CEP 810 Personal Learning Reflection

I have always believed that it is important to teach using technology because it keeps students more interested and involved in what you are teaching and in order to do this, teachers must stay on top of learning the newest forms of technology. This course has taught me about many new forms of technology that can be used in a variety of ways in the classroom and will definitely keep the students engaged.

Not only did I learn about new resources, but I also learned ways that these resources can be used in the classroom. The most beneficial way to use these resources is to teach collaboration. The wide range of web-based technologies from Blogging to Twitter can be used as ways for students to collaborate with each other.

My SIG presentation is the assignment that I feel exemplifies good teaching with technology  because I not only learned more about our group’s topic of using videos in the classroom, but I also learned how to use the program Prezi which can be a very useful tool in the classroom as well.

Because of this class, I have definitely branched out into learning many more technological applications that I did not previously know about and I can now take these new ideas back to my classroom. I now have many ideas to choose from and incorporate into my lessons as opposed to the past when I only knew and used the same few techniques that I used over and over again.

My new goals are to take what I have learned throughout this course and incorporate these new ideas into my classroom lesson plans. My plan for reaching this goal is to stay on top of all the new programs I have learned and to make sure I find ways to incorporate them into my teaching even if it is a little at a time. It would be too difficult to take on the task of incorporating everything I have learned into my teaching all at once, but my long term goal will be to incorporate more and more techniques as time goes on. I would also like to continue my learning in educational technology by taking CEP 812 & CEP 813 next summer.

CEP 811 Personal Learning Reflection

I have always believed that it is important to teach using technology because it keeps students more interested and involved in what you are teaching and in order to do this, teachers must stay on top of learning the newest forms of technology. This course has taught me about many new forms of technology that can be used in a variety of ways in the classroom and will definitely keep the students engaged.

Not only did I learn about new resources, but I also learned ways that these resources can be used in the classroom. The most beneficial way to use these resources is to teach collaboration. The wide range of web-based technologies from Blogging to Wikis can be used as ways for students to collaborate with each other.

Because of this class, I have branched out into learning many more technological applications that I did not previously know about and I can now take these new ideas back to my classroom. I now have many ideas to choose from and incorporate into my lessons as opposed to the past when I used few techniques.

My new goals are to take what I have learned throughout this course and incorporate these new ideas into my classroom lesson plans. My plan for reaching this goal is to stay on top of all the new programs I have learned and to make sure I find ways to incorporate them into my teaching even if it is a little at a time. It would be too difficult to take on the task of incorporating everything I have learned into my teaching all at once, but my long term goal will be to incorporate more and more techniques as time goes on. I would also like to continue my learning in educational technology by taking CEP 812 & CEP 813 next summer.

Online Teaching and Learning

One of the technologies that qualify as an online experience and could be used with my students is Career Cruising (www.careercruising.com) which is under the section of career planning tools. I have actually already used this website with 8^th graders while teaching an exploratory class about careers. In this course we introduced students to many different careers and to exploring their interests and personality traits that would benefit them for certain careers. Career Cruising was a great website to use for this class because it starts out by having students take a personal interest test. After the test was taken, the program would use each student’s results to give them a list of jobs that matched their interests. Finally, students could explore these careers to find out which ones they were interested in. Using Career Cruising, students can compile materials and keep track of their EDPs (Educational Development Plan) online.

The pedagogical strategies that I used with Career Cruising were to have students look over their results from the interest inventory and choose their three top careers from Career Cruising’s generated list. Students would then have to do research about each of the jobs they chose and list the pros and cons of each to eventually choose their top choice that they will complete a report on at the end of the class.

The technologies that would be harder to use with my students are any type of Interactive Discussion like podcasts and video conferencing. I think these would be more difficult to use in my classroom because it would be hard to find time to fit this type of program into a lesson and it would be hard to tie it into the curriculum.

Learning Styles

I have always been a visual learner and as I was growing up in school, I benefitted from my teachers using diagrams, pictures, and videos while teaching. If the teacher was just lecturing or describing the directions to an assignment verbally, I usually wouldn’t grasp the concept completely until I saw an example or diagram of the topic being discussed. Strategies that were less effective were when a teacher would just simply lecture or read from the textbook.

Because we can’t teach each lesson with a focus on every learning style, our focus should be on making sure that we use a variety of lesson plans that teach using each type of learning style. This can be especially useful when teaching about a certain topic for multiple days because then the teacher can take advantage of teaching using many different learning styles on the same topic.

Creative Commons Image

Photo Attribution:Original image: "Layers of color"
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/2650613773/

by: Quinn Dombrowski Released under an Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Images in the classroom could be used as visual demonstrations of the topic you are teaching about. For example, if I was teaching about sedimentary rocks and how the layers are effected by things like faulting and folding, I could show the picture above to demonstrate how faulting has caused the layers in the picture to become unaligned.

Link to my Flickr Page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/65875559@N07/5998339750/

UDL Checklist

Here is a link to my UDL (Universal Design for Learning Framework) checklist. I had to use this checklist to improve a lesson plan that I created. 
UDL Checklist

Wikipedia Correction

On my school district's Wikipedia page, I added the date when one of the elementary schools was closed.

Blog vs. Webpage

Blogs are better than webpages because they provide the opportunity for more communication among teachers, students, and parents. By allowing students to post and comment on their classmates' posts, you are encouraging collaboration and communication.
Webpages are better than blogs because they give you the opportunity to keep things more organized and easy to find because you can have separate tabs for different topics as opposed to having one very long page with everything compiled on it.

PC Maintenance & Security

The three tutorial I chose for this lab were:
A) 1. Clean up & speed up your PC
     2. I learned how to save space by using the disc cleanup and how to make my computer start up faster.
     3. I was surprised by how much space was being taking up by unnecessary stuff and I am glad that I now know how to get rid of these unwanted applications.

B) 1. Using free anti-virus products
     2. I learned many different options for installing free anti-virus products. I am now using Avast on my computer.
     3. I was surprised that there are so many free anti-virus software programs out there that I didn't know about.

C) 1. File backup options.
     2. I learned that Microsoft has a quick and easy way to help you backup your files which is a good thing for me because I have had two of my previous computers crash on me and lost all of my files.
     3. I was surprised that this Microsoft program is already on your computer and that no one had told me about it.

GTD (Getting Things Done)

While listening to the pod cast about GTD, I heard them talking about an app for the iPhone called Things. I decided to buy the app to use as my organization process. This app makes it much easier to organize your tasks because it has the different categories set up for you and automatically updates all of your tasks daily.
Going through this organization process is very tedious and takes a long time! However, once you have everything set up, it will be a huge help in reducing stress and making sure nothing important is forgotten.
I will definitely continue to use Things because it is on my phone, which makes it extremely convenient and accessible.

Social Networking

Social networking has a huge influence on my personal and professional life. In my personal life, I use social networking such as Facebook to easily stay connected to many people. Some of the ways I use
Facebook to stay connected are by sending messages to people, inviting people to activities by creating events, sharing and seeing each others' pictures, and simply keeping up on others' lives by reading their daily posts. In my professional life, I don't use social networking as much, but I do use it to connect with coworkers and past students. It can also be used in your classroom for students to connect with each other about assignments or to find out about many different topics around the world. If it weren't for social networking and being able to easily stay connected, we would probably lose touch with many important people in the midst of our busy lives.

barne174's Bookmarks on Delicious

 

barne174's Bookmarks on Delicious

MERLOT Evaluation of Lesson

http://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=75242
1. Quality of Content: Content in the site does a great job of being user friendly and clearly demonstrates the major topics related to earthquakes.
2. Effectiveness as a teaching tool: This tool would be used as a demonstration of the curriculum/ exploration of the problem. After using the site, students should be able to understand how to find the epicenter of an earthquake.
3. Ease of Use: The site does a good job of giving the instructor a step by step demo of how to use the material. The site has directions on each page and easy to use buttons to navigate from one step to another.

Blog comment

Here is the comment I posted on one of my RSS Blog sites: ChalkTalk

RSS Page

Welcome!

Just started my new blog!