Reflection- Inquiry Wiki

I put a considerable amount of effort into my technology inquiry wiki. Although I could have put more effort into working on it throughout the semester over the past few weeks I have been working on it semi regularly. I think that the value of completing my wiki is less than the value of everyone completing their wikis as a whole. Although mine helped inform me as the the answer to my inquiry question I think the overall resource to access everyone's wiki's in the future will be much more valuable to me as a teacher. Although I wouldn't really assign this exact assignment to my future classrooms, I think that wiki pages in general would be really beneficial. In fact, i learned about this specifically in my inquiry investigation. I found that students are most likely to respond positively to social networking that allows for individuality but group cohesion at the same time. Since wiki's allow students to create their own pages but still be apart of the classroom page I think they would be very beneficial in the classroom. One way that I might implement them would be in a big topic unit study assignment. It would be neat to have a page on the basics of the unit and then branches of the page assigned out to each student to investigate more specific aspects of the unit. For example on a unit of animals there could be groups assigned to pages on the types of animals and then each group member could have their own page on a specific animal as well.  

One way that I think this assignment could be improved upon in future courses would be to have required benchmarks along the way. I think that if i had felt like I was required to be working on the project as our class progressed I would have been more on top of it before the end of the semester. I know you told us we should have been working on it but I admit that I procrastinated anyways. I was also surprised how quickly you graded them and really appreciate it because it lived a big weight off my chest about if I had anything else to do for the semester. Thank you for a wonderful semester Jeff, i truly learned a lot of really helpful technological resources from you and hope to continue learning more in the future.

Final Last never again reflecting on this blog post

Class is OVERRRR and that's really exciting because it means that summer is nearly here. I really enjoyed this class and I'm sad that I wont be learning fun new technology tips and tricks every week from Jeff but I'm positive that my technological horizon has not been reached by a long shot. I really hope to take what i've learned from this class and apply it to my future classroom because I know how much studen't love technology. My thinking about technology hasn't changed too much throughout this course because I've always though it was necessary for teachers to untilize the technologies that were available to them. I still think that there's a lot that can be done in schools to familiarize teachers to the resources that the school has to offer. Obviously this process has begun by exposing perservice teachers to the benefits of using technology to teach. There are a bunch of teachers who, for lack of a better word, are old and resistant to technology because they aren't used to it and the idea of changing the curriculum that they've had for years is scarry or unappealing to them. I think that once this group of teachers retires and the fresh more accepting of technology teachers take their place our school systems will change dramatically. Until then I plan on using, learning and teaching others about things that our technological world has to offer.

Reflection- Podcast

I always thought that in order to create a podcast you had to have all kinds of expensive tools and lots of sound editing skills. After creating one, however, i realize that anyone with a microphone can make one easily and fairly quickly. In fact I spent the majority of my time working on the script for my pod cast and hardly any time actually  putting it together. I think podcasting would be an effective tool for a classroom because it's a very creative and fun way for students to explore various topics. I think an assignment involving podcasting could be for just about any subject whether it be creating a story, reporting on a recent news event,  or exploring a science topic. I think students would really enjoy creating podcasts because they could show off what they learned to their peers with a presentation of all the podcasts that the class made.

I think there are other ways podcasts could be beneficial in a classroom as well. It would be pretty easy to make announcements to parents via podcast that are a lot more personal than an e-mail or a letter home. Also, it would be a good way for teachers to post their lectures online so that students who missed class could have access to the material. This may be more beneficial for older students but it's similar to the e-learning tool that several classes at UF have. I'm sure teachers spend a significant amount of time trying to get students who miss class caught up where as a podcast of the day would be a fairly easy homework assignment that could be posted hours after a schhol day is over.

inquiry question information

for the best practices I should focus on what are the best ways to use social networking sites to promote collaborative learning in the classroom. It's a synthesis of the sources we've found and the tools we've discovered and how they will be used to answer our inquiry question. Most important part of the paper.

Paragraphs are fine but a bulleted list would work as well. It doesn't have to be written like a traditional resource paper and wikis traditionally are not that way. organize it in a way that makes sense. Just make sure the information is conveyed in a way that I want them to be shown.


Additional Resources: websites that list resources, If reader wants to learn more where can they go to find more information, best sources, could come from formal/informal sources but they shouldn't be the same list. Just the best ones.


Informal: Teacher blog, something from a website, podcast. Not formal b/c there's no peer review or review process
Formal resources: scholarly sources found in articles, journals, etc.

Screencasting:
use jing

30 seconds on introduction
no more than a minute on additional resources
bulk of presentation on best practices

Exit Slip #10 - What did I take away from class today

We learned about some pretty cool things today. I liked working with the clickers but Sarah and I had covered most of the information about them that we covered when we were doing our chapter presentation at the start of the semester. I bookmarked a ton of things in my delicious account. I'm glad we set those up. It's obvious that using it thoughtfully will result in me becoming a better teacher in the end because of all the handy and FREE resources that we store on it. I liked the cool tool presentations also today especially wordle because it let me create a word cloud of whatever I want. I saved my picture to drunken llama but here it is

Pretty neat. Amanda's presentation was very entertaining but she's always pretty entertaining. Then we learned about stopmotion animation and worked on our awesome animation project together.

Chapter 10- A reflection

Chapter 10 “assessing meaningful learning with technology” is about how technology can be a means of conducting learner assessment. I feel that I’ve experienced a lot of technological assessment since I’ve been in school but this chapter did introduce me to a few that I never really had thought of before. The chapter emphasizes that technology can allow teachers to assess more frequently and provide more and better feedback to learners to improve their performance. I like this idea about assessing more frequently although I don’t think traditional ways of assessment, or tests, should be more frequent but rather an overall process of gathering and analyzing data to determine if the students have achieved the learning outcome that was desired.

From reading this chapter I have definitely learned that assessment in school is not an option. It's something that has been occurring since schools first started but since the big hype over standardized tests has started assessment has gotten a very bad wrap in school systems. For a parent, teacher or student to say that assessment is bad would be foolish. There are better ways to administer assessments though than the traditional way. This chapter offered ideas for assessing what students know using different applications of technology. All of them were given with the potential to harness meaningful learning. Perhaps more important than this, however, was the fact that these ideas are meant to provide a window into discovering what learners really know while providing rich information that can be organized into meaningful feedback to learners that can improve performance. I agree with the chapter that this type of assessment would be much more beneficial for students in the long run because it assesses long-term information rather than how well they can memorize in order to pass.

Exit Slip #9 What did I take away from class today

-Jeff looks funny in animation
-the chapter presentation gave me some great resources for my math class and future classroom.
-you can use your ipod to cheat! Why that never occured to me before I have no idea. in 7th grade my friend Lindsay would listen to the radio on her walkman by putting the headphone up the sleeve of her sweater and then leaning her head onto her hand. I bet this would be effective to listening to a podcast will all the information to a test also.
-e-mail etiquette is something that has to be covered at some point or everyone will start writing e-mails with lol's, omg's and wuts up in them.
-twiddla has a fun sandbox tool that lets us draw to one another
-live mocha is an interactive language learning website
- Inquiry question is looming over me. I need to get to work on that