog. I am sure the process of utilizing all of the technology in a safe and productive manner takes some time. But even the children shared that they were now better problem solvers, better decision makers, and had learned to share! I think these could all be problems if not taught in the beginning.
It sounds as if her technology program sprang from necessity when she had to teach the children to use the internet in a safe way because her computers could not load programs. I had already wondered where she got the money for these things in her classroom and she was able to get funding through several resources. I also know that it takes time to keep up a web-page and monitor the progress of each student so I was glad to know they gave her some release time in which to do this. I loved her idea of using Twitter as a collaboration technique for not only for students in the classroom but relating to other teachers as well. The idea of having the students create their own school Facebook page different from their personal one is a great idea. It would be a very easy way to communicate with each other and post assignments. Most kids are going to check their Facebook when they get home anyway.

Blog Post #10

          Do you Teach or do you Educate? gives us a wonderful example of how becoming a teacher is not just about filling kids with our knowledge but helping to inspire the desire to learn and developing character and life-long skills along the way. The difference in teaching and educating is like comparing knowledge to wisdom. What good is having the ability and knowledge to do something but never knowing when and how to apply it?
          My desire to become a coach and P.E. teacher is not just about rules and how to play, nor is it all about winning and losing. I truly want to teach the importance of teamwork, perseverance, and pride. Coaching and teaching are just the tools I use to help develop the character of the students I teach and the boys I coach. I had the privilege of coaching my first basketball team as head coach this past season and it was one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. Not because we had a winning season, but because I had a small part in shaping the character of these boys into productive men. I really agree with the true meaning of this video, teaching is for the moment but educating is for a lifetime.
           Tom Johnson’s Don’t Let Them Take the Pencils Home is written in a comical way to make several points about why education systems that refuse to change, with the use of technology of today, are really doing more damage to their students instead of helping them. For years books, chalkboards, pencil and paper were the core tools of education. We have never thought twice about kids taking home paper and pencil “to learn” with but if you think about it, what are they learning? How to just write or spit back facts? A computer, when used wisely, can offer so much more to a student’s education. This entire course has shown us the value of embracing technology. It offers a new way of learning by engaging the learner in his/her own education. Technology offers a way to show that learning is taking place instead of rote facts remembered long enough to take a test.
          In reading other people’s responses to this article, I don’t think everyone understood that this really wasn’t about pencils being harmful. The harm is done when supervisors and administrators are under so much pressure for their schools to perform, that they instruct their teachers to basically “teach the test”. Why do they think that test scores really show the quality of a student’s education? It really just shows facts, rules and processes that students know but how does it show what they have “learned”? Most students are exposed to more technology at home than they are at school anyway and that can be a good thing if they learn at school the proper uses of technology and the responsibility that comes with it. Just like we have never returned to each child having a slate board and chalk after paper and pencil were invented, pencils and composition books cannot compete with the technological “notebooks” that are available today.

Blog Post #9

I read the blog entries of Mr. Joe McClung written on May 27, 2009 and June 15, 2011 to see if his view of teaching had changed very much over three years. On the latter blog post I noticed right away that he had added a picture of his students to the post which clearly showed him more at ease with technology. In both blogs he expresses the importance of the students. He reminds teachers that sometimes we teach lessons for our supervisors or instructors that are judging us and forget about whether the students comprehended anything or not. He reminds us to be reasonable with the expectations we set for our students and not set them up for failure. Not every lesson is going to go like we plan nor is it going to be perfect. In the last blog, he reminds us “not to touch the keyboard” because we will defeat the purpose of letting our kids learn by doing things themselves.
In both blogs he points out the need for communication between student and teacher and the teacher with other professionals. The only thing that really bothered me about the last blog is that he says he hangs out with his students and doesn’t really interact much with the rest of the faculty. I know this can be effective in relating to students but shouldn’t we interact on a professional level with our colleagues? I was surprised that he wrote that he was “immature” in this sense.
I do like the way in both blogs that he encourages teachers to never quit learning and to not get comfortable. His ideas of attending professional developments that seem interesting and being on committees that he has never served on are good ways of moving forward. It is very true that some teachers just become satisfied with what they do year after year and are never motivated or required to change. But like he points out, don’t let these kinds of teachers dampen your excitement to want to continue to learn new things and keep evolving into the best teacher you can be.

Project #14 Smart Board

C4T Summary

My third C4T was a teacher at Elsonar elementary school, Mrs. Martha. Both of my posts were very similar Art In Motion  and Art In Motion-Hippie Man were videos of her students editing project. It was a lot like our book trailer project #12. It was after a field trip to the Mobile Museum of Art where the students examined and discussed various works of art including collages. They thought it would be fun to create one of their own. They took an Ipad placed in a plastic bag with a hole cut out where the camera lens was and hung it right above where the table where they were working. They used colored construction paper to cut out characters and other objects needed in their story. The students then placed the characters where they needed them scene to scene. Then they took the footage they shot and used the editing tools to cut out and create an art in motion story. I thought this was really creative and very simple to use in the classroom. A great way to get students motivated and engaged to learn something new. On a reply post Mrs. Martha said the children were amazing and without fear. Because it is harder to teach an adult because they are afraid of the unknown and clicking buttons to find out what they do. Another cool thing was the second group of student’s “Hippie Man” was taught by one of the students from the first group. This is something I would really want to use and do with a class of my own.

C4K Summary Report for March

My C4K for March was a blog post by Zahra. This post was a short story from the point of view of character named Amy while camping. The character becomes scared upon waking in her tent while on a camping trip she planned with her father. As she woke up she saw fifty little spiders inside of the tent. She jumped with terror and woke up her mother. Amy’s mother ran out of the tent, jumped on her dad and left for home. I thought Zahra did a great job in her choice of words to describe the emotion of her story. This was great for capturing her audience as they read the short story. I encouraged her to continue writing and posting.