![]() What I've Learned I feel as if I have learned quite a bit in this course. This course has given me the opportunity to try out different technologies that I do not think I would have used without this course. I feel like we are about to enter a time period in education that is going to require us to use any mode necessary to help reach our students, and this class gives you just about all types of technologies to use. This fall is going to look quite different than any other fall in probably the last 50 years of education, some schools are doing full on virtual learning, so are doing hybrid models, and some are doing a somewhat traditional method. The technologies that we used in this course can be used for all three settings, especially the virtual/hybrid styles. As we enter into this realm of unknown, we can fall back on a lot of what we used in this class to help us stay afloat. Learning Tools
Strengths and Weaknesses I feel like one of my biggest weaknesses when it comes to technology in education is taking the time to try and implement technology in my classroom. This was something that I wanted to do last year, but I never spent the time trying to figure out how to incorporate technology into my lessons. Some of the problem was not knowing exactly all technologies were out there, and a part of the problem was my lack of time management. I feel like one of my strengths is that I can generally figure out how to use technology pretty quickly, even if it's not something I'm used to using. Fortunately, I am a quick learner when it comes to the tech side of things, so I feel like I I can pick up these different tools and put the into use pretty quick. Classroom Integration I fully plan to use quite a bit of these tools in my classroom. I think that children today are more apt to use technology than any generation before them. Most of them have a smart phone before they are a teenager, and they always like to have a screen in front of them. I think it is our job as educators to adjust to them, we should look for ways to meet them where they are instead of force them to do what we want them to do. I feel like integrating technology is a part of that. My goals going forward are to:
This class has been super helpful in helping me discover different types of technological tools that I can use in my classroom.
0 Comments
Question 1
Project ten years into the future. You have now been a classroom teacher for the past 7-8 years. Technology has probably changed significantly between the time you completed your student teaching and now. What options have you considered – and perhaps taken – to stay current in technology? I do not think it will be very difficult for me to stay current in technology over the next 10 years. My bachelor's is in Computer Science, so I have a pretty big interest in technology. I'm always on my phone, I follow quite a few tech guys on twitter and Youtube that help keep me up to date on the newest phones, laptops, and random other tech accessories. I do not foresee me losing interest in this field over the next 10 years, but I do think that social will play a large part in me staying current. I do realize, however, that not all teachers are in this boat. For teachers who do not care about technology as much, I think professional development would be an easy way to stay up to date. Most PD days offer breakout sessions for teachers to choose where they wish to go. Every PD I've been too has had a technology in the classroom breakout session where there were 2-3 teachers discussing what technology they used in the classroom. I think this could be extremely useful to helpful for those teachers who might not keep up with technology otherwise. Reflection Question 1: Assume that one of your students tells you that an enrichment class at your school has developed a website and that every student’s name and picture will be available on the website as a talent directory. What concerns do you have about this discovery and how would you approach your colleague and your school to address these concerns? I think there are a few layers to this situation. First, all schools have some type of policy concerning adding students picture onto the internet. For instance, some schools send home a waiver at the start of the year, while some might only send home the waiver if their child might be in some project or experiment that would require them to be uploaded online. My first concern would depend on my schools policy regarding this, if my school had gotten permission from parents to upload pictures of their child to the internet, then I wouldn't really have any concerns. However, this is a small chance, as there would realistically be a very small chance that our school got that waiver back from every single student in the school. So I'll go through other concerns assuming my school most likely didn't get that waiver from every parent, and some that still apply even if they did get the waiver signed. One concern I would have is if the parents had knowledge of this website. Even if they signed a waiver at the start of the school year giving the school permission, this is still a project that I feel parents should know of. If I knew this colleague well, I would approach my colleague in a respectful manner to double check that they let parents know that this was going to happen. I would also make sure that my colleague let the administration know this was happening. Even if parents are fine with it, the administration still also need to know of a project of this nature. However, if I was not close with this colleague, then I would possibly ask one of my other colleagues who I knew was close with the enrichment class teachers to approach them. Group Reflection This week was another smooth process in our group to complete our tasks. We met on Tuesday again and divided up the tasks that needed to be done, and we all completed them by Saturday so we could have time to review each others work. After a few small tweaks on Saturday/Sunday, we were good to go. I think our group has done a great job each week communicating and completing all of the assignments. This week, I was tasked with the Thinglink assignment. This was quite an interesting idea to use for classroom. While the tutorial was slightly out of date and not very useful, the website was not too hard to figure out. I was able to upload my main picture without much hassle, then I was able to add the tags in as well. Scoopit Thinglink Quiziz Quiz ![]()
Chapter 8 Reflection:
Select the five distance-learning technologies that you would prefer to use if you were teaching a distance-education or blended course. Reflect on your teaching style and your students’ learning styles and how each of the selected technologies would be received, depending on the students’ learning styles. (Two students can answer this question) 1. Zoom Zoom is the technology that I would use to hold virtual meetings. I have used Zoom in the majority of my Graduate level classes and it has worked fantastic in all of those classes. I think that the fact you can put students in groups and have them in their own room to work in groups is very useful. This could help students with ADHD as I would be mixing up instruction in the middle of class to help keep them from being too distracted. The students could also use zoom to call each other for group projects and such. 2. Google Classroom I would use google classroom to list all of my assignments and announcements for the students. The students would also be able to submit any assignments on google classroom as well. 3. Edpuzzle I would use Edpuzzle for supplementary instruction. I could use it to make additional videos about what we've been going over during our class time for the students to get additional practice. 4. Spiral I would use spiral for assignments and assessments. I could use spiral for small assignments for the students could work on, or I could use it for the formative or summative assessments. I would also use this some for my slides as it has an interactive slide options for the students to log into. 5. Google Drive/Docs/Slides/ etc I would also have the student utilize the rest of Google's online software. They could use drive to work with other students or to submit assignments. Project Reflection: This week, I worked on project 6, the Movie Story. I enjoyed working on this project, after looking through a few different video making software, I found one(that I thought was free) that would work. I was able to add in any pictures, text on the pictures, audio, video clips, and pretty much anything I needed to the video. Our students are learning about the colonization of America, so my video focused on the New England colonies. I only touched on the geography of the region, the economy of the region, and the religion. Overall, our group is still killing it for these projects. We had a video conference again on Tuesday to split up the duties for the week, and we all worked on our parts and finished them up in a timely manner. Project 6 - Movie Story Project 7 - Interactive Video Project 8 - Course Website Project 9 - Padlet Reflection Question:
When using the Internet with children, there are privacy and acceptable use issues. Describe the issues you are most concerned with and how you plan to address them when you become a teacher. This is an issue that many schools are starting to encounter with the increased use of technology such as chromebooks. Ten years ago, this was not something that most schools had to think about because 90% of schools did not have a classroom set of computers or tablets or any other technology that could easily access the internet. Now, students are exposed to technology at such a young age, that most of them know their way around a chromebook before they're even 10 years old. By the time they're in middle school or high school, students can be extremely sneaky in their computer usage. One main concern that I have in my classroom is students accessing websites that they should not be on during my class. Luckily, our district has some monitoring set in place, so the students cannot access the majority of inappropriate websites. I can generally tell if students are accessing sites that they should not be based on how much work the student finished. If the students spend time playing games, or scrolling through some random website, then they will generally not complete the work that they should, so I have used that to gauge how many students might be off task. However, this is not necessarily a fool proof solution, so this coming up year, I plan to implement a few extra steps. One step is to communicate with my schools IT guy more often. I do not use our chromebooks every day, so I plan to start asking him for a report on the days that I do use the chromebooks. Each student is assigned a certain chromebook, so I can use the time stamp to see which period the chromebook was on a website that it should not have been. This will help me find exact students who have been off task on certain days. The only problem is that this is a reactive solution, and I would like a more preventative solution. I think one preventative measure we could take is to find a software that helps us to track our students screens live. There are all sorts of softwares that can help with this, if you can convince your administrator or IT guy, a software such as NetSupport School could be used for this. With this software, you can have all of your computers as small thumbnails on a single window. So you could monitor your students computers live during class. There are also other free softwares that do something very similar, obiviously, I would recommend checking with your IT guy before installing anything. But here is a list of free software that can do similar things as NetSupport. I have already checked with my administrator and IT guy about NetSupport School, but if we're unable to buy the license for that, then I plan to use on of the free softwares to help me out. Projects 2-5 These projects went pretty smooth for our group. We agreed to read over all of the projects on Monday, and then we met via a video conference on Tuesday to split up the projects. We all took one project to work on. We used Google Drive to upload all of our documents to so that we can all review them as well. So we agreed to have all of the projects completed by Saturday so we could all review them and have time to make any necessary changes. I was in charge of the podcast, and I used Vocaroo to record it. I thought it turned out well, and it was not very difficult to record and download. The one downside to Vocaroo is that there was not an option to edit the clip. So if I messed up on one part, I had to basically start over and try again. Fortunately, I only had to record it twice before it was pretty good. Group 4 Projects: Project 2: Lesson Plan Project 3: Survey Project 4: Slides Project 4: Document Project 5: Podcast For this project, our team had to write a grant that was requesting 20,000 to create an ideal 21st century classroom. We originally started off communicating in our group text message, but realized that some of the communication would be much easier if we could get on a video chat. Melissa set up a video chat for our group, and our project took off. We had already completed some of the project, but the video chat allowed us time to split up the remaining work to finish up the rest of the project. After a second video chat on Sunday, we added the finishing touches and were able to submit it. One thing that stuck with me during this project is how far $20,000 could go for a classroom. We all threw out ideas of what we wanted in our classroom, and then we still had roughly $4,000 left on our budget. So we had to think of a few more things that we might want. I think we ended up getting everything we could possibly need in order to best serve our students. When I first read the prompt, I was a little worried that $20,000 would not be enough and we'd have to cut some options that we might like. However, once we got rolling, I realized that $20,000 could go a long way in a classroom. ![]()
Question #1: Consider how technology has helped you to be productive and complete tasks. Examine the physical requirements for using your favorite technologies. How might physical disabilities hamper your use of those preferred technologies and impact your personal productivity. As a teacher, what can you do to mitigate these challenges for students with special needs.
Technology has been extremely useful for me to complete tasks. As someone who earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, I have used technology in all aspects of life to complete tasks. My phone is probably one of the main pieces of technology that I use to complete tasks. From apps that help me communicate with others, keep track of everything I need to do, or even helping teach my soccer players certain tactics, phones are able to help us do just about anything. I have also used laptops, calculators, google home, word processing software, spreadsheets, and I could go on and on. One of my life mottos is Work Smarter, Not Harder, so I am always looking for ways to complete tasks in a more efficient manner. This generally means that I am always using technology whenever I can. I know physical disabilities come in all different forms, but I actually live with a small physical disability. I am missing the top half of my fingers on my left hand. I was born this way, and I am missing from the first knuckle to the top of my finger. This has led me have to learn different ways of using some technology. For example, when I type, I really only use my thumb on my left hand. This was difficult when I was younger, but I kept typing and eventually figured out a way that worked for me. Most of my friends jokes that I can out type them with only a hand and a half. While my physical disability is relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, I think it has given me enough experience to realize that people with physical disabilities might not always be able to use some tools in the same way people with physical disabilities use them. I think this can help me as a teacher when I have a student with a physical disability come into my classroom. I will know that I have to help that student achieve anything they want to do with technology, even if they have to use it slightly different than it's meant to be used. I think there are a plethora of teacher task software that can help teachers manage their classroom, but I can think of three that were vital in my time in the classroom last year. The first is Google Slides/PowerPoint. I used Google Slides in some capacity nearly every day in my classroom. I had a smart board in the front of the room, so I would display the bell ringer, lesson, practice problems, instructions for an assignment, etc. One useful aspect of google slides is that I could log into my google account on my laptop at home and make any additions or changes, and I would not have to worry about copying it over to a thumb drive or anything like that. Since Google Slides are saved to the cloud, it would make the changes and when I would login at school, the changes would be there. I could also cast my Ipad screen onto the board and still have google slides pulled up. This helped me move through the classroom during class, which helped with classroom management quite a bit.
The second software is School Status. This is a software our district uses to communicate to parents. It can also be used to look at discipline for students, absences, and it had previous state test results. This is the primary way that I would communicate with parents. There are options for a large blast to send out before a quiz or test, or you can send individual messages to parents. I used this almost daily to communicate with my parents. I also used it a the beginning of the school year to look into the state test scores from the previous year. The third software that was vital to my success last year was an ExamView Test Generator. I used this to create some worksheets and every quiz/test we took last year. This had a question bank based on standards that you could choose from. It also gave you the option to reorder/recalculate the questions. I would use this to create the study guide, then reorder and recalculate the values to use for the test. This also made it easy to make multiple forms of a test to try and reduce cheating(although some still tried despite my multiple warnings). Other software that I used that was super useful was Plickers, I-Ready, Kahoot, Quiziz, IXL, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and more. While most of mine are Math related, I believe most of these could be useful for other subject areas as well. What are the advantages to using multimedia in a classroom presentation? I think there are a handful of answers to this, but the one that sticks out to me is that using multiple media types combined into one helps to accommodate your lesson for more students. If you only create a lesson for auditory learners, then you are completely leaving out your visual/kinesthetic learners. As educators, if we are only one dimensional in our lesson planning, then we are setting up the majority of our class for failure.
Finding or creating lessons or that use multiple forms of media helps all of your visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners. I think this is something most teachers know, but we need to be careful to also make sure the software we're using in class is multimedia as well. This might be a little more difficult, as we sometimes might not have time to fully explore some software before trying to use it, but we need to make sure that we are not leaving out some learning styles from the software we use. By using multimedia, we are able to include all three basic learning styles in order to make it as easy as possible on our students. If we are including all of the learning styles, then it will be easier for the majority of our students to learn. Since our goal is to help all of our students learn, then it would be quite irresponsible of us to design a lesson that only caters to one learning style. I think that the hardest DID step for me to employ will be step 4 -selecting support technologies. In my first year of teaching, I feel like I did not do a very good job of incorporating technology into my teaching. I did have a smart board in my room that I used pretty much everyday, but I did not do a very good job of using technology to complement any of my lessons. I would use the smart board for presentation and demonstration, but outside of that, I did not use technology enough. That is why I believe that step 4 will be the hardest for me to complete.
I think there are many steps that I could take to overcome this though. I think the first step begins with this class. I believe some of the strategies that I learn in this class will help to make implementing technology easier for me. I am eager to learn different strategies teachers use to help them implement technology in their classrooms. Another step that I plan to take is to seek advise from other teachers at my school. I know some teachers who implement technology all throughout their lessons, so I have already reached out to some and plan to reach out to others later on. I think this can help as they have most of the same resources that I have, so I don't have to worry about reading an idea that utilizes technology that I do not have access too. Lastly, I need to devote more time to planning lessons. During my first year, there were times when I would procrastinate or get distracted with grad school or coaching, and I would not give as much time to developing lesson plans as I needed too. My goal for this year is to spend more time planning and preparing my lessons every day. While I am spending more time planning, I can start thinking of different ways to implement technology into my lessons. I think all three of these steps are practical, measurable and can help me overcome the difficulty I faced in my first year of teaching. |
AuthorMy name is Luke Smith. I am a middle school Math teacher and a High School Soccer coach. Blog Roll Ashleigh Bowen Melanie Bryan Kathryn Bubrig Mara Chitic-Holmes Terry Cullum Lauren Delaune Kelly Hudson Lindsey Jones Rachel Long Jana Milsap Jonathan Mooneyham Nicole Musselwhite Daleana Phillips Melissa Queen Derrick Routon Amelia Watson ArchivesCategories |