Field Experience 2

What? 

I am learning how to use technology in the classroom as a teacher. This week, I am learning how to teach social studies lessons, using technology to enhance learning, in a 6th grade class. 

So What?

As a teacher, this means I am learning how to incorporate media into social studies lessons in a meaningful way that helps reach the core curriculum standards, objectives, and indicators. I have learned that power point is an effective way for the teacher to stay organized and on topic. I have a tendency to go off on tangents, and I was glad my partner and I had prepared a power point presentation to help us stay on track today. We still didn't end up having time for one part of our lesson, but we were able to look to the power point when we got lost or needed guidance to transition us to the next step in the teaching process. As a student, I learned today that activities sometimes take a lot longer than you had planned, so it is important to have every step mapped out. The easiest way to do that is to have an organized media tool/presentation to keep everyone on the same page. The students in our class always get excited when they see technology in the classroom. They jumped for joy when we told them we would be bringing the mobile labs in for an assignment on Thursday. As a colleague, I have been able to use google presentations and google documents to plan lessons with my partner while I've been at work or at home. The collaboration and organization between our communication has been effective enough to have successful lesson plans and have the lesson run smoothly. 
We are learning, hands-on, how to incorporate media into our daily lesson plans to familiarize ourselves with all the different aspects of preparation that come with having an effective technology based or included lesson. This can apply to me in my classes because for my classes, I am in fieldwork, and I am learning how to work media lessons for a 6th grade audience that isn't totally familiar with computers yet. In my life in general, this opportunity is allowing me to have experiences that will fine tune my teaching skills into a more organized method. To me, this technology means I am responsible for teaching future generations of students how to survive in a technology based world. I am responsible for opening them up to the world they are surrounded by and will soon be surviving in independently. My colleagues will have the same responsibility as me, and we are only bettering ourselves, our students, our careers, and our schemas by applying media and technology into our daily lesson plans.

Now What?

To my future students, this technology that I provide will be the means in which they make the difference between simply surviving or graciously thriving in their environment. This new information changes my current schema by allowing me to introduce media based lessons to a new and younger audience. This improves my schema by giving me more ideas of organized ways to teach, and using media in the classroom is teaching students more ideas of organization through observation and experimentation and learning about totally different subjects all at the same time. This information will change the kind of teacher I am in the future because while I have been observing in field, I have noticed the kind of excitement and passion that comes from Mr. Shirley's technology based class, as opposed to my cooperating teacher's paper worksheet, silence, independent work based class. I see how the students react to new, modern, current, relative technology that is brought into the classroom, and I see how they react when they build a worksheet. The difference is vast, and it is important to have up to date ways of teaching with technology because the students will learn better and they will actually like coming to school. The students may actually begin to see ways things can apply to them better than ever before because of the current content.
The kinds of assignments I can give my students, using up to date technology, is much more plentiful than those assignments I can assign without technology. For our lesson tomorrow, the students will be using mobile labs and in a group, they will research, create, and develop a link on a class website about inventions in Ancient Rome. If they don't finish in the allotted time in class, they can work at home because it is an online class page that they can work from anywhere on. Since it is a more wealthy area, they may even be able to work on it from their parent's phone at a soccer game or other places outside the school. In class, it is cooperative learning, and outside of class it is cooperative learning. That is something that could not have been done as easily in the past before these kind of technology resources. This will help me become a better teacher by allowing me the chance to be organized, resourceful, helpful, knowledgeable, creative, and full of options and ideas to help the students learn in the best way possible. Learning how to incorporate media in daily lesson plans will help my colleagues and I to feel more confident and aware of what is going on in our classrooms. I'm sure departments will get along better if they don't have frustrations about internet, technology, and computers. Our cooperating teacher has a poster in his room that is a picture of Garfield chain sawing a computer and saying, "Compute this!" The frustration about computers and technology can only be conquered when taken head on and harnessing all that energy into something productive and useful. The department would be wise to encourage this negative 'every thing is always broken anyways' fear about technology to completely disappear and transform into a positive and working relationship between the opportunities technology provides and the classrooms it can provide it for. Getting over the frustration of technology and facilitating opportunities for the students to learn to use the tools they will grow up with will benefit the teacher and the learner both. 

Video Reflection: Next generation learning

Next generation learning is all centered around up-to-date technology and incorporating it in the classroom. The comparison between the generations before me and now is immensely different and it is hard to bridge the gap. This video gave resources and a website to help bridge this gap and incorporate more current media into the school's learning.
I found it interesting that this particular school found a way to incorporate learning with one of the most popular children's video gaming tools in our day- the Wii. The more technology we can use that the kids enjoy and love, the better.
The boy in this brief film said, "It's amazing the doors it opens." He then gave an example of how incorporating media through a class website allowed the parents to feel confident about their children taking a field trip to Madrid because they were able to see uploaded pictures from the trip the day they were taken. This Mother that felt the need to push for technology in her son's school even though she didn't have a similar education growing up. Parents can adapt to the new changes and it will benefit them to be familiar with all the things they can do with technology in this day and age.

Field Work 1

What? 

I am learning about how to incorporate different media tools in my classroom lesson plans. I am learning how to get sixth graders interested in Social Studies by giving meaningful lectures with hands on assignments.

So What?

As a teacher, this means that the students will trust my ability to teach effectively. It means that I will be able to gain 6th graders attention by relating to them with their current technology based world and growing schemas. As a student, this means that I can learn to have better teacher presence by being more prepared in my lesson plans. I can be most prepared by organizing myself through media tools. I find that when I have vidcasts, podcasts, or digital stories I have created or found, my lesson remains interesting, and I am able to stay on track and get myself organized and together while the media tool is teaching. As a colleague, this is helping me be a better team teacher. My partner, Charis Jensen, and I are having great success using Google's many collaborative tools to plan our lessons. We are doing this to expand our horizons and become more well-rounded individuals that are better prepared to involve students in RAD teaching, Whole Brain teaching, and reaching multiple senses to keep the students interested.  

This can apply to me today in my other classes because it is helping me create more valuable Social Studies lessons for field, and the technology I have come to learn about is creating more opportunities to find primary sources and create valuable methods to present them. In my life in general, I have found that the technology tools I have learned about have helped me serve other people in more effective and important ways. I am now able to help my Mom create a powerful Sunday School lesson using Google Presentations and attaching digital stories and mp3 files. To my colleagues, this means that I am more capable of communicating, sharing ideas, and using 2 brains to create one awesome and organized media tool creation.

Now What?

To my future students, this information means that they will be learning in a style that is relevant to their time. They will be learning about technology through learning about Social Studies. This information changes my current schema and it is evident by the way it has changed my day to day vocabulary. I catch myself saying things like "Good idea. You should podcast that," or "Let's google doc it over the weekend," or "Search google images and add it to the presentation, and I'll edit the format." All these phrases show me how much my schema has changed over the past 3 months. This information will help me become a more well-rounded teacher with tons of new ideas to display and educate in a sophisticated and interesting manner. The kind of assignments I can give my students have become much more group oriented, which matches the theories I've been studying in Psychology. Group work is socially vital, and in the 6th grade class I'm in now, we don't see much of it. Charis and I will be giving a Google presentations assignment in class that we think will improve the social unity of the class by having them work in groups It will force them to complete the assignment they are learning about in class rather than goofing off and saving it for homework if they are required to present their slides to the class at the end of the lesson. If we don't have time to complete the assignment with our allotted computer time, the students will be able to collaborate from their home computers. 
This will help me become a better teacher because I will be including the students in a deeper learning process. This will help me be a better colleague because I can share my idea, work together to produce valuable teaching tools, and create sharable lesson plans. In our department, we can rely on multiple ways of communicating, sharing information, improving our lesson plans, exploring new ideas, and motivating our teachers with things like digital stories. All these tools we have been learning about can work in any of Gardners' 8 intelligences and can help anyone produce the most effective form of lesson from their type of creative genius. 

Video Reflection: Teach or Educate

Some things I liked from this clip were the quotes about education by socrates, the analogy of filling a vessel and lighting a flame that showed the differences between teaching and educating, and the music transition that recognized educating as the better choice.
I didn't like that there were no pictures of students. Teaching/Educating is all about the students, and I didn't feel the point the author was making really made that deep of an impact without any pictures of students.
I thought the  color of the font was too translucent. I also thought the speed of the words transitioning was too fast, and I thought the words needed to be more interesting to make up for the lack in interesting pictures.
I also thought the pictures were a little irrelevant. An empty school chair on the grass didn't really make any connection with the topic, to me. I also thought the blue flowers weren't related to the subject at all. I thought the connection between the fire extinguisher and the quote about lighting the flame in the students was contradictory and a little confusing.
I thought the definitions of teaching supported the ideas of an educator, so it didn't really separate the light between the two ideas that the creator was trying to get across.
Overall, I didn't think this Digital Story was all that educational or moving. It didn't practice what it preached by really educating the audience.

Digital Story 1

What?

We have just finished building our podcast and vidcast. I liked it so much that I made an extra podcast and then posted my favorite. We are now beginning our Digital Stories. I think I may enjoy the digital story almost as much as the podcast.

So What?

As a teacher, this information means that I will be able to teach my students with combinations of music, pictures, videos, and other graphic images to present them with valuable information. As a student, I can use this information to put projects into a more creative and interesting form. For my brain fair project, I was able to use my knowledge of how to build a website in order to organize the information, videos, and pictures from my team's research. They also knew how to do it, which helped with the collaboration, and it reminded me of how it could work with my colleagues in the future. We are doing this for the very reason to help us become better students, teachers, and colleagues.

This can apply to my other classes and my life in general in many ways, like being able to use my enlarging schema of media to create better and more interesting ways to share and teach information. This technology we are learning will allow me to portray important messages to the students in a way that can be interpreted by them and only them through what they see, feel, hear, and take in from media organizers like the digital story.

Now What?

To my future students, this information means that they won't have to listen to me tell them information, but they will be able to decipher which facts are and aren't important through visual and auditory imagery. This information changes my current schema by enlarging the ideas I have floating around that I can retrieve to help build a better learning foundation for my future students. I can give my students an assignment at the beginning of the year to build a website and throughout the year, I can have them post their assignments on their website. They can go back to their website and edit it throughout their school years and it can serve as a journal to them in the future. Hopefully they will continue to build on it throughout their secondary education and high school.

This will help me become a better teacher because I will be helping the students create fond memories by harboring good experiences and long-lasting assignments. This information will also help me become a better colleague because I plan on keeping the google site I created in this class and adding to it and taking away from it as I shape my schema and teaching philosophy. I really enjoyed making my podcast and even made an extra to help my friend, who was having sleep troubles, to fall asleep. I hope my students will connect with one of the many assignments I now know about and can give them.

Web Quest Final Touches and Pod/Vidcast Reflection

What?

As my partner and I put on our final touches to our blog today, we were very impressed with the turnout of the hours and hours of work we put into our web quest.

As we started planning for our vidcast and podcast, we were bouncing ideas off of each other and are excited to get together again to learn a new teaching strategy by planning our pod and vid casts.

So What?

As a teacher, this means that I will be able to put vidcasts and podcasts on my web quests and gather all my information to make amazing lessons. As a student, I can create organized and impressive lesson plans with web quests and I can make them interesting with pod/vidcasts. As a colleague, this means doesn't mean much now, since I'm a janitor. But I suppose if they ask me to do a tutorial on 'how to be the world's greatest janitor', like I am, I could do a very cool 'how to' vidcast. I can see it now... "How to be like Ally, the world's(UVU's) greatest janitor." We are learning how to create these web quests, vidcasts, and podcasts, so that we can use them as tools in our future classrooms. This new information can apply to me as I put it to use in teaching new concepts in regards to my presentations given in my other classes and come up with innovative study songs and memory techniques I can record.

I can be more creative. I can have a method to the madness going on in my wildly over-creative mind. I sadly don't have any colleagues at my current working position, just bosses, but my bosses could definitely be more effective teachers to their students if they would use things like this. They could create a site with podcasts and vidcasts demonstrating art techniquest in print making and drawing. That would allow their students to work from home when their stuff is much too large and unorganized to bring into class.

Now What?

My future students will be provided with a much more prepared teacher- prepared to deliver lessons in a creative, innovative, colorful, and organized way. This current information will allow my schema to reach out to different pathways to find ways to teach and formulate lesson plans for my students. I can give my students assignments in class with all the technology they come with (like ipods, phones, internet accessible tools, and cameras). They could formulate a song having to do with all the continents and their climates and record it and publish it on the class site all in one hour. That would be awesome. They can work in groups to collaborate all their tools, and they could use songs from each other's ipods to come up with a good rhythm for their song. If they didn't finish in class, they could google doc it at home, skype, or ichat to correlate. These type of activities that are all inclusive and allow students to use the tools they thrive on and love will allow me to be considered a cool teacher in their eyes, and if I can effectively teach the curriculum along with that, then I will be cool.

This information can help me become a better colleague because if I figure out how to do something really well, that other teachers are struggling with, I can make a how to vidcast. If other teachers have great ideas that need a little more organization to improve upon them, then these tools will be perfect organizers. The department can put together a DVD where all the teachers film the how to of their greatest lessons. The DVD can be used by all teachers to use great classroom study techniques, review games, assessment activities, etc. Technology can help teachers collaborate with each other in so many more ways than just lesson plans. This kind of technology can pass on individual philosophies, passions, and psychology theories to come up with the best balance of everyone's input on effective teaching.

Video Reflection: Schoolhouse Rock and why let our students blog

Schoolhouse Rock:

This was a very energetic vidcast that I enjoyed watching with my class team. We brainstormed ideas for our pod and vidcasts and thought of ways we could recreate something like this for other class projects and our future classrooms. The chorus: "Every person you can know, every place you can go, and anything you can show" was very catchy and even could work more effectively than that average 'person, place, or thing' memorization tool that is most often used in defining nouns. I also learned that music is an extremely effective tool to use in vidcasts.

Why Let Our Students Blog:

In this music slide video presentation, I learned a few reasons why blogging can be a useful learning tool for students. They can feel the same way I do when they get a comment on their post... basically like the coolest person alive. I have gotten several prompts and advice to become a writer as people have commented compliments on my blog. That has been an effective motivating tool in my writing career to have an encouraging audience. My nephew, who is in the 3rd grade was given a blog of his very own for Christmas from my sister. He constantly hears all of his aunts and his grandma talking about how great blogs are, so he caught on to their 'coolness.' He was very excited to receive his very own football decorated blog with a picture of him scoring a touchdown front and center. From him having a blog, I made the connection to this video that he felt empowered, motivated, and he was was able to interact with our family of bloggers. There are many reasons to incorporate kids with the blogging world, and I found it interesting that the person who created the video is from New Zealand. Talk about connecting with the world! Children can learn things from bloggers in the third grade all the way in New Zealand. That's pretty sweet.