ILP "Design" - Glogster

For my second ILP project, I created a Glogster on the Solar System. I talk about all 8 planets and give a brief description. I also included a video from YouTube that talks all about the solar system. Below, I attached a link and photo of the Glogster I created.

https://edu.glogster.com/glog/solar-system-5a21b2eab2121/2pkic18tsqt

Blog Journal 10

As a future educator, I think I will use data collection surveys and using Excel to report these findings for many things. For exmaple, if I were teaching a high school level class, I could ask students which of them have texted while driving. I could use Excel to upload my results and organize my data. I could also use data collection to acquire information on how many high school students work because they do not receieve financial help  at home. Again, like the previous example, Excel could be used to helporganize the information and allow me to express the findings in different forms such as charts, tables, etc.

From reviewing my classmates' blogs, I learned many things. Not only did I learn about the activities we did in class and their views of these things, but I also learned that athough we are in the same class, studying the same thing, we are all so different. In our blogs, we all had something different to say. It was interesting to read the outlooks of our in class assignments from my other classmates because their view of the assignments was different than mine. Lastly, my favorite thing about reading my classmates' blogs was when we would attach screenshots of the progress of our assignments. Seeing how we were all assigned the same thing, yet we all percieved the assignment in our own way and created all different things was fascinating. 

The next technology-related skill I would like to learn is how to use the SmartBoard. Although I am familiar with using this device, I would like to learn how to use it like a "pro." I believe that learning how to use this device will benefit me for when I am actually applying for a teaching position. Proficient use and knowledge of this will definitely put me ahead of collegues and allow me to be interactive while teaching my students. SmartBoard use allows students to be more engaged in the lesson and with their peers. As a future educator, I will achieve this goal by going to FSU's very own, SandBox. Here, I can spend my time practicing with the device as long as I would like. The SandBox also offers many many other cool technologies that are used and could be used in classrooms. Maybe I could even learn how to use other technological devices!

Blog Journal 9

The "flipped classroom" concept is students gathering video sources or any online material to review and help prepare for the lessons before class. During class, time is made for questions and discussion on the material and later applying the new acquired knowledge through assignments. I believe that this concept is one that will definitely be used more in the future with growing technology and more available education resources that are being created. An application that is a great resource for students to use for this concept is "Tackk." Tackk is an easy tool for creating digital assignments, which is perfect for the "flipped classroom" concept. Tackk provides an easy to use interface that enables students to post images, videos and other content and even add text to these things to ask questions or post questions on other assignemts. There is also a comments section that is automatically places for each thing a student posts for discussions within peers to be made.  https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tackk-create-and-chat-with-friends/id927632716?mt=8

The podcast focused mostly on open education. Open education is providing knowledge to someone that may want to learn about a certain something without having to worry about factors such as location and money. Open content in education includes notes and lectures or anything else that may be helpful to teachers. Lastly open source in education is free technology programs that help students. One example of open content is a website called "OpenStudy." OpenStudy is a social learning network where studnts as well as independent learners can come together in a huge study group. Through this website, learners can find others who are working in similar content areas in order to support each other and answer questions they may have. http://openstudy.com

Some skills that I have gained from creating the two PowerPoints are learning ways in which I can create these presentations to be fun, eye appealing, and engaging to students. Many times powerpoints in classroom discussions are plain and boring, so I like the fact that I can create whatever I want while making it look colorful and linear at the same time. I love adding animations and action buttons and the voice over was really cool too, I had never done anything like that before for a project. I think I could improve on trying to elaborate more in my own words rather than putting so much text in the slides. This not only shows that I have knowledge of the subject area, but that I, as an educator, am confident in teaching and passing the material down to my students. I have never really used PowerPoint in the past how I have in this course, so there was definitely a lot to get to used to and a lot of navigating through the software to learn.

Technology and Teacher Professional Development

Today, through my individual efforts, I learned about a website called "Professional Development Resources for Teachers." This website allows educators to view lessons plans and articles to help them improve their teaching skills. The website provides many resources such as helping teachers find new strategies to effectively teach diverse students and help those teachers who have made the same mistakes as you give you feedback and help.

Viewing the bookmarks and annotations of others, I learned more about a website called LinkedIn. LinkedIn allows you to professionally share work profiles and  information for you to send to employers and even friends. I also learned about education forums where teachers with like-minded interests discuss certain topics and help each other out. 

Blog Journal 8

Adaptive technologies can be used to support those trying to learn because they make learning more fun and understanding for students of all grade levels. I believe that smart boards are a great resource to get students, especially with disabilities engaged. They can also keep the gifted students busy instead of just working with pen and paper. One type of software are word prediction technologies. They can help those with disabilities predict what they are going to "say" after just entering one word. Many students who are disabled have difficulties typing so this software is a great one. Some challenges that would arise using a technology like this one is the cost to the school for the classrooms and the training for the teachers to implement them in the classrooms. 

Powerpoint is great to engage students learning in the classroom. Powerpoints can be represented through the different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. For remembering, the ability to show students charts and diagrams on smartboards, using Powerpoint is a great resource, especially for visual learners. It allows students to see what they are trying to comprehend instead of just hearing it. For comprehension, an educator could create little mini "quizzes" about the lesson. For example, a teacher could create a few questions about the lesson and have the questions appear with a "command" button whenever you choose. For applying, teachers could show a video related to the lesson and ask how what they are applying relates to the lesson. This allows students to "dig deeper" and really try to engage in the subjects they are being taught. Analyzing is probably the best taxonomy for learning. Powerpoints are great for analyzing lessons. An educator just simply has to make slides about the topics and go in depth and detail in all the slides about the lesson. Synthesizing in a powerpoint is simply just putting the pieces together. To synthesize throughout a powerpoint presentation, one would just have to breakdown a topic and explain it in full detail. Lastly, evaluating in a powerpoint would be to have students critically think about the lesson/topics discussed. During the presentation of material, teachers can create questions in the slides to keep students focused, engaged, and interested. 

Technology, especially in education is always developing. New technologies and tools are constantly being "bettered" and created. Many companies are always seeking and creating new tools to facilitate teaching for educators. Creating lesson plans, and especially teaching them, is not easy. These tools are created to help educators and even students in learning. These technologies can also be very fun for students. They are learning while at the same time working with technological devices that are interactive. To be able to keep up with advancing technology and see what is out there, there is website called "The Techy Teacher," which gives a list of different technologies and softwares for classrooms. They even mention they keep the website up-to-date as more things are created. 

Adaptive Technology for Diverse Learners

Through my individual efforts, I learned the different ways that annotating can allow me to share with others why a particular website could have useful information for them. I also learned the importance of adaptive technology for students in different grade levels, specifically for students who are disabled. In viewing and listening to the group presentations, I learned about the different ways adaptive technologies can benefit international students, especially those trying to learn a certain language, more specifically, English. Viewing the annotations and bookmarks of others I realized how different we all are. We all annotate and highlight different points and sentences. This goes to show me that annotating, especially via Diigo is super helpful in the fact that it allows each person to share their ideas and then see what everybody else has to comment and what others think about the same information. 

Blog Journal 7

So far, from using twitter I have learned how beneficial it is to interact with others. Twitter is so versatile in the ways you can share information, read information, and post information. Benefits from using twitter have been interacting with my peers and learning new education advances posted by "popular" education profiles. I am able to see tweets and retweets from my classmates about articles I am interested in reading, facts they post, etc. No, I have not experienced any issues with Twitter. 

From working on my web design, I have acquired skills such a uploading background images, adding texts to these images, and linking links to "buttons" I add on my page. I like how I can create absolutely anything I want. I have the ability to make this page my own by uploading pictures that stand out to me, playing around with colors and seeing what looks best, and writing about information I would like my future students to know about. I can improve this website next time maybe by completing it a little quicker. Since it was my first time ever doing an assignment like this, it took me some time to play around with the features. Completing this website could help me in my future career because as a future educator, I plan to create a website like this one for my class. I think it is very useful for students and parents to find and read information like the ones I uploaded for this assignment. (class calendar, class announcements, and school supply list).

http://brennacarrigan.weebly.com

The new skills I learned from working with Diigo is learning how to annotate and publically comment on my classmates annotations. I think it is so cool how Diigo allows you to do this. It makes it easy to share information and personal thoughts on subjects you want to share with others. This application can be useful in my classroom if I ever want my students to annotate on lessons we are learning in class and sharing this information with their peers. In my individual professional efforts I could use Diigo for assigned readings in my classes. For example, if I am reading an article I could bookmark it, then go through it and annotate by marking and commenting points and paragraphs that stand out to me. If I need to study from this article, I could later go back and read the points I made to facilitate my studying. 

ILP "Design" - Prezi

Bullying can be verbal, physical, sexual, and even done cyberlly. It is a huge epidemic that should be stopped and taken more seriously. I believe this can be done right in the heart of schools. I also believe children have the power to put an end to it. I decided to do this project on a few simple and easy ways to prevent bullying. Most of these prvention tips are for students. I explain what they can do to try to put an end to bullying.

https://prezi.com/view/rjZx06Iri3IQCXY6FXTK/

Teacher Productivity Tools

Through my individual efforts on today's activity, I learned about a program called Schoology and what it has to offer for teachers and students. Schoology is a learning management system for K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and corporations that allows users to create, manage, and share content and resources. Technological tools have so much to offer and as a future educator, I cannot wait to experiment with them! 

Viewing the bookmarking and annotations of my classmates, I learned about many education technology tools teachers could use that I had never even heard about. It is amazing how much is out there for our benefit. For example, many people used the example of using spreadsheets for not only taking attendance and keeping track of students grades, but it is a great tool for keeping students and parents contact information. 

Group Activity C.R.A.P.

In this group activity, my partners were Jade Grassi and Gavin Clark.

Contrast:
-Yes, the contrast on Mrs. Savage's webpage is good. Most information is either black or white or garnet and white. I am clearly able to differentiate titles, headers, and actual information links.

Repetition:
-Yes, similar visual elements are repeated throughout the webpage. She has subjects such as "daily schedule, field trip dates, and homework help" with the same size, font, etc. Also, all her different newsletter tabs look the same, which make it easy to read.

Alignment:
-Yes, similar elements are aligned to represent a visual connection. She has two columns, separating all the tabs from the actual information depending on which tab you click. There is also a defined space that is always present between the tabs and the information.

Proximity:
-Yes, visual elements are grouped together depending on what they are. For example, the tabs that she has on the side are grouped together because all the information relates to those topics. After you click on your desired tab, all the information is grouped together since they are similar.

Blog Journal 6

I looked at Mrs.Pyne's fourth grade class at Cedar Creek Elementary. On her class page, she has external links to math games. I assume that she assigns homework through these websites or just encourages her students to interact with these games for practice. She has tabs such as "assignments, class info, tests, and weekly assignments." The only tab she has information in, is the "weekly assignments" tab. Here, she has kindergarten, first and second grade homework. Lastly, she has a calendar available and a news tab that has student success information as well as snack time information. 

 http://www.edline.net/pages/Cedar_Creek_ES/Classes/211-24/News

I envision myself using technology in many different ways, especially once I become an educator. Planning and documenting lessons is a great way to make teacher preparation more efficient. When lessons and materials are word processed, they are much easier to update. For example, using a software like Evernote allows you to take notes and save webpages. Never again do you have to search for an old book full of notes or a website you wanted to share with the class. Evernote allows you to do all this and more. Another tool I would use in my classroom is google calendar. Google calendar can help for anticipating workflow or mapping out an entire semester or year of lessons and tasks to complete. I would also use Excel spreadsheets for grading and record keeping. Excel is pretty easy to navigate once you get used to it and it allows for almost no human error. Excel calculates grades on it's own once you put the weight percentages in your spreadsheet. This is useful for students projecting their final grades, depending on performance from future assignments. Lastly and probably most importantly, I would use my e-mail to connect and communicate with parents and students. E-mail would probably be the quickest way for a student/parent to reach out to me or ask me something. Also, I would use e-mail if I had to communicate with a parent for any reason and to send out weekly class newsletters.

The technology tool at the SandBox that I would probably have available to me in my classroom and I would use most is the Smartboard. I have always had smartboards in my classrooms since Elementary school. They were always a great way to have the entire class engaged at once. Teachers can put interactive lessons on the board and have students take turns going up and answering the questions or marking with the markers the correct answer. Smartboards are fun and there is so much you can do with them. Another technology we used at the SandBox that was really cool was Virtual Reality. Although we all agreed this is a technology that is very independentaly based, it could maybe be used in small groups, that way all students get a turn at using it. Virtual reality can be used in a science classroom to explore the depths of the ocean, or in a history class, to go back in time and see what living in pre-historic times was like. There are many lessons one can come up with to teach using virtual reality and I find it pretty interesting.