Blog Post #16 Final Reflection

Final Reflection

 

Blog Post #14 & #15

Blog Post #14

Over the course of the semester, I have improved on Project Based Learning. I would normally dislike classes that require a lot of work, but actually doing work outside of class is what helps you the most. Doing a lot of work in a class is what helps you learn things because you are actually involved in everything. One of my strengths is definitely being interested in learning Project Based Learning and being able to learn as you go. I usually like knowing as much as I can before actually doing things, but it is so much easier to learn as you go through a class. I also enjoy helping children learn so that is definitely a strength for me going into Elementary Education. A weakness that I definitely need to work on is being more serious with students. It is a lot of fun to play games in class and to have fun while learning, but you do have to get serious at times. I know that overtime I will get better at it.

Blog Post #15

How to Make an Audio QR Code 

In this video, Mrs. Bennett talks about making a QR code for audio. You can record your voice reading something that you can play for the students to later listen to and students can even record themselves talking. When you save the recording that you like, the website will make it into a URL code that students can go to to listen your recording. 

iPad Reading Center

In this video a teacher tells us about a reading center that she has her students do. The students record themselves reading a book with their iPads and have the chance to listen to themselves read and follow along with the video. I think this is a great way to help students with their reading in the classroom.

Using Poplet in Centers

Poplet is an app that the students can use to make a web of a book that they choose. The students then take pictures of what they want to put in the web and write a sentence about the picture that they took.

Alabama Virtual Library in a Kindergarten Class

Alabama Virtual Library is an app that the students can download to their iPads. They students were taught how to use the app in their school library so that they can do it own their own. The students can look up different things and learn from watching or listening to videos about what they searched. This is great for all grade level school students to use as a source while doing research.

iMovie Trailer for Kindergarten

In this video, Mrs. Tuck shows us how to make an iMovie Trailer. We made a book trailer as an assignment earlier in the semester and I enjoyed making it. This is something that is great for students to do after they read a book because then they can show it classmates. One thing that is a great idea when starting to make the trailer is to let the students listen to the music that they can choose from to make the trailer, but do not tell them what it is called. Some students may want to use certain music just because of the name of it. Making book trailers is definitely an activity/project that I will have my future students do.

Discovery Education Board Builder

Students are able to make their own board about something they learn in class. In this video students create a board for a moon project that they are doing in class. They can add, images, videos, and facts about what their topic is. The students are able to get their videos and images from Discovery Education.

Mrs. Tassin's 2nd grade students share Board Builders Part 1 and Part 2

In these two videos, Mrs. Tassin has a few of her students showing their Board Builders that they made for her class. Board Builder looks like a great way for students to research different things and have them present it to help with their public speaking.

Twitter for Educators

In this video, Dr. Strange interviews two teachers from Daphne Elementary School and Gulf Shores Elementary School. Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Bennett talk about how Twitter helped them as educators. You can learn so much from Twitter! Being in a chat is definitely a great way to learn new things.

C4Tp (Permanent) #4

In Mrs. Silvia Tolisano's blog post, Back to the Future Project: Life Cycle Snapshots in Target Language, she talks about another teacher's project that she had her students do in her class. The students were practicing different languages and life cycles. The students were assigned to make fake Facebook profiles for the people they had and the page needed to include birthday,  school and college years, work, and retirement. They had to have pretty much their whole life on it, but not every detail. They just needed to have the important part in it. They also needed snapshots of different times of their life including: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and retirement. I really like this idea and it helps the students be creative when making up people.

In her blog post, Building Good C.U.L.T.U.R.E. Mrs. Silvia Tolisano shows the conversation she had with a few people on Twitter. Dan McCabe came up with the acronym Collaborate, Understand, Love, Trust, Unite, Respect, Empower. I think these are all great things that students and teachers should be able to do.

C4Ta #4

The first blog post I read for this assignment was Mrs. Hadley's Almost Boring! She talks about how towards the end of the year when her class talks about changes in Europe, she gets her students to write diary posts. The first post is before the Black Plague hit and the second after it passed. When it comes time for this assignment she lets the students do it how they want and let them take over. She calls herself a 'resource' when it comes time for the students to write the posts. Since it is the end of the year, the students are able to do this assignment on their own and they only asked her to proofread things to make sure they were doing correct. It is great that the students are able to do an assignment on their own and able to do it correctly. I think it is a great way to see how much the students learned over the course of the school year.

The second blog post that I read for this assignment was Mrs. Hadley's Just Laugh. In her blog post she talks about how it was great coming back to school from a break and seeing her kids. The second day after coming back the students were not serious about an activity that Mrs. Hadley had planned for them. Before the break the class was talking about the empire of Mali in West Africa. The students were acting silly because while reading they would mispronounce words that foreign to them. She had wanted the students to take the activity serious but did not want to be the grouchy teacher. She then decided to help the students pronounce the words correctly and then the students helped other groups that were mispronouncing the words as well. I think she handled the situation very well. At times you may want to just tell the students to be serious and to act right, but sometimes you just have to put a smile on your face and handle situations different than how you would want to. At the end of the day it is better that a teacher does not fuss at the students. The students will still  have an interest in what they are learning and have fun with  it.

Blog Post #5 Part 2

Final Summary of Personal Learning Network

Symbaloo was the easiest Personal Learning Network tool that I could find. I added different networks that I use almost everyday. Symbaloo helps you have easy access to things on one page. One thing I really liked about Symbaloo is that it keeps me signed into all of my apps that I have on my Personal Learning Network. It is so much easier to not have to log back in every time I want to look at something on an app. It has many different apps and websites already on the Symbaloo account and it is much better that there are so many different websites that you can go to with just one click.

Blog Post #13

What Did I Leave Out?

A blog post assignment that could be used in future EDM310 classes would be for them to find at least two teachers that are in the subject area that the student plans to teach. The students will need to check and make sure that the teachers they choose post often and are currently posting. This will give the students a chance to follow a blog that may be more interesting. The students will then post each week about something they found interesting in the blog post and what they may use in their future classroom.

One way that most students will look for the blog is to search Google. I typed in "Elementary School teacher blog." One site that I found is Top 25 Elementary School Teacher Blogs of 2012. One of the blogs that I found interesting is 4 the Love of Teaching. The two current blogs that she has posted are guest bloggers that post on their own blogs that had their own different ideas of activities to do in the classroom. These two blogs have great lessons that you can use in your classroom and I will probably use a couple of them in my own classroom.

The other blog that I found interesting is Busy Bees. This blog is by two teachers: Robynn Drerup, a Kindergarten teacher, and SueBeth Arnold, a second grade teacher. Many of their blogs are different activities you can do in the classroom. The two most recent posts that are posted on their blog is from a conference that one of the teachers went to. From what she has posted, it seems like she is going to take away many ideas that were given at the conference.

This assignment is similar to C4Ts but I would have enjoyed having this assignment than the way the C4T is set up.

Project #12 Part B

Lesson for Kindergarten learning Shapes

Blog Post #12

What assistive technologies are available to you as a teacher?

The first three sources that we were given for this blog post were Assistive Technologies for Vision and Hearing Impaired Children, Apple Assistive Technologies  and The Mountbatten. These three sources give us different technologies that can be used in the classroom to help vision and hearing impaired students. The Assistive Technologies video talks about how there are so many children that are vision or hearing impaired. The video seems to be a motivation video to make a difference and be able to have these students do what the other students are doing and to not let them be completely limited. The Apple Assistive Technology source was a website that showed different accessories that you can get for an iPad that students can use in the classroom to help them. The Mountbatten video is about the Mountbatten Braille Writer that helps blind students be able to respond in the classroom. When the student brailles, the student announces what the machine is typing in Braille. This machine is able to save files and also send files to a computer. This machine can be helpful in the classroom, especially if a teacher does not know braille. It will help the teacher know what the student is typing because it says it out loud. Both assistive technologies sources will be great to have handy in the classroom because it will help students be able to not have any limitations in the classroom.

iPad Usage For the Blind and Teaching Mom What Her Deaf/Blind Child is Learning On the iPad are both videos that discuss that an iPad has different features that allow sight impaired people to use them just as anyone else would. One can swipe their finger across the homescreen and an automated voice would read aloud the names of the apps and what one should do to use and access them. For example, in iBooks, the automated voice will read aloud the book chosen, as well as tell you the chapter you are reading, and also read aloud the different functions in iBooks that are available on each page of the book such as “Library button” or “Table of Contents”. For our future students that may have sight disabilities we can provide headphones so that those students can have the automated voices speak to them during class without disrupting other students. We would want our disabled students to enjoy school and get the most out of our classes, just as any other student would. 

In Teaching Math to The Blind a professor at the University of San Francisco talks about a device that he created to help blind students solve simple and advanced math problems. The device is a grid that holds small square pieces. The square pieces has a number written on one side and on the other side the same number is written in braille. With this device teachers are able to teach math to blind students at a younger age. I think that this device would be very useful to me in my classroom. The device will help the blind students model and solve math problems just as a sighted student would.

In the 50 Must See Blogs for Special Education Teachers, there are tons of blogs that could be helpful to any teacher, not just special education. Teaching All Students was a great resource to look at. It had many blog post added weekly that contained different tools that teachers may need. In Dyslexia My Life, Girard Sagmiller shares about his struggle with dyslexia and gives teachers advice on how to teach children with dyslexia. Special Education and Disability Rights Bog is an important blog to review because it explains different legal issues you may face as a special education teacher. My Special Needs Network could be a very helpful blog for teachers. It is a group of blogs from teachers AND parents that could greatly help you understand how to help a child because you don’t only have a teachers view but also a parent view! 

Blog Post #11

What can we learn about teaching and learning from these teachers?

In his video, TEDxDenverEd-Brian Crosby- Back to the Future, Brian Crosby talks about different projects he used for project based learning in his class. One of the projects that I really liked is when his students sent off balloons. They connected a GPS to the balloon and kept up with the balloon on Google Maps. They are able to learn about maps and distances.

In his video, Blended Learning Cycle, Paul Andersen talks about how he uses the blended learning cycle in his class. The blended learning cycle consists of blended learning and the learning cycle. Blended learning is the combination of online, mobile and classroom learning. The learning cycle consists of the 5 E's: Explore, Explain, Expand, Engage and Evaluate. He came up with an acronym for the blended learning cycle: Q.U.I.V.E.R.S. Which stands for Question, Investigate/Inquiry, Video, Elaboration, Review, Summary quiz. This a great idea of Project Based Learning for Science.

In the video, Making Thinking Visible, Mark Church talks about a project he had his sixth grade class do. In the project he had his students watch a video about early human beginnings. They have to come up with a headline to summarize what the whole puzzle is about the beginning. He put up the headlines in the classroom and when they finish the whole lesson the students come up with another headline. At the end of the whole project the student will get to see how it all changed.

In the video, Super Digital Citizen, Sam Pane talks to his fifth grade class about how to be a good digital citizen. The main point he is trying to make to the students is how to use the internet safely and responsibly. The project that the students get to do is make their own digital citizen superhero. He first shows them the basic way of making their superhero and then let them go on and make their own superhero. They also get to create the citizen and put them in a real life situation that occurs online like cyber-bullying and putting person information online. They end up getting to make a comic story that their superhero gets to come in and save the day. This project is a way that Mr. Pane uses to help the students reach the English standards that they have to meet. The students then got to walk around and see what all their classmates did for their comic. This is definitely a great way of using Project Based Learning. The students had fun with it and they also got to learn how to use the internet safely.

In the video, Project Based Learning by Dean Shareski, three teachers talk about how they restructured their classroom to incorporate Project Based Learning. They would plan to spend more time doing a project or be able to spend more time researching to make their end result better. Some students would think that they were done with their project, but when the teacher would tell them that they can make it better and that they students could present their project in a great way. Some students would spend more time fixing it and were proud that they fixed it and enjoy the end result of their project. The teachers gave the students more time in the class and let their classmates read the project so that the one who made the project could fix different places. Many students liked how the teachers organized the project and would like to do more projects like it.

In the video, Roosevelt Elementary's  PBL Program, teachers from Roosevelt Elementary talk about how they incorporate project based learning in their classroom. They teach the students real world things that they will use in the real world. A kindergarten teacher has her students making presentations so that their public speaking skills can improve.

C4Tp (Permanent) #3

The first C4Tp blog post I had to read for this week was Silvia Tolisano's The Possibilities of Student Blogging. On this blog she actually has a video talking about different ways that one of her colleagues, Andrea Hernandez, uses blogging in her classroom. One way that I thought was a great idea to use in the classroom is quad-blogging. With quad-blogging there are four different classrooms around the world that work with each other in blog posts. One class will write a blog bout something and the other three classes will comment on it different ways that the student can edit their post to make it better. Each week the classes switch out who writes the blog and who comments on them. I believe that this is a great way for students to improve their writing skills because they are getting more feedback from other students that are not only their classmates, but students from around the world. It also gives them the chance to meet other students.

The second C4Tp that I read for this week was Silvia Tolisano's Documenting FOR Learning.Mrs. Tolisano has always been a documenter and documents different things for her family. he says that documenting is heutagogy (a supporting piece for the study of self-determined learning) and pedagogy (a strategy, approach and technique to facilitate learning).  She gives a list of how she sees documenting including a process of intentional documenting serves a metacognitive purpose and being open for feedback. She later on lists different ways teachers, students and school can use documenting for learning. One point that is a way for teachers to use documenting is to make teaching available outside of the classroom for the students. The reason I like that one is because sometimes students forget to write something down during a lecture and want to find out what it was that they missed. One way students can use documenting is to become aware of their own learning growth. It is good for students to be able to see their progress in school.

C4Ta #3

The first bog post that I read for my C4Ta was William Chamberlain's I Admit it, I Am Biased. I Prefer Classroom Teacher Led Sessions. He talks about how when he goes to a conference he would like to hear from a teacher that actually uses the tools in their classroom that are being talked about. He has been to multiple conferences that the speaker is not even a teacher that uses the new tool that they are presenting. He also says that whenever he presents at a conference he wants to take his own experience and talk about it. I think that you would get more out of a conference when the tool being introduced is presented by a teacher that actually uses the tool. When a teacher actually uses the tool they can bring their own experience and give different examples of how they use it in the classroom. If the presenter does not actually use the tool in their classroom then they can't exactly tell you how you can use it in the classroom.

The second blog post that I had read was William Chamberlain's Why Do I Have to Learn History? In the post he talks about how a little question can make you have to sit and actually think hard about the answer. There is no exact answer to this question and everyone has their own answer to why they think that they have to learn History. I have also answered this question in an earlier blog post.



 

Blog Post #10

What can we learn from Mrs. Cassidy?

The first video I watched was Little Kids... Big Potential. The students in Ms. Cassidy's first grade class talked about different tools they used in their classroom. While watching the video it  looked and sounded like the students really enjoyed using technology in the classroom. One thing I saw in the video that would something I might use in my future classroom is skyping with experts. In the video, Ms. Cassidy's class were skyping with a geologist and she talked to the class about different rocks.

In the first part of the interview that Dr. Strange had with Ms. Cassidy, she talks about using technology in the classroom. About five years ago, her classroom was given five computers and decided to use them as centers since there were not enough for each student to use. One downside to the computers given to the classroom was that you could not download any programs onto them, but Ms. Cassidy decided to make a class blog so the students were able to use the laptops to learn and review different things. She also has much support behind her including administrators above her in the school system. She also has support from the students' parents, which is always a plus since it is their children involved in the blog. The parents are able to go onto the class blog and see the their child's progress in school. This is one way I would definitely think about using in the classroom because the parents can check their child's progress in school whenever they want to. The parents do not have to wait for a progress report or a report card, they can just go to the class blog and look.

In the second part of the interview Ms. Cassidy talks about how she does not use technology in her personal life. She admits that she just recently made a Facebook account only because she could not access some websites because you have to sign in through Facebook. She believes that technology is a great tool for teachers to use in the classroom.

In the third part of the interview students in EDM310 actually ask Ms. Cassidy questions. The first student asks how often she uses the blog in the classroom. She starts to explain that it depends on the year and who all she has to help to see how often she uses it. She says that some of her students even blog from home and that those students tend to blog more than others.She also talks about how when the students first start using the computers she explains to them where they should go so that they do not go to the wrong sites. She said that that is the best way to keep them on the sites that they are suppose to be on.

Project #10 Interview Movie

Interview Movie