the end

I will take a great deal from this class to heart as I pursue a career in teaching.  I can’t wait to further explore technological applications in my classroom.  I want my classroom to be a place where children feel safe enough to risk reaching out and sharing their work with the world.  I can do this by connecting my class to the internet – creating a class website for instance.  I can help my students create Google Docs accounts so that they can learn to collaborate responsibly in and outside of class. 

The responsibility factor is one that will create challenges for both teacher and students.   A critical part of incorporating technology in the classroom is teaching responsible and appropriate use of equipment.  I will also have to teach my kids how to work together ethically and respectfully.  The internet and technology give me a ton of opportunities to teach these life skills.

I am excited to see where technology will take us as we create and share class-work!  One lesson that I have learned again and again in this class is that technology should never be used as an excuse for bad teaching.   A good teacher can make her children feel secure and engage them in learning with or without technology.

week 13

Tech Article Presentations

I learned a lot from watching everyone’s presentations!  One general comment I wanted to make is that technology allowed for dynamic creativity in this project.  Opening up our options to include music, video, prezi, and glogster really opened me up to do something I wouldn’t normally do in a classroom setting.  Once again I am growing in my understanding of technology!

I liked Sarah’s prezi.  There was a lot of information and it took me a second to figure out how to navigate but I learned plenty!  I especially enjoyed learning from the videos that she included in her prezi.  I was surprised to learn that skype is free and easy to install.  I didn’t know that!  Also I was surprised to learn that you don’t need a webcam?  How cool!  I was intrigued by the teacher that talked about learning skype on a personal level first so that you know how to use it already when the stakes are higher (in the classroom).  What good advice! 

Joe’s and Josh’s presentations got me thinking about how big a change occurs in the classroom when the internet is integrated.  Just a simple connection to the internet (which like Josh says in his song is not cheap) can open the classroom up to include the whole world.  Even though the cost of a broadband internet connection may be high, schools should think of how much they will save on educational videos and field trips which can be obtained free online.

Julie’s video game glogster taught me that video games can have value in the classroom.  I was surprised to learn that surgeons who play video games are faster and more efficient than those that don’t.  I guess my perception of video gamers is all wrong!  If used appropriately, I learned that they can improve right brain functions.  Cool! 

Digital Portfolios

http://web.pdx.edu/~pgerst/goals.htm  pretty good!

I like that “Paul” has an introductory page that explains how to navigate the rest of his ePortfolio.  The links to the different pages worked fine.  The one that was an “external link” opened ok but none of the video boxes played anything.  So that was kind of poor. 

http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/collections/castl_he/ebarkley/project/index.html really good!

This one was very well organized.  Lots of pictures and very professional-looking.  I noticed in browsing a couple of these portfolios that a lot of my perception depended on how things were arranged and just basically how it looked.  It is more important here I think than in a classic portfolio to make the portfolio eye-catching and to make it look interesting. 

week 12

no post

week 11

no post

week 10

I haven’t yet actually taught my lesson using the SmartBoard but I am excited about the potential it holds for educators.  I would definitely want one in my classroom as a teaching tool.  In class we only scratched the surface of what the SmartBoard can do and I was engaged by the novelty of it.  I wonder how long that fascination would last in a group of children though.  It still comes down to the teacher and the personal relationship they foster with their students.  I have learned a lot this semester about teaching and one thing that has stuck with me is that there is no substitute for a really good teacher – someone who is trustworthy and has an engaging personality.  Without that I think any technology is pretty useless.

Recently I observed in a first grade classroom.  The room was equipped with an ActivBoard and the children were very much engaged in their “Hang-Mouse” game on Spelling City.  I could tell that this was a regular activity, something that the students had been trained in.  They knew what they were doing and could pretty much carry out the steps on their own.  But it was a caring teacher, who got just as excited as the students and made comments about the characters in the game, who made the difference in whether or not learning occurred.  The students transitioned well from their interactive whiteboard spelling game to chiming in as their teacher read a story that they were studying.

I want to be a teacher who can use an interactive whiteboard (or whatever the latest classroom technology happens to be) but  can also engage her students in a simple story or song. 

weeks 9 and 10

no post

week 8

I thoroughly enjoyed our introduction to working with video in the classroom.  One insight that I gained into working with this medium is that the best way to learn it is by doing it.  Reading about how to record and edit video didn’t really capture what it was like to put together the video.  What I learned a lot about was how to work with someone creatively and how to mediate ideas and then make them real.  It was very cool!  I think it is a great way for students to not only learn the technology but also how to work together on a creative project.  There are some things that I would definitely alter when working with children though!  I would upload the video myself outside of class because I wouldn’t want the children sitting around with nothing to do!  Planning a lesson involving video would be difficult because of the time involved to do this.  My partner and I were focused on getting enough footage of a scene so that we were sure to have plenty to work with in the editing stage.  I didn’t think about the fact that it’s possible to have too much footage!  Our nine minutes of footage took almost 20 minutes to download.  Then our video imported as one big clip, so we had to keep going through the same footage to pull out the couple seconds that we really wanted.  It was pretty frustrating, but we both got pretty quick at cutting the video apart and piecing it together.  I think I would supervise the actual taping stage to be sure my students weren’t recording too much footage.  If possible, I would be sure that all my students’ videos would import as small clips.  I heard Michele say that it might have been certain cameras that were causing the video to import as one big clip.  So maybe that would mean even more planning to test each camera to be sure they were set up the same way.  I think video in the classroom has tremendous potential for teaching content and also social skills.  It will give shy students a chance to branch out and be seen and heard in a way which is not as intimidating as a formal oral presentation.  Creating their own video will make content more memorable and relatable.  As an introductory lesson I might have students conduct interviews with one another to get them used to being on camera.  I would have them work in groups of three so that each would have a chance to be the interviewer, interviewee and cameraperson.  As a more advanced lesson I would have students make a video science project.  This would give them the opportunity to create a video involving several different shots – the set-up, the actual performance of the experiment, and a re-cap explaining what happened and why.  A big potential problem would be that the project may require students to use the equipment outside of school.  A lot of instruction on the appropriate use of the equipment would be absolutely necessary.  It might be possible to set up times throughout the day when the students could perform their experiment in school…again it would be a planning/preparing issue.