Twitter Video Reflection

One thing that really stood out to me with the University of Minnesota's technique of using media in the classroom was their supply of computers. In the clip, it showed a few different shots of all the students in the class having computers to work with and a filing system for all of them. I don't think I will have these kind of resources in my future classroom, so it will be hard to use it as much as the seemed to be. I do know we will have computer labs, with assigned days to work on the computers, but the assignments need to fit into that hour- 2 hour time span.

As for outside the classroom collaboration for the students and teacher, I think it would be important to spend one of those computer lab days showing students how to work twitter and get them signed on to a class twitter page or whatever class on-line collaboration networks the class prefers to use.

Being an practitioner of on-line knowledge will be an important skill to have obtained when it comes to interviewing for jobs, choosing colleges, picking a major, and having applicable life skills that involve so much media.

Web Quest 2

What?

I am learning how to make a Web Quest. Right now, we are adding to our basic Web Quests and using skills like hyperlink and other tools to make the navigation process more effective.

So What?

As a teacher, this information will help me prepare organized lesson plans. As a student, this will help me reach my goals of becoming a more prepared teacher, by going into the field with loads of ideas and ways to organize those lesson plan ideas so that they are useful. As a colleague, having web quests will help my fellow-employees to borrow my lessons and hopefully add to them and share back with me how to make them better. We are doing this to become better teachers, with more media resources to organize and effectively teach large lesson units with specific instruction and information. In my other classes, this will help me to be aware of the kinds of organizational methods there are to plan a lesson. In my life, this can be helpful to me because I am becoming more familiar with basic technology skills. I use technology daily, and I like to make creative projects/gifts, so I am becoming more technology savvy, which is great.

To me, this technology means that there are endless options to create valuable, teachable, and creative lessons. That makes me happy. I want to be a super awesome teacher. Whatever skills and specific methods I can learn to do that-- bring 'em on. Hopefully, my colleagues, whoever they may be in the future, have some great ideas and different media approaches. We can combine our lesson plans/ideas/tactics and become a superpower of teachers. I can see it now... No fear, Super Schlauder is here. Here come Super Schlauder(mac laptop symbol for her super hero symbol) and her pack super hero teachers!! Yes. This is going to be good.

Now What?

Technology has a negative connotation for a lot of more experienced teachers. It definitely has its cons, and I've seen teachers get so mad with overhead projectors, that they have hit it with their hand and shattered the glass. I have seen other teachers use technology so effectively that when it stopped working, they had no problem teaching it another way. They preferred a technological way, but they were so familiar with the way to teach that subject that they gracefully kept flying on through. So, we are learning how to make web quests, but if all goes wrong and suddenly the internet site for my web quest gets deleted, I will be better prepared by having organized it so effectively that I'll be able to pick up with it no problem. That situation represents an example where my schema would be changed for the better. I will be a more prepared teacher by having delved so deep into the organizational process by developing an all-encompassing lesson plan.

I can give my students an assignment about finding the latitude and longitude of places in the world they want to travel to by using google earth. I can preface this assignment with a web quest that allows the students to find out more about different countries in the world. Once they are familiar with the different options, they can have that 'hook' of interest that will allow them to give attention to other subjects like latitude and longitude. They can create a google doc with members in their group to do a collaborative research paper that includes their country(topic), its latitude and longitude, a picture of a city/area/neighborhood they might consider living in from google earth.

This will help me become a better teacher because I can use authentic tools that are used in real world daily jobs, careers, and social skills. It will help my students be more prepared for working effectively in their future positions. It will help my colleagues develop these same skills the students are learning.

I just planned a direct teaching lesson with media influence that was well organized and prepared. I feel way excited to give it tomorrow because I am confident and prepared. It is so nice not to have to rely on your brain, but you can rely on valid internet resources. It is easier to trust a latitude and longitude mapping system on-line rather than on a worksheet map, and it is more fun. It'll be a great presentation tomorrow. I'm sure of it.

Video Reflection: Engaged Learning

This video made some striking compare and contrast visuals. This video compared old with new, India and China with the U.S, Shakespeare with Eminem, the ipod with the jukebox, collaboration in person with over the internet(google), and in class text books versus all kinds of computer resources.

Their main comparison was with the classroom in the past and the classroom today. What are we preparing our student for? Are we preparing them to work in one career? A statistic presented on the video stated that one person in this generation may have anywhere from 10-12 careers in their lifetime. We are not preparing students for one career out of a plethora of careers that all include the same competencies. We are preparing them for a world with all different levels and kinds of knowledge and competencies, and in order to cope with the vast progression in our ever increasing world, student must learn to have a self concept that allows for continual improvement.

So, as teachers, we must be improving daily, and we must be helping our students improve daily to interact with the world they must be prepared to live in, work in, and socialize in.

Holiday

What?

I am learning how to make a web quest using power point. I am performing a group assignment with my partner, Rachel, to come up with a useful complete lesson plan using the layout of a standard web quest.

So What?

As a teacher, this means that I am preparing to navigate my lesson plans in a different format. As a student, this means that I must learn to organize my lesson plans and call upon good examples that I make now for the future. My job is to make the good lesson plans now to look to later for guidance. As a colleague, this doesn't mean much to me today because my job is as a janitor, and I work alone, but in the future I will need to collaborate, and I could do that with web quests. We are doing this to be better future teachers, employees, and colleagues.

This can apply to me today in my other classes by organizing other presentations using this format. This can apply to my life in general because I can use these tools outside of school like at church, family activities, birthday presents, etc. It is a way to organize information, pictures, memories-- anything that is desired to be organized. This technology means that my schema is growing and creating more pathways to complete personal goals to continually improve. This will improve the life of my colleagues in the future in the same way that it will open up a new door to create lesson plans and other informational masses, but it will be different because there is room to be creative and unique within an organized layout.

Now What?

To my future students, technology is--their world. It means everything because it is everywhere and it is the key to accessing any past, current, or unique idea or information. My schema is changed by this information because my need to be have a technology supported classroom is becoming ever more obviously necessary. This changes the type of teacher I become in the future because I will be able to use Web Quest to organize lesson plans in a new innovative form that may appeal to students over other organizers. I can assign my students projects and assignments where the information can be accessed at home on how to complete the processes and remember the information to do so. They can be paired or in groups and can collaborate via previous tools taught to them like google documents.

This new information will help me be a better teacher because good teachers provide students with options and options they can understand and access. This information will help me be a better colleague because I will be less stressed about making copies and I will have time to make the kind of preparations necessary to be a confident and successful teacher. This information will help collaboration in the department because teachers can just type up their links the their web quest and it can be a resource for the entire district rather than even just the school. All these great lesson plans will just be floating around on the internet for anyone to access, and the school department can make a list of all these websites to help teachers give great lessons.

This information, I believe, will help teachers, like me, to be more confident through being better prepared. There will be less stress in the classroom, and there will be more synergy by creating more organized and efficient lesson plans.

Video Reflection: Surface Computing

Video Reflection

Recently having watched the movie, Surrogates, with Bruce Willis(no he was not on my couch watching it with me, he was starring in the film), my immediate response to this film was fear. I was scared that our world would turn into some psycho technological surrogate surreal world with computer tables and coffee tables-ah! I took a step back and thought about something we talked about in class--how teachers are afraid to use new ideas and technology out of fear of trying new things when education could be done the simplest and easiest way. I then thought about how I don't want to keep my students from knowing everything they can; I want to be the teacher that presents students with information and allows students to decide for themselves what they want to be interested in.

This footage of this futuristic technology surprised me when they said that it could be in stores as soon as 2007. I haven't seen any but it makes me wonder what kind of technology is out there that has been in the works for a long time. I'm thinking some pretty big things are coming up in our world of technology. I just hope that surrogates aren't!

I thought it was pretty cool how they could just set the camera on the table, and the pictures would just automatically download. It blew my mind when they set the cell phone on the table/computer and they could just transfer info on the phone. There are some brilliant minds out there. At one point, all those inventors of "Surface Computing" had a 4th grade teacher. I want to be the 4th grade teacher that facilitates an environment for minds like these to develop.

What?

I am currently learning about Web Quests. Although we are not using a web quest designer, we are learning how to perform/build the basic functions of a Web Quest through PowerPoint. These functions present the information for a task in a very organized and accessible manner.

So What?

As a teacher, this means that I can plan my lessons in a more structured way that will help me feel more prepared going into a unit. My students will be benefited by the organization and clarity of the assignment and its precise instructions. The parents will be able to have access to understanding all the elements of the subject assignment. We are doing this for those very reason... to help the students and parents be totally aware of what is expected. This applies to me, right now, because I can use this for future lessons that I have to give in my field work this semester and to come.

I can start building a portfolio of great lesson ideas. More than just having these great lessons written as ideas, I can have great instruction and organization within the lesson. I can rely on these in-depth tasks and processes to fully reach the core standards and objectives. As I do my backwards design, I can most certainly use this layout to organize each lesson well.

Now What?

My future students will understand the rubric, instruction, and expectations, so they will be able to fulfill those while venturing out into more creative ideas and abstractions within the boundaries set by the teacher. This changes my schema by allowing one more option of organizing lesson plans to enter into my pool of organizational techniques that are swimming around like fish. The nice thing about them is that they are easy to catch and use over and over, improving with each time it's used. This information will change the kind of teacher I am by allowing me to be a fisherman in a boat that is surrounded by that many kinds of fish rather than a pool with sparse living of any kind--struggling for ideas. This will help me become a better colleague because I will want to share my ideas and stay in touch with the other teachers. I will be able to offer my ideas, being proud of my work, while looking at their ideas--again, expanding the amount of ideas to fish for. This kind of collaboration will promote positive 'sharing' within the department.

I dream a lot. I have at least one dream I remember every night. I had a weird one the other day that I woke up to work out in the morning before I had to be at school. I was the teacher of a 3rd grade class. After I got done with my work out, I went to school. It was a surprise teacher evaluation. The principle was in my class before my class was and he asked me to change my lesson plan from an overhead projection lecture to a different teaching technique. I stood there in terror. I could not think of one other idea than just talking to the class about the subject and using the overhead projector. He wrote Brainless on the evaluation and left, shouting through his ears(it was a weird dream) about how no teachers in the school had any good ideas and he was going to go get some good ideas and make us eat them for dinner.

The correlation between this dream and my feelings about learning new methods of teaching do relate-- believe it or not. In deciding to be a teacher, I felt like my method of teaching for any lesson was pretty much the same. Use some kind of visual, write some kind of paper, and share some kind of personal experience. I always resort back to these familiarities, and coming into the program, I figured that that was what a good teacher was. Don't worry. I have learned that the more resources the better, the more teaching methods the better, the more ways to present the better, the less speaking and the more showing... the better. This Web Quest is just one more addend onto my teaching philosophy- that using more/knowing more/teaching more is better.

My Beliefs

I would like to incorporate more technology in my teaching techniques for many reasons. Number one, the students will be tech-savvy, and it will be a common interest we will share, as teacher and student, if I can be up to date on the latest trends and fads of their generation and mine. If we, as a class, can collaborate and use as many common interest tools as we can to be organized and communicate, then the class will be that much more synergetic. The classes I am most successful in are the ones where I am capable of independently knowing what is going on in the class at all times with assignments, due dates, and learning topics. If I can give myself a little heads up before class by looking over the content for that day's lecture, then I feel comfortable, prepared, and confident to do my work. Most importantly, I succeed in the classes that I can navigate the syllabus well and understand the curriculum goals fully.

I believe the students will learn to trust their teacher as they are able to understand the expectations and goals of the class. The class must be fair, and the teacher must be willing to help and answer questions. This type of synergetic relationship and understanding is only developed with a clear and purpose-filled curriculum with clear and reasonable assignments that benefit the student and help the teacher assess and evaluate the next direction to head towards. Trust can be developed through proper communication, and communication can be facilitated by multiple internet, phone, texting, and in-person contact. There needs to be explicit and unchanging 'lab hours' where the students can come in for help. There needs to be a consistency and fairness in the response given by the teacher to emails and texts. There also needs to be an overall professionalism set in place so there is no misunderstanding or error in helping along this process of communication through technology.

Lessons Learned

Some of my favorite insights from the videos, readings, and websites were the following:

WWW- "To counteract with the new WWW's potentially harmful impact on youth, educators must use technology to create learning experiences that are real, rich, and relevant."

This is the age of 'instant media gratification' where it is vital to be feeding the dendrites in the brain the right kind of knowledge that will serve the students the most successfully. They are at an age ripe and ready for knowledge, so I learned that we need to be feeding them with the most useful resources and skills that will continue to develop and progress throughout their student career.

High Tech Learning- There is a "big difference between providing access to resources and facilitating the learning process." Going along with the last lesson learned in WWW, this lesson also incorporates the importance of giving students valid and useful information- information that can give students a plethora of accessible opportunities to use when searching for any other educative information.

Shorthand- This article was very entertaining, but more than that, it gave me a few ideas for lesson plans teaching acronyms and poetry in English. Certainly it would be useful for the class to come up with other acronyms to use in texting to be funny or just to keep up with the growing rate of language changes in instant messaging, informal emailing, and texting. We, as teachers can incorporate social networking systems into our basic teaching tools and lessons to relate to the students, keep them interested, and teach them the madness/history behind LOL.

Did You Know- Teacher Tube is an awesome resource I had no idea existed before this assignment. I watched an amazing primary source on DDAY; in memory of the fallen. Primary sources are vital in teaching and this site was a great resource to make learning history interesting and real.

There are many resources out there that can help me become a better and a more up-to-date teacher. These are a few ideas, websites, and methods I can incorporate to make me a better teacher.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Weaknesses from NET Standards:

II. Planning and designing learning environments and experiences includes a few elements that I find difficult to apply into my teaching/training at times. For instance, C: Identify and locate technology resources and evaluate them for accuracy and suitability, is a hard element of technology support for me to implement. It is a weakness of mine that I don’t evaluate the accuracy of websites before trusting their information. My students deserve the truth, and in order to give them the truth, I need to better examine what methods I can use to evaluate the validity of a website’s information.

III. Teaching, learning, and the curriculum includes an overall skill that I haven’t fully developed. Sometimes I solely use technology to create an aesthetically pleasing presentation (cutesy elementary teacher coming out), and I use technology to entertain rather than to teach.

Strengths from NET Standards:

V. Productivity and Professional Practice

D. Use technology to communicate and collaborate with peers, parents, and the larger community in order to nurture student learning.

I have strength in this particular area because I have been educated in email, instant messaging, and other technological communication methods since I was a middle school student. I am familiar with Skype because I have used it as my only source of communication for 6 months while I was traveling abroad. I also used Skype in teaching Taiwan preschoolers about technology and cross-world cultures (America). I know that this will be a continued strength when I am a teacher because I am passionate about the effectiveness of organized communication through the internet. It will be a great tool to be able to post the weekly newsletter, spontaneous announcements, the syllabus, and the calendar all on one website. This will be much easier for me, my students, and especially my parents. Since making the parents happy is my biggest fear, it will be a continual concern of mine to keep them happy through constant and organized communication.

Strengths of the UNI survey:

The only strength I tested above the Apprentice level was on Standard 15; Use audio/visual technology to produce artistic informational audio/visual projects.

I was rated between an apprentice and a practitioner because I have created many(50) pieces of work that have included editing mainly via imovie. I have made wedding videos, study abroad videos, contest entry videos, commercial advertisement videos, interviews/news videos, and many other types of editing and creating with film. I have taught other peers how to use these editing tools to make effective projects, advertisements, or presentation aids. I haven’t taught a class of my students how to use these tools because I am not a teacher yet, but I have had practice teaching these skills to my peers, so I believe I test slightly above the apprentice level.

Weaknesses of the UNI survey:

I do not use databases or spreadsheets, and though I have taken courses on how to do so, I do not implement them into my current life and may not have the abilities to do so when I am a teacher.

Goals:

In order to improve upon my weaknesses, I could take these two workshops.

1. http://sites.google.com/site/colettecassinelli/spreadsheet
2. http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic32.htm

The first workshop will help me to improve my understanding of how to use spreadsheets and data, and they will help me to understand why they are important tools for me as a teacher.

The second workshop is a great resource to learning how to find out the accuracy of websites, and it is built especially for teachers.

Video Reflection: Power Point

In this video, my negative feelings towards poor power point presentations were well represented. I struggle when a teacher throws on the power point and stands or sometimes sits with no enthusiasm and a long-winded approach to talking us through each bullet pointed concept. Some 'to avoids' that the speaker indicated in his presentation were to avoid the following: too many bullet points, bad color schemes, confusing data charts with excess information, and too much animation cancels out effectiveness. Through his presentation, I also came up with some things to remember when presenting an effective power point. The enthusiasm displayed by this speaker was very entertaining and 'effective.' Without mentioning the importance of passion and enthusiasm, the presenter displayed the kind of emotion necessary when using a power point and really in doing any kind of teaching. A hands-on activity won't require such intense enthusiasm and ranging voice tones as much as a lecture type lesson will. So, if I'm not in the mood one day to be enthusiastic and energetic, I can be assured in knowing that a hands-on activity will allow the students to be interactive, and it will keep their attention and provide the students with the opportunity to learn and remember the material being taught. I'm not an avid supporter of power point presentations because the majority that I've been involved in have created a sour feeling about the topic being learned. I have, although, seen one or two power points work out and benefit the learners immensely. The downfall of power points is that the teacher really does have to prepare so much and spend a lot of time in creating power points- even the ones that end up being 'boring' to the class. So, my theory is: why not spend that same amount of time, hard work, and preparation on something that is guaranteed to work. If a power point can work for that particular subject better than any other technique, then it's important to know how to make it aesthetically pleasing and effective.