Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts Chapter 7

Flickr is something that I find has potential for great educational learning. I like the idea of being able to take photos and tag separate parts of the photo to annotate whatever you want. This seems like a very useful learning tool because either I or my students can upload annotated photos to explain what the pictures are about. For instance, I could have my student’s take a photo of their diagrams and then label the different parts of the diagram to tell me what it is and why it is important to the diagram. An example for me is that I could take my own photos such as a wild life photo and then label some of the different things that are in the photo such as plants or animals. I could put together a slide show of perhaps scenes from around the school and then annotate them with what each thing is. This would help connect my students with learning, their immediate environment, and technology. I could then have my student leave comments on my photos or their classmate’s photos and carry out discussions on them, kind of like a question/ answer session for each photo. The possibilities are endless with Flickr and it is constantly changing.

Interactive White Board Lesson

This project was a really good way to start getting acclimated to using SMART Notebook and making my own lesson plan with this new technology. There are so many different things that not only I can do with the lesson based on its use with a SMART Board, but also just within the software. There are so many templates, pictures, games and other useful activities/ tools that are available. Also, I like that I can go onto SMART Exchange and look at others work or even use them in the future when I’m teaching.

I learned a lot just through playing around with this new software and I feel comfortable making a very basic Notebook file. There is so much more I can do with this program that I’m sure I don’t even know about yet but it is something that I look forward to learning via workshops, online resources and my peers.

In my particular lesson I chose to do a lesson on the U.S. States because I remembered learning about the states in 5^th grade myself and remembered how boring it was. I believe through a fun interactive technology, like through the use of an Interactive white board, students will become more engaged and not only learn a lot faster but also retain what they are learning. I chose to go over some basic states things such as postal labeling, location of each state, their capital, which ones were part of the original 13 colonies, and some basic facts like which one is the largest and the smallest. These are all basic trivia that I remember having to learn while going over the states.

Social Bookmarking with Delicious

I believe that using a bookmarking site is much more beneficial because not only can you look up sites that you have saved on any computer via the internet but it also allows you to see what others are bookmarking that might be relevant to your interests. I also like how Delicious categorizes and organizes all my bookmarks based on what I tagged them as. The tagging feature is nice because it allows me to save a site based on key words that I will use and remember. In addition to that I can also add some notes as a shore description to further describe what the site is. This I valuable for later, when I want to go back and find a site, I don’t have to look at each site again. All I need to do is just read my short summary or note of what each site is. This is a much more efficient and effective way to save sites that I might want to recall later versus booking marking them on only my computer.

Exiting Post (Week 14, 12/13/10)

Today we spent some time wrapping up everything we learned and was instructed to find 3 ways to incorporate some of the new technology ideas into our classroom. It was interesting to see what my peers said they would use in their classroom and compare it to what I myself plan on using. The other thing I liked is it really got me thinking about how much of this class I’m going to take away, will use in my class and how much I actually learned/ feel comfortable using. The previous post is my list of how I will use technology in my classroom.

Overall, even though this class was hard and I felt that the workload was on the heavy side, looking back now I feel like I learned a lot and I’m taking away valuable information. I feel comfortable using at least half of the things I’ve learned during this semester in my classroom and I feel like having a head start or a look into the other half will be good for the future for if I choose to use that idea in my classroom. This was a real eye opener into how influential technology can be and what is out there.

How I Will Use Technology In My Classroom

My class is in an upper elementary level somewhere between 4-6 grades. These are a few ideas that I have to use in my classroom to help promote learning in my classroom:

1)      Class wiki/ blog

-My goal as a teacher is to provide a resource for my students and their parents/ guardians that they can go to see what is going on in my classroom. This will primarily be used to post our class rules/ expectations, due dates, assignments, notes, learning resources and act as an additional place to find school newsletters and other important school news.

2)      The use of interactive whiteboards

-In my class I have a SMART Board. This has enhanced my classroom tenfold because it bring the best of both worlds together, whiteboards and projectors. This teaching tool allows me to allow my students to become more interactive in their learning in a variety of ways such as the programs that are available with the SMART Board software, SMART exchange, lesson plan resources provided by book publishers, etc.

3)      Digital projects (PowerPoint, video, collaborative wiki, etc.)

-I believe it is essential to make learning fun and also include technology into the classroom. By doing “digital projects” with my students it allows me to take these two ideas and put them into on great way of learning. There are many ways to do this which with some guidance, creativity and ample time, I believe that this is a great way to learn because it makes the content more personal.

Exiting Post (12/6/10, Week 13)

While watching a video I saw how useful a SMART Board can be in increasing participation and cooperative collaboration/ learning). The particular teacher in the video used a lot of technology in her classroom with a lot of computer use in it. She did things like Blogging, not only for herself but she also had her students have their own blogs. The teacher had a blog that gave assignment dates, and was informing what was happening in the classroom. Another thing that she had her students do was online collaboration with both their classmates and peers in other parts of the world in a variety of different ways such as using their blogs. In short, everything that is being done today was done in the past, the only thing that has changed is HOW we do it, we have moved to a new and more modern medium. What we need to ask ourselves is; does technology allow me to do things I haven’t been able to do before? And can I improve what I’ve done in the past but make them better by using technology?

PSA Project

This project was interesting to make. Part of the battle for this project was finding something that was relevent to PK-12 students. We finally decided on hitting on Facebook a little because it is one of those sites that if not used properly and appropriatly, it can get users in some very serious trouble. Most younger users do not realize that what they upload onto their Facebook page can be potentially be seen by anyone and once they post something online it stays on their forever. We had two primary concerns with this PSA. One, was to inform them that posting things online is very serious and perminant,  and two, was to make users aware that there are privacy settings that they can control to adjust who can see what.

Aside from all the content we learned related to the video, this project was very insightful on how to make and produce our own video. This might be a skill we coud use later down the road in the future, and something that we could share with our students.