Reflection 9

At Thanksgiving this past week, my family was talking after dinner and my 5th grade cousin was complaining about how she is one of the only kids in her class without a cell phone. I did not get a cell phone until my sophomore year of high school and I remember in when I was in 5th grade hardly anyone had a cell phone. It just made me think about how technology use has grown so much just in the past ten years and as teachers   we will have to deal with stuff at the elementary level a few years ago would have barely been on the radar at that age. It also shows how adept younger kids are at using technology and plays into the importance of teaching with technology to better gain their attention.

Week 14

I read a few different articles while researching the future of technology in education and found there seems to be a theme of trying to change the mindset of teachers as well as the whole education system of from thinking "we've always done it this way" to "how can we best integrate technology and prepare our students for the future." It is difficult to integrate technology because it is always changing and becoming more and more advanced, but as teachers it is important to prepare our students for the future and technology is a huge part of life now. In one of the articles I read, Joyce Johanson makes a good point when she says,
                 "Americans accept the advantages technology offers us at home, on the highway, in business and industry. We accept, expect, perhaps even demand, these advantages in all aspects of our lives except education. Why? Why is it that the educational "we’ve always done it this way" and "it’s worked for over 100 years" attitudes block the integration of technology into our schools where we are educating children for a future that demands they understand and use technology? The fact is that if America wishes its future generations to be able to meet the demands of a global community, to compete in a world that is technology-based, and to manage the vast amounts of data and information available, we must give today’s children the tools through education." (http://www.wiu.edu/thecenter/articles/thefuture.html)
             I agree with what she says here and think that as technology becomes more and more a part of life and work it becomes very important to teach our students how to use it as well as use it to keep their attention as we teach. How we do education is changing and technology is one of the main forces driving this change.

Reflection 8

Before this year, I had never really thought about how useful a program such as Google Maps could be in the classroom. A few different classes I am in now have talked about different ways it can be used in the classroom. Using it you can show students what a place actually looks like; it can allow you to take them on a mini field trip to places all over the world.

Week 13

Word: Typing, the synonyms feature, spell check, formatting help
PowerPoint: Slideshow, transitions, add photos, backgrounds
Excel: I don't really use Excel that often, but when I have I have found it is useful for list making and figuring out money stuff with the auto calculate functions and is helpful to keep everything in line.

Lesson Ideas:
1. To help my students learn Excel we could do a math project where they have to start their own business and keep track of the finances on Excel in order to determine if they are losing or making money.
2. To help my students learn PowerPoint we could do group presentations that relate to something we are working on in class and part of the presentation points come from having certain elements from PowerPoint on their presentation such as, transitions, pictures, words, etc.
3. To help my students learn Word we could do a project where they have to type a short paper and the paper with have things that need to be bolded, italicized, have a header, etc.
                  *Before starting any of these projects we would do a short overview of the programs and the basics of using them and then the projects would give the students more practice with them.

Week 12

The article I read was about the use of active boards in classrooms and the some of the studies regarding the use and effectiveness of them. In some studies between 16-26 percentile point gain in student achievement was noted, but "One of the more interesting findings from the study was that in 23 percent of the cases, teachers had better results without the interactive whiteboards." When they looked into this though, they discovered that this tended to result from how the boards were being used. Stemming from that, this article was able to help explain effective and not effective ways of using an active board. Reading this article can help a teacher to understand the best ways to utilize technology and in particular active boards in the classroom. 

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/nov09/vol67/num03/Teaching-with-Interactive-Whiteboards.aspx

Reflection 7

I was preparing a short lesson for one of my other classes and stumbled across a website with a bunch of different lesson plans and downloadable power points or classroom resources. I thought it was so neat that just by spending a little time on Google I was able to save a lot of time and enhance the lesson I already had begun to form on my own. Here is the link to the website if anyone is interested. http://betterlesson.com/home

Week 11

The blog post I read was called "Are they Students or are they Learners?" by David Warlick. It broached the topic of the difference between students and learners and the value of shifting our thinking as teachers to viewing our class as learners instead of students. There was a very helpful chart that put the two side by side and drew out the differences. Two of the main ones that stuck out to me were the relationship with educators and motivation. For students, the relationship with educators is "Students are employees, expected to obediently follow instructions." On the flip side, "Learners are citizens with a vested interest in the learning society." In regards to motivation, for students it is "Obligation: Students are culturally obliged to work for the teacher & for compensation" but for learners it is  "Responsibility: Learners are motivated by an understood and realized “value” in their work, especially when it is valuable to others." I really enjoyed this article and it made me truly think about the classroom and my view of my class and the relationship I build with them. I don't really know if my comment contributed that much to the learning world, but by reading this and thinking about different ways to approach teaching, it can help me to impact the learning world within my classroom. 

http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/?p=2762