Exit Slip #3- What did i take away from class today?

Today I learned more about Racheal, Marissa, Tassie and Kelsey in their digital autobiographies. Then Tiffany and I presented chapter 2 which went really well. I need to work on slowing down when I am presenting information but other than that I think I did great. We came up with our inquiry questions and it became obvious to me that getting the input of 17 other people really helped to reassure me that I choose a good one. Scratch seems like it will be something I look back on and say "why did I think this was going to be so hard?". Right now it seems a little over whelming though. My character got stuck upside down at one point and then i accidentally deleted it. I plan on watching the resources in order to become better acquainted with the program.

Inquiry Question

How can teachers use social networking communities (SNCs) to promote cooperative learning?

Chapter 2 Prezi Presentation

Prezi Presentation

Visit these web sites and then answer the following questions:

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Link 4

Link 5

1)Who is providing the information? Why?

2)Does the site author have an authority in that field?

3)Is it clear when the site was developed and last updated?

4)Are there references used? Are they used with correct citations? Are they credible?

5)Is someone trying to sell a product or point of view?

6)What kind of site did it come from?

7)Is the language used inflammatory or extreme?

8)Is this a credible website?

Reflection- Chapter 2

Chapter 2 is the chapter that Tiffany and I will be presenting on so I feel that I learned quite a bit more from it than I would from a typical chapter I read in a text book. This is most likely because I’m only comfortable presenting something if I feel prepared, therefore I prepare myself for presentations fairly well. Basically this chapter was about how teachers should utilize the resources now available in their classrooms in order to promote effective, reflective, comprehensive learning with technology.

One of the biggest points in the chapter was about how to get students to successfully complete intentional information searching. According to the book students must first plan, use strategies to search, evaluate and triangulate sources in order to become competent in using the internet for information searches. I never really thought about having a lesson to teach students how to do research on line but it makes sense to me that this is a very important thing that must happen. There are so many crazy websites on the internet that I could see a naïve student being fooled into believing an outrageous accusation or simply an incorrect fact. Teaching students how to differentiate between credible and non credible sites will help them not only when doing research but in real life as well. Just as you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet, you shouldn’t believe everything people tell you. I feel that a strong background in checking and double checking facts and information will provide for a smarter, less gullible, future generation of students.

I’m not really sure how I feel about the idea of firewalls. Although I know there are many offensive, inappropriate websites out there I also agree that we are not “protecting” students form them by blocking them. We are, however, helping them realize that they shouldn’t be trying to get to them in places like school or the library. Maybe it would be a good idea to have a type of firewall that is given on a punishment basis. Provide full access to the internet for all students. When a student is caught breaking a rule then turn on the firewall for that particular student’s account. I can see how this would be an issue though since it would require each student having their own account and password although I foresee this happing in most schools in the future anyways.

Reflection- Digital Book Talk

I put quite a bit of effort into this digital book talk project. My first decision I had to make was which book to choose. I considered using an older children’s book because I hope to teach an older grade but I had a lot of difficulty coming up with ways to present a book digitally that didn’t have any pictures. This caused me to switch over to a children’s picture book for lack of a better reason than feeling like it would be easier to work with. I laid out all my books on my bed and slowly ruled them out one at a time until I was left with 2, The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash and Hey Al . Most of my books are from when I was a child and I treasure each one. I went with The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash because I felt that Hey Al was a little too strange of a book for me to be able to describe in 45 seconds.

This task gave me some more experience working with video makers, Windows Movie Maker to be more specific. I feel this is a valuable skill to have because it could help me in the future to create valuable lessons that I will be able to use in my classroom. These types of lessons could be helpful for my students because they will provide them with differentiated instruction. Using various mediums to teach helps to keep instruction more interesting and I feel that movies are a great way to mix it up. Also, the more I use these types of media creators the better I will become at making videos and the more I will learn about how to make the videos interesting and effective In a classroom.

Overall I enjoyed doing this project. It was surprisingly easy to use the Windows movie maker and I would be more than willing to try and use a different type of movie maker some time as well. I can already tell that I’m going to like doing most of the projects for this class and I look forward to learning about what it is we will be doing this week. One thing I didn’t like about my book talk was that I couldn’t figure out a way to use a music file as well as my audio file. I think I may have recorded my voice in the wrong file type and that’s why the program wouldn’t let me use more than one audio file at a time. If I had figured out a way to add music to the background of my digital book talk I would have been a little more satisfied with it. Other than that little bit, however, I felt that the book talk project went very well and I am happy with my work.

Reflection- Credibitily of Websites

I probably do not think about the authenticity of the websites I view often enough. To be honest though, I typically do not have a lot riding on the information I collect from the ones that I should be doubting more than I am. However, I do usually take websites with endings like .gov or .edu as more reliable than ones that end in .com and any information that I collect for things like school work or research I usually take from peer reviewed articles or authentic websites. I could not really think of a list of things I do to make sure a website is authentic so I did a little research by simply typing in “checking website authenticity” into a google search bar and thousands of pages came up. One such page was a yahoo answers page in which a person asked “How can I found out if a website is credible and accurate?” (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071212122051AAD1B7x). As unimpressive as the grammar and wording in the question was, yahoo user “liz t” received half a dozen responses to the question. One response that I particularly liked that I think I would use to help teach young learners about evaluating websites for credibility is for them to ask themselves the following questions:

1) Are there none or only a few advertisements?
2) Has the author of the article/webpage famous/heard of/reliable? Does the author have experience?
3) Is grammar and spelling correct?
4) Do they list sources or links to support this? Do they provide any follow-up websites for more info?

Even though these questions will help students determine whether or not a website is credible I feel that the most important thing that students can do to determine if a website is credible is to use their common sense when reading the information given to them. Taking the websites given to us, for example, a Northwest Tree Octopus is ridiculous. Also, checking facts against other reliable resources is a very important step for all students to take. I imagine we’ll be covering more on this in class because I feel like I should know more about it. I don’t really consider myself a fool for fake information and I even question information given to me from sources other than the internet such as magazines or conversation. One thing that is extremely convenient about the internet is that you can check the information you find against other websites with just a few clicks where as before the internet this process was much longer and more difficult to do.

Exit Slip #2- What did I take away from class today?

So today I decided to start taking down notes of things I thought were interesting. I easily forget information that I feel I should remember but oddly enough I always remember that there was something I didn't want to forget. It's a terribly frustrating feeling knowing you once knew something but not knowing what it was you knew...anyway, here are the notes I took and things I'm thinking about them now:

NOTES
Kindle in every backpack- replacing textbooks
Texas and California leading the way
-It would be so cool if i could have access to every textbook i've ever used. I do think there would be some sort of time limit on accessing certain books although book companies could just come up with newer editions and sell those.

Kidsonline video-
Kids are engaged in different ways
Instruction about how to use the Internet appropriately
Line computers up along outside walls
Kids find ways around firewalls- know your students and teach them to have online edict rather than being responsive-cyber ethics, cyber safety
Club penguin- online dangers start earlier than most think

Clicker-audience response systems
Spelling test via clicker
-I hope to be lucky enough to have this sort of class interaction tool. I'd want to ask all sorts of questions from my students. I would either keep the fact that i know who answers what to each question a secret or I would find a way to make submissions anonymous so that I could ask more sensitive questions. This way students would not answer how they think I would want them to but rather how they really feel.

Reflection- Preface and Chapter 1

I think it’s amazing how much our classes seem to be overlapping in regards to how education In Florida has changed to be directed toward “teaching to the test”. It makes sense to me that technology is no exception to this sad reality. However, there’s no avoiding the fact that standardized tests have a lot of power in our current school systems. Rather than resisting this though many of our textbooks, including this one, are coming up with creative ways of incorporating the skill necessary to learn the material required by the standards while at the same time maintaining influential, effective, creative and interesting instruction. I liked the example given in the preface about how to incorporate multiple standards in one lesson. The lesson they gave was obviously a very well thought out plan since it included every standard that had to be met. I hope to be able to use these types of lessons in my classroom because they seem like an effective way to teach the standards but at the same time maintain student interest and creativity.

One section of chapter 1 that I particularly liked was under the constructive (articulative/reflective) attribute. In this section Jonassen et al say that it is essential that “learners articulate what they have accomplished and reflect on their activity and observations to learn the lessons that their activity has to teach”. Earlier today I was complaining to a coworker about having to reflect on everything we do in this class. My coworker thoughtfully paused and then told me how she wished she was made to make time for reflection of each of her assignments. This really hit home for me and made me change my opinion right there and then and realize just how much I have taken reflection for granted! I think that I will have my students contribute a similar type of reflection that we are doing following the assignments I give them. Not only so I can see their reaction to the assignments but so that they can benefit from the lessons to the fullest.

I also enjoyed reading the part of the chapter about how technologies foster thinking. It helped me realize that technology use cannot be productive and meaningful if it is taught in the traditional way and that “Students should learn with technologies, not from them”. This statement made sense to me because it would be a waste of time for teachers to spend a year teaching students how to use a particular technology when a new and improved version comes out just about every year. Rather, if we teach our students how to learn technology then they will become much more self sufficient after they’re done with school and thus more likely to succeed.

Reflection- Digital Autobiography

I put about 30 minutes into completing my digital autobiography. I know that time and effort don’t have the biggest correlation though because I’ve spent hours reading and rereading the same page of a book before with little to no effort. For lack of a better way to measure effort, I would say I put about 65% effort into completing this task. I took a few minutes to look at all 4 options that were given to us to create the autobiography. I had used voice thread before and I hate hearing my own voice so I decided against that one. Photoshow seemed like a good enough website and I liked the options for editing each image. Vuvox required a login name and I didn’t want to make an account so I just glanced at the main web page before I decided to not use that program. I ended up choosing Animoto because I was really impressed with the video that Jeff showed us during class and it seemed like the easiest program to work with.

I really liked how Animoto let you upload photos from various locations, including facebook, and I used this feature to choose several photos from the album I had from my trip to Ireland. I think I spent the most amount of time on looking for music to accompany my video. I had an idea that I wanted an Irish drinking song to play with my video but most of the ones I could find online were poor quality. Luckily my mom knows just about every irish drinking song there is and she recommended one that I had learned to play on my violin when I was younger, the Irish Washer Woman. Once the music was picked the program made the video for me and it turned out way better than I expected.

Completing this task was valuable because it introduced me to several video design programs that I had little to no knowledge of before. This alone, I feel, was a beneficial impact on my future teaching because it added to my list of technological resources that I am familiar with. In order to use technology effectively, teachers must have a wide selection of technological resources that they are comfortable using. It’s one thing to know what a program can do but only through experiencing the use of a program can someone truly have competence in using it in instruction. I look forward to using more programs and technologies that I have not used before in this class. I also think that by giving assignments that require us to use these technologies is a great start in becoming fluent in them.

Reflection- Growing Up Online

This wasn’t the first video I’ve seen about how the internet is changing the way kids grow up. We’ve been exposed to several since our first semester in proteach and I’ve seen many TV shows regarding this ever growing issue. The fact that 90% of teenagers have regular access to the internet is not surprising to me and I expect this number to increase by the time I become a teacher. There’s no doubt in my mind that many people feel this is a bad thing but to me, that’s irrelevant. The fact is that kid’s love technology and they’re really great at using it. Therefore, I hope to use this love of the internet, online games, chatting, text messaging and everything else to help my students enjoy learning when in my classroom.

This video didn’t impact my thinking about technology’s role in the lives of young learners all that much because it’s been a hot topic for some time. It did, however, give me some more great ideas about how to incorporate technology into my future classroom. I absolutely love the idea of podcasting lessons so that students can refresh themselves on the material. Also, answering questions via the computer or text message sounds like so much more fun than “raise your hand if you think it’s A”. Also, although the internet has made it easier for students to find sources to plagiarize from, websites like turnitin.com have really helped teacher combat this. My high school teachers used turnitin.com for a majority of our papers and the fear of being caught “in the red zone” really encouraged me to cite my sources and choose my paraphrasing wisely.

The mother in the video hit the nail on the head when she said “online is a continuation of [our kids] existence”. I think it’s really important that parents realize this. Young people love myspace, facebook, youtube and all of the current hot spots on the internet. One thing I don’t understand is why more parents are not taking advantage of this knowledge and using it to achieve whatever it is they’re looking for from their children. Resisting technology is useless and the sooner a person hops on board with the current advances the less behind they will be. Although this type of relationship may not be exactly what some parent’s had in mind, I feel that parents and teachers should embrace what the future generations are interested in because they’re living in the same world and technology is not going away. As the video said, the internet “has created the biggest generation gap since rock and roll” and rock and roll doesn’t seem to be fading any time soon.

New Thinking from Class today

-Game boys are more than just brain rotters, mom
-I have a lot to learn about using technology effectively in my classroom
-I want to check out video podcasts
-In plain english-helpful tool
-Delicious seems useful but use it or lose it
-It's easy to stay awake when you're freezing
-They're not all called smart boards

What is technology’s role in teaching and learning?

Technology plays a crucial role in teaching and learning. Just as teaching practices have evolved throughout time to better assist student’s learning, technology has evolved to do the same thing. Teachers who avoid technology are doing their student’s an injustice. At the same time, however, teachers who are not prepared to use certain technological advances can actually hinder their students success if they try to use them. Wasting time during class to try and “figure out” how a specific technology works is just as bad as showing up to class without the correct class materials. Therefore, teachers should be exposed to technology training and be encouraged to investigate technology on their own. This training will help teachers use technology in a positive way.