ILP #2 "Design" - InfoGraphic

For my Independent Learning Project #2, I designed an InfoGraphic on a website called Canva. I designed classroom rules that teachers can display and post in their classroom in order to provide groundrules to their students. This is important for teachers to keep their class in order and their students learning and behaving well.

Here is a link to my InfoGraphic and a picture of it:
https://www.canva.com/design/DACnUWhnqNo/-gVP3KXFyKPHOPgicKia3w/view?utm_content=DACnUWhnqNo&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=sharebutton

Blog Journal 10

As a teacher, I can use data collection (surveys) to keep track of my students' learning needs. This can be used on any grade level, and it can be given to the students in worksheet format. The survey can ask questions about what I as the teacher can do to improve and help my students learn better, which ways they learn best (visual, auditory, hands-on), and etc. Excel can be used in any grade level classroom as well. Teachers can use it to keep track of each student's grades on every assignment by their first and last name. It can also be used to calculate the class average, maximum, minimum, etc.

The topic I found most interesting while reading my classmates' blogs was the Independent Learning Project. It was interesting to see what my classmates chose to create. I saw Prezis, PowerPoints, Glogsters, posters, and more. It was cool to see everyone's choice of topic and the way they designed it.

The technology-related skill I would like to learn next is how to work Excel. I know the basis of data entry, but I would like to learn in depth the details about it. I can achieve this goal this by watching YouTube tutorials.

Blog Journal 9

"The Flipped Classroom" is a classroom that utilizes videos as a primary source for students to learn from. It flips the way students spend their class time. Rather than listening to the teacher lecture and instruct during class and then going home to practice for homework, they are given an instructional video to watch for homework before class and the next day they practice with the teacher during class. Here is a link to educational videos for the classroom: https://www.ted.com/watch/ted-ed.

The "open" terms mentioned in the podcast include open education, open content, and open source. Open education refers to making educational experiences available to everyone. Opportunities for education are often times restricted to higher classes with higher socio-economic statuses. Open education strives to make more schooling opportunities available to everyone of all classes and diversities. Open content refers to sharing resources and materials online with other teachers. Reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute is the basis of how to use open content. This is often restricted by copyrighted material, which limits content usage. Open content gives teachers an advantage to network and share successful lesson plans with one another. Open source refers to using softwares that are accessible to everyone to guide education. Not all softwares are available to everyone, some require that you buy them. Open software gives opportunities to everyone and does not restrict any social group. Here is a link to a website that allows for open content: https://www.oercommons.org. This website lets teachers make and share resources and lesson plans with one another.

I acquired new skills from working on the PowerPoint assignment. Before working on this assignment, I had no idea how to record a voice over a PowerPoint or change the master slides. Now I know how to record myself perfectly to each slide and change the layout of the master slides. I liked this assignment and felt it was helpful because as a teacher I imagine I will have to make a lot of PowerPoints to guide my lessons. Next time I can improve by going more in depth on my slides and my speaking. Here is a screenshot of the beginning of my PowerPoint:

Blog Journal 8

Adaptive technologies are different kinds of technologies that can be used and adapted to students to support their different learning styles in the classroom. These could help students with disabilities by providing them with a piece of technology fit for them to learn from. I have seen concept mapping in the classroom. This adaptive technology helps students think by visually seeing how ideas are connected. It helps organize their thoughts for writing. A challenge that can come out of using adaptive technologies in the classroom could be that it separates students in a way. All students are using something adapted to their brains and learning styles, so it could be hard for a teacher to bring the class back together on the same page after.

It is possible to use a PowerPoint to support student learning at each level of Bloom's Taxonomy. The bottom level is knowledge. It is possible to make a PowerPoint to teach basic information. For example, if students are learning animal names, you could put a picture of the animal on each slide, labeled with its name. This way students can observe and recall the information. The next level of the taxonomy is comprehension. Comprehension can be used by creating a discussion based PowerPoint. For example, if you are teaching off a PowerPoint based on a book the students have to read for class, every few slides should contain discussion questions that allow for students to demonstrate they understand what is going on. Application is next going up the triangle and can be used in PowerPoint form by applying knowledge and using problem solving methods. For example, if students are learning how to count money it may be helpful to create a PowerPoint using real world problems. That way students can learn how they will apply their skills of counting money in the real world. This question could look like, "If I buy a shirt for $16 and I give the cashier a $20 bill, how much money will I get back?" Analysis is next on the taxonomy. A PowerPoint can be used to support taxonomy by identifying patters, organizing ideas, and recognizing trends. If a student is learning how to analyze a graph, a PowerPoint could be helpful in leading them in this. Teachers could display a PowerPoint with a graph and questions on the board to help the students better understand the data information. For example, teachers could ask if it is a positive or negative trend, and identify the pattern of how the independent variable affects the dependent on the graph. Higher up the taxonomy we come to synthesis. A PowerPoint could be used in synthesis by using older concepts to generate new ideas, design, imagine, and predict. A teacher could use a PowerPoint to guide students how to design an experiment, or predict the outcome of the experiment. Lastly, on the top of the taxonomy we have evaluation. A teacher could use a PowerPoint to solve, judge, evaluate outcomes, or compare ideas. For example, a PowerPoint could be formatted to compare different ideas. Say the class was looking to compare life and death, a column could be made for both and pros and cons could be listed to compare.

Below is a website teachers can use to keep up to date on technology trends. It gives tips and resources teachers can use to keep them updated.
https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/teachers-technology-trends

ILP “Design” - Glogster

For my first Independent Learning Project I chose to design an educational tool using Glogster. The online poster that I made could be used in pre-school and kindergarten classrooms to teach young students the main animals found on a farm. The Glog I made is colorful and will catch the attention of young eyes, includes pictures of the animals, as well as labels under each picture saying what each animal is.
Here is a link to it and a screenshot: http://edu.glogster.com/glog/animal-farm-59ebd5718ba04/2iu1jke0iqh/

Blog Journal 7

I am having a great experience with Twitter so far and I have not experienced any issues yet. I mainly interact with other students in the class as well as professional educator accounts. I have been reading articles these professional educators post, and retweeted them for my peers to see. Twitter has actually been a huge help for this class and has many benefits. The first benefit being that it makes it easy to communicate with other students in the class. We have been able to help each other with any confusion on assignments, as well as bond over interesting, educational posts. The Technology Sandbox class field trip sparked some great Twitter discussions within our class!

I have acquired many new skills from the Web Design Assignment. First of all, I learned how to create a website in order to inform the students and parents about my class. I learned how to create pages for different topics and purposes, as well as insert hyperlinks and calendars. I definitely liked this assignment and felt that this will help me in my future career as a teacher because I will already have the skills to create a website for my class.
Here is the link and a screenshot of the top of my home page: http://eg16c.weebly.com

Diigo is an extremely helpful tool and is effective to use as a student and a teacher. The new skills I have learned from it include how to easily highlight and annotate an article online. I have learned how to interact with other students on a specific article in a group on Diigo, as well as create tags for each article researched. In the classroom, this will be helpful for students to use to effectively read articles. Students will better comprehend the readings by highlighting and making notes about specific parts. It is a great tool for working with team members because you can create a group and share articles within it so everyone is granted access to read and annotate it together. In my professional, individual efforts this will help me by being a tool that will keep track of everything I may have to read or understand.

Blog Journal 6

Most schools require teachers to maintain a website with class information for parents and students. I looked up my 9th grade English teacher at Trumbull High School in my hometown Trumbull, CT to see what kinds of information she put on her page. I found a section about her explaining her schooling, why she loves being a teacher, and fun facts about her family and what she enjoys doing in her free time. I also found a section about her classroom goals and what she hopes to accomplish this year. Additionally, I found a section about when/where her extra help hours can be found. She has a page for each of the classes she teaches showing the syllabus and specific assignments. She also has a link to her classroom library, showing all the books she has in her classroom for students to take out. She also has a page that includes a list of the best books to read to encourage reading in her classroom.

Here is a link to the site and a screenshot of it: https://sites.google.com/a/trumbullps.net/englishkravecs/home

I definitely see myself using many different kinds of technology in the classroom to teach more effectively and efficiently. First off, I see myself using presentation softwares to convey information from a lesson to my students. Presentations like PowerPoint are an effective way of displaying material to the class. I also see myself using classroom management softwares in order to keep track of my students grades, behavior, and other reports. In addition, I know I will use word processing softwares. This is how all worksheets, tests, assignments, handouts, etc can be made and distributed to the class.

I loved visiting the Technology Sandbox last week. One piece of technology I experienced that could definitely be used in the classroom is a SmartBoard. This was an interactive display screen that could be used in multiple ways. There are tools on it to be able to draw and write on it, so teachers could show the class something or students could come up to the board and practice a problem. It can access the internet so articles or a website could be pulled up in front of the class. PowerPoints could be presented on it, it has tools to be able to draw shapes, play games, along with endless other uses.

Blog Journal 5

LinkedIn is a useful site for teacher professional development. Teachers can use to this to communicate with other teachers and share tips, advice, lessons, etc, as well as keep bookmarks to sites that may be useful in the classroom on this. Engrade is also helpful for teachers to use to keep track of their student's assignments and grades. A site that is not the most useful inside a classroom is Facebook. I believe there are other sites that can be more useful for students to use to communicate between themselves and their students. For example, Edmodo and FirstClass.

An interesting web 2.0 tool I might use when teaching is Edmodo. The link to this is www.edmodo.com. I could use this as a communication tool between myself and my class. I could post homework, announcements, assignments, etc. I would review this positively because it contains all the resources I need to keep communication between my students and I.

The technology advancement that holds the biggest promise in education are multi-touch display boards. This is because teachers can use these to bring students into lessons for a better understanding. It is easy to pull up word documents, the internet, articles, and so much more onto the screen. They also have a drawing feature where the teacher can use this to show students how to solve a problem, or call students up to solve a problem on the board. This technology would be utilized by having a multi-touch display board in every classroom. Teachers would incorporate this into their lessons maybe by pulling up last night's homework onto the board and showing the class how to solve the problems, pulling up an article and have students annotate it on the board for a full understanding, as well as so much more.

Blog Journal 4

Last week was the first week I used Twitter for this course. I have mostly been interacting with @eme2040's tweets. I have been replying to their questions as well as reading responses other students have written to their questions also. Twitter may be helpful in my future career as a popular way to keep students updated on homework and assignments, or a simple way to get students involved in answering thought-provoking questions.

The digital divide can create a huge gap between students in schools. Those that have access to the internet are more likely to have the resources they need to succeed in school. Causes of the digital divide come from students' socioeconomic status at home. Those students that may be on the poor side may not have access to the internet or a computer at home. This could lead to them not being able to look up something for school, read articles, and more. On the other hand, the students that have extensive access to computers and the internet at home will have every resource they need to succeed. As a teacher this will make it difficult to create assignments all students have the resources to complete successfully. I will have to make sure I treat everyone equally. Maybe if the assignment is to read an article online, I can provide a handout of the article to those students that do not have access to the internet at home.

If I were a second grade teacher, the type of student software I would use the most is educational games. This provides a fun and entertaining way for students to practice the lesson so they will stay engaged and intrigued. The software type I would use the least are tutorials. Tutorials provide the learning content to students solely over the computer in a multimedia format. I would rather teach the learning content to students in class and give them a software to the material practice with. I feel that face to face interaction is important when first learning new content. This way the teacher can see right before his/her eyes what his/her students might be struggling with in case they need to provide further instruction or help.

Twitter

My EME2040 class Twitter is @EGreinerEME2040

Blog Journal 3

The ELA Standards I feel I am most prepared for include using multiple sources and using digital media. I feel that my work I've done for school has taught me about evaluating sources, how to paraphrase them, and how to include them in a project/lesson. I also feel that I could be skilled at finding media, like pictures, videos, diagrams, etc to put in a presentation and help get the point of a lesson or topic across. The ELA Standard I feel that requires more learning on my part include making multi-media informational text and literature. I do not have much experience including these skills in a presentation so it will take a little more work to get familiar with it.

I think using the internet to play interactive learning games, like Kahoot, and watch interactive learning videos are the top technology sites I would use in my classroom. I want to teach elementary school so these would apply to younger students, around ages 6-10. The digital citizenship concepts I will need to address include the need for them to demonstrate the technology skills needed to use the internet. At a young age they will need to know how navigate the web and connect to Kahoot and the videos. They will also need to participate effectively in the educational games/videos with the proper technology and communication skills.

The Newsletter Design assignment is an effective way to teach students a way to communicate with their class and class' parents/guardians. I learned how to create a top boarder and insert a line to be cut off as some sort of form. This skill can be used to send home important messages or describe what we have been working on in class to my students or their parents as a future teacher.

Blog Journal 2

I have used Microsoft Word extensively as a student since middle school. Most of my experiences using it come from school essays and assignments. These papers and assignments I have done for classes have given me the full and total skills to use and navigate around MS Word. Teachers also use MS Word for everything in school. All handouts, syllabus', assignment details, handwritten tests, and much more are usually created using MS Word.

I have not had many personal experiences with copyright or fair use of materials in an educational environment that I can think of. I have only seen copyright marks on the bottom of readings, books, and other learning materials I have used in classes. As a teacher, if I were to develop my own instructional materials I would definitely want to copyright them under my name so I get credit for my work. However, I would also like to share them with other schools and teachers under fair use if it related to their lesson and would help them teach their students more effectively. When it comes to students creating their own works, fair use is important. Students use copyrighted material to aid in their understanding of what is being taught.

With implementing technology in the classroom, issues definitely come along with it. These problems include legal, social, and ethical issues. As a teacher, when using technology in the classroom it is important to discuss all these issues with students and let them know they will not be tolerated. Three big issues I could see in my classroom are academic dishonesty, cyberbullying, and student privacy. A solution to academic dishonesty is to teach a lesson on plagiarism and cheating and make it clear that I will not accept it in my classroom. I will make my students aware that if they are to plagiarize or cheat they will get a 0 on the assignment and it will bring their grade down. When it comes to cyberbullying, any students engaging in this activity will be in serious behavioral trouble. Families and the school will get involved and hold meetings with those involved to put it to an end to it. With student privacy, any time information about a student is required to be shared I will have to send home a permission slip where parents/guardians must approve first.

Blog Journal 1

What influences teachers and students to use technology in the classroom mainly revolves around facilitating the lesson being taught/learned. Technology can be used in many forms like Powerpoint presentations and games that can help teachers teach more effectively and students learn more effectively. Technology in the classroom can reinforce a lesson, promote thinking, creativity, and communication in students, addresses diversity, can check a student's understanding of the material, and prepare students for all the technology they will use today in the 21st century.

Out of the ISTE standards for educators, the one standard that is most meaningful to me is being a leader. It is so important to be able to guide and empower students to develop them into the best life-long learners. The one standard that seems outside my current skill set is being an analyst. Analyzing data is not one of my strong suits, but I hope this class will help me with that so when I become a teacher I can use data to help lead my instruction and support my student's educational goals.

I personally do believe in the label "digital native" for today's youth. To be digitally native, it means that one grew up using technology so in a sense using technology comes easy to them because they are so used it. In the classroom I notice a difference between myself, a digital native, and the teachers, digital immigrants. In my high school every classroom was equipped with a SmartBoard. There would be times where the teachers would struggle to power it on or get it so they could use the special pen to write on it. They would ask for a student's help in my class and my peers could do it instantaneously. This just took time away from our lesson, so we had less time to learn the material that class period because my teachers would struggle with the technology. In the future I honestly do not anticipate much of a difference between me and my students and how we use technology. I grew up a digital native and so are they, so we should be pretty close in skill.

Elizabeth Greiner Blog 1

My previous experiences using technology include mainly using social media sites. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have had a huge influence on my life. I grew up using these and have become a little too familiar with them, as my parents might say. I use these three sites daily and have become a pro at posting, scrolling through my feed, and navigating on them. I am also very familiar with Word and Powerpoint. Going through school I used these for essays, assignments, and projects. I have used these extensively for school purposes and would say I am tech savvy when it comes to them. However, everything else I am not so tech savvy with and look forward to learning more about.

In this class I hope to learn material that will help me become a successful teacher. Technology is used in classrooms extensively in today's world, and to be able use these new methods of technology is an important skill to have. I am excited to master these methods of technology that I can bring to my classroom as a future educator and teach my class effectively using them.