Standards Reflection 3

Standard 3-Learning Environments Technology allows students to work individually as well as cooperatively. Wikispaces gives students the opportunity to respond to questions online when they may not raise their hand to contribute to a class discussion or give an answer. It also allows students to write collaboratively each entering their interpretation of a piece of literature,book chapter summaries, a "novel in an hour" lesson, too many options to write down. Students have assigned print colors so that the teacher can determine who has written what and how each student contributes to the whole. When students can find their niche whether it is as a leader who influences others, or a quiet contributor who would rather not draw attention to him/herself, technology seems to find an outlet for creativity, confidence, disabilities,????? Many I'm sure I have never heard or thought of!

QUIZLET-FAST-FUN-EASY-FREE

I chose to use Quizlet for my chapt 20-22 tool. I use it all the time and it has served my purpose well. There are some new features that are pretty interesting and look like fun for students, will have to give them try! Quizlet is a great way to study and learn subject vocabulary. I mostly use the hard copy version of the flashcards but want to incorporate the interactive features. I like that once you create an account quizlet keeps track of the vocab sets you have created. You can also look for already created sets for any subject. I have had great luck finding sets that go with my school's reading adoption "Storytown" Seems like a lot of unfortunate districts use that as their reading curriculum lol. Anyway, students can go online and study words using interactive games, learn correct pronunciation, and work on spelling of the terms. It is a great tool to create quizzes and gives you t/f, multiple choice, matching, and fill in answers options.

AVATAR FUN!

Creating an avatar was fun! Everything is fun if it isn't hard, right?? Well, creating my rottweiler Enforcer will enable me to play rules, for example, to students who haven't quite got school rules down pat. My voice restating rules over and over becomes much like Charlie Brown hearing adults talking as blah blah blah. So in order to get student's attention we must sadly entertain them, so emerges the avatar. I guess teachers must do what they must do in order to get content or ideas across. Next I will try virtual worlds!

Standards Reflection 2

Standard 8-Instructional Strategies Using a variety of instructional strategies is just good teaching. All students learn differently and since we now live in a technology based environment it only makes sense that students would like to learn from methods derived from technology. Using programs such as Yodio, You Tube, Avatars, and audio programs draw student's attention. Hands on, text driven, daily 5,and technology need to be used to hold interest and keep students engaged.

Standards Reflection 1

Standard 6-Assessment Using technology to access students gives teachers the ability to personalize tests to what their students have been studying. Giving students diverse opportunities for testing also enables all students to show their degree of comprehension of a subject. Summative assessment is crucial for teachers to measure students learning or lack there of. This also makes teacher workload lighter if you use a program that will score student's work and enter it in a grade book. Also, being able to create rubrics for assignments and projects makes students aware of what is exactly being assigned and graded. This helps take the subjectivity out of grading!

RULES REVISITED

School Rules Avatar

Part 4 Reflection

After reviewing the chapters "Tools to Present Content" I decided that I would probably want to use and teach my students to use Yodio.  It proved to be very user friendly except for the drag and drop feature.  It was a trial and error approach that proved to be frustrating at times.  I feel that it would be a good tool for presenting learned material to peers and fun for students to use.  I would limit the number of slides they could use therefore making the time limit 2-3 minutes.  It would also  be a functional tool for parent-student-teacher conferences.  Students would be making a slide show of what they have learned so far in the year.  Since I teach a self-contained 6th grade class, I doubt that I would use Yodio for instruction but who knows?!?!?!?!  Students love to talk about themselves, so uploading pictures and inserting their voices for the narration should be right up their ally!!

Chapters 8-10 Reflection

As a group we chose the Wikispaces tool.  We had some diffuculty setting up a group but all is good now.  We felt that this tool can be used for collaborative work with students, student reflections of reading assignments, to share comprehension of a topic a question etc.  Being able to separate student's input with colors is a great way to tell who compreprehends and who does not. 
My difficulty with this tool is my students are to young to be assigned e-mail addresses so I will probably not use this tool unless the regulations change.  It would be a great tool to collaborate with my co-workers.  Using it for a book study, planning, etc. would work well. 

Preface/Chapt 1/2 Tech Toolbelt

 My eyes are opened to some possibilities for using  tehnology in my classroom.  Having a teacher/tech person in our school is superficially helpful and by that I mean they can troubleshoot a problem or maybe show you quickly how to add an assignment to our keyboarding program but not anything indepth or with websites for help or step by step instructions for classroom tools.  This book is a tool in itself.  I don't know the difference between 1.0 or 2.0 and don't think that is particularly important to know but being able to create a calendar or mind-map or a page of website links for my students to us is. 
The matrix is great so you can skip from section to section instead of reading the book from cover to cover.  I hope that  the information will not soon become obsolete but it will still give me the verbage needed to find other resources of the same type.

SUCCESS IS MINE!!!

SO I FEEL QUITE ACCOMPLISHED!  HAVE CREATED A GOOGLE CALENDAR AND SYNC'D IT WITH MY IPHONE.  THE INSTRUCTIONS WERE EASY TO FOLLOW AND I BELIEVE THAT I WILL USE THIS TOOL A LOT!  MAYBE I WILL BECOME SO ORGANIZED I WILL BE THE ENVY OF MY PEERS-LOL

Welcome to my NEW Blog!  I will be attempting to post and read answers, wish me luck!