During the exhibition, I definitely learned how important learning the different technologies throughout the semester have been to my career. One of our guests who looked at my website and really wanted to dig deep into how these technologies can be used in the every changing classroom. To be honest, I wasn't really sure how to answer his question. From a newly hired high school math teacher perspective, I have no idea how I'm going to integrate technology into the classroom. If I learn how to use the smartboard, I can see it being extremely useful when demonstrating geometric shapes and angles, but if I am in a low-income school like I am supposed to be in, I am not guaranteed a smartboard or the training that comes along with it. So what else can I do? Blogs would be good for the students so they can vent to me about what is working and what they don't understand, but not every child is guaranteed to have a computer at home, either. I am really excited that I took this class and learned all of these technologies, but I wish that I was guaranteed a school setting where I would be able to use my knowledge. Maybe I could integrate it in specials, unique ways. I'm not totally sure what those ways are yet, but I'm sure I'll figure something out. Only time will tell how I will use the things I have learned in this class, but I am so happy that these programs and technologies have been introduced to me so that I have the funds of knowledge to create if need be. :)
I didn't go to the 26th Annual College of Education Technology Conference on November 14, but I did however do an alternative assignment instead. My assignment was altered from some others assignments because the main website had closed by the time I needed to use it, so I was asked to look at my classmates tweets on their Twitter accounts and find websites they submitted when they were at the conference. On Stephanie's Twitter, I found some really useful websites. These websites connected me with other educators through Twitter, laid out the 21 essentials to educational technology (including time management skills and types of technology useful to the classroom), and through a Discovery Channel website, I gained access to many great and useful tools for an elementary classroom. I really enjoyed searching through these sites to see what they contained, and I got really excited when I found out that the Discovery website had a puzzle maker! I love puzzle makers and remember trying to find one for my placement last year but I couldn't find a good one. This one is really legit and has plenty of puzzles (i.e. lots of different kinds of puzzles) for the classroom! Yay!
I find this sort of digital storytelling amazing! I really enjoyed doing it and I liked how it came out. I have had to do a digital storyboard for one of my TE classes before, and I did it in iMovie. iMovie is extremely difficult to work with until you fully understand what you are doing and really work with the program for a while until you get a hang of it. It took me an extremely long time to figure iMovie out, but once I did, I think the project came out amazing. Comparing iMovie to this sort of digital storytelling software... even though this is much more simplistic, it is extremely easy to use and the product is pretty amazing. I like how it kind of shakes and how the text is on the page long enough to read. Something I didn't like about the software is that the amount of text we are able to add is extremely little. I wish we could add much more text so that the pictures can be more meaningful. I can definitely see using this software in my classroom in the future because it draws attention to a subject in a short, interesting amount of time. I'll be sure to use this again in the future very soon.
This week we worked on a Ning website to be used for our classroom. I found the Ning website creator to be interesting, but not as easy to use as Weebly. I understand that there is a lot of nice features with the Ning that Weebly doesn't really have, but I still really prefer Weebly over Ning. Ning has a very nice set up for a classroom website. It is very organized, but the ads on the side of the site are kind of annoying. I like the fact that the Weebly website does not have ads attached to the page somewhere. I also like how Ning sets up the pages. They are very big and easy to find and click on, so you know exactly where to find what you are looking for. It is easy to relabel everything and rearrange everything on the website, which is also quite nice. On Weebly, you must really play around with the site to get it exactly how you want it, but that is also a nice thing about the site: you have the option of making it exactly how you want it. The Ning site only allows you to set the page up with certain restrictions, where as on Weebly, you can basically do anything with the page, set it up however you want, add as many pages as you want, etc.
I've never really understood why podcasts are so popular. I've never listened to one myself, but I assume they all differ and can basically spark anyone's interest. If I ever listened to one, I would probably have it be a news post, or something that Paul Harvey would put out. His stories were always the most interesting (and he had the best radio voice). But I see these all as recreational uses. I don't really see how this could be used in the classroom. I personally can not stand hearing my own voice, so having it recorded and readily available for all to hear makes me shudder just a bit. Today, we had to face that fear and create one ourselves. I struggled hard core saving mine as an MP3 file (I have a Mac), so that was frustrating. Again, another reason why I shouldn't be creating one. But I can see how they could be useful. If you recorded your lessons for children who were absent, you could send them to them and they could listen to them at home (or in the car, or wherever they have an audio listening device). Would children actually do this though? Who knows. If I were a student, I probably would not, but again, I was never one for a book on tape either.
Maybe there are some teachers out there who find great uses for podcasts. I know I would used prerecorded ones in my room for educational purposes or for fun interesting purposes, but making one myself and sending it to my students seems a little much. If they really did enjoy it though, than it would definitely be an option to look into. Copyright laws can create many issues for teachers. First, there is the main issue of plagiarism. Students can plagiarize, and many times not even realize they are doing it. For example, if a student uses an idea discussed in an article they read, but do not cite the article, they are plagiarizing. Students may take direct quotes from an article or book and again, not cite it, and plagiarize that way. Some students even go as far as stealing papers off the internet and submitting them as their own work. This clearly is a very aggressive act of plagiarizing, and has very serious consequences in the academic world.
Other issues concerning copyright laws may not be as obvious to people. These issues pertain to things such as images. If a student adds an image to a project or a paper, and they do not cite where they got the image, they are plagiarizing. Teachers may be more lenient on students who do this type of plagiarizing because students really may not be aware that they have to cite photographs. Where this may become a bigger concern is if a student is submitting a photograph in which they said was theirs, and it wasn't (i.e. they are submitting it for an art project). Teachers need to make sure that they are aware of all the types of copyright violations that students can make during their academic career, and assess which ones are major violations to the copyright laws and which ones are just purely human error. This can become difficult for teachers because they have to assume certain thoughts that went through the students mind when they submitted something, and this can be quite difficult. I had my first experience with a SMARTBoard in class on Tuesday. I have only seen one being used once before, and that was about three weeks before this class. When looking at someone else use the SmartBoard, I thought it was really cool and could be really useful in a classroom. This changed when I tried using the SmartBoard myself. I'm not sure if I'm just not technology savvy, but it was really difficult for me to use. I didn't like how I basically had to pound on the screen for the mouse to work sometimes, and then other times just barely touch it and have it react. Maybe that is just an issue with the portable SmartBoards, but it definitely deterred me from liking them. I have very little patience for technology that doesn't work the way it is supposed to all the time.
When it comes to classroom use, I can see it being useful in some aspects, like when you want to write something on your notes, or something like that, but if you are just doing math problems, I don't really see the point. I think it is a waste of money when you could just use a white board or a chalk board. I do like how it can be interactive though, and how students can use it for their own purposes. I'm not really sure what those purposes would be, but I think I'd have to play around with it more to really see what it can do. The software that comes with it though makes it more worth the cost, just because if it were just something that could make your computer touch screen, I'm not sure if it would be worth it at all. For me, I can't really see using it in the classroom just because I don't know everything that it can do nor do I know if it's worth it. |
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