Blog Journal 10

 Hello Class!

Welcome back to my blog! As we have learned in class data collection is very important in teaching. If I were to be a teacher I think I would have chosen 2nd grade or anything in elementary ed. In this grade level I would use data collection to make sure that the class was averaging good grades. I would use it to identify outliers in the data which would indicate that some students are not understanding the material. In terms of surveys I would send them out weekly to gauge who is engaging with the material.

I used my token #7 for the review of my peers blog posts. But so far from what I have seen the most interesting thing to me has been how everyone has chosen to set up their blogs. By this I mean that everyone has different layouts and even where they chose to put their gadgets was different as well. We answer the same questions as each other each week but even our answers vary a lot from week to week. 

The next technology related skill that I want to learn how to use is Photoshop. I think that technology has a lot of really good features and can be used a lot in education. The uses would be making posters for the classroom, and editing videos and pictures to help engage the students. This would be really cool because one a teacher has the knowledge they can pass those skills onto the student as well. 

Blog Journal 9

 Hello Class!

Today for my blog I will be talking about my experience as a distance learner. I have been distance learning at least half time for two and a half years now. I started taking online classes because my schedule got so complicated that I needed to not have set times for certain classes. I like remote learning because I can do the work on my own time. One of the thinks that I do not like how ever is how hard it is to stay on track sometimes, it is a lot of time management. As a teacher, I can reach out individually to students to make sure they are staying on task. 

According to UNESCO, open educational resources are any learning teaching, or research materials that fall in the public domain or are published under an open license and allow no cost access. These are excellent free resources that anyone can have access to and use. The website that I found this information on highlights UNESCO’s policy on OERs and provides so good resources. These resources include presentation from all over the world about different countries policies concerning OERs. 

https://en.unesco.org/themes/building-knowledge-societies/oer

One of the things that I learned while making the first PowerPoint assignment was how to use the design recommendations that are built into the app. It gave me some pretty cool layout options that I never would have thought of on my own. The first  picture is an example from the first power point assignment. Something that I learned in the second PowerPoint assignment was basically any of the skills that I used to make it. I previously had no idea that this was even possible. I think that it is a really cool feature and would be really interesting to use in a classroom to make things more interactive. 

Blog Journal 8

 Hello Friends! 

At first I was not a super big fan of using Weebly to make a website. After I got the hang of the site though I really enjoyed making it. I wanted to be an art teacher for elementary school kids and I used warm earth tones for the theme. I liked the capabilities of being able to drop formatting options onto the page and set them up exactly how I wanted to. One thing that confused me was all of the different tabs. I think I would need more than a couple of days to fully get the hang of the site.

http://misslindseysclass.weebly.com/

Honestly I am having kind of a difficult time with Diigo. I understand how to do everything when we are in class but actually executing it on my own is challenging. I can see the benefits of this website, like sharing research and articles. Being able to point out key information with highlights and sticky notes is cool tool. In a classroom I would be able to use this with my students to share articles I wanted them to read. 

Since technology is changing so I’d the way we learn and the way that we teach. This link is for “Free Technology for Teachers” and recommends fun apps and tools that you can use in your classroom. The learning stays the same, but the way you teach changes which is one of the important aspects of teacher professional development. This website is perfect for staying informed since it is a blog of a teacher.  

https://www.freetech4teachers.com/ 

Blog Post 7

 Hello My Friends!

For this blog post I went to visit one of my old High School teachers websites. It looks a lot different that I remember. It was honestly very challenging to find the link to teachers webpages from the schools website. Once I arrived at Mrs. van der Kaay’s website the first thing I saw was a link to email her. Next I noticed the headings at the top of the page which is links to class information and summer reading materials. The link for this webpage is https://sites.google.com/highlands.k12.fl.us/vanderkr/home

Being a teacher can be very hectic and I imagine it could be hard to balance all of the professional responsibilities. One teacher app that I found that can really improve productivity for teachers is Dualless. This app allows for people to have dual screens up without having dual monitors. This would be very important when multitasking. Another app for teacher productivity is OmniOutliner. This app will help with facilitating outlines for lesson plans. 

Overall the experience using PB Works was a pleasant one. It was easy to move around the website and edit. I liked having access to all of the different pages. One thing that I wish was different was the presentation of the website. The structure just looks old to me. 

Thanks for reading!

Lindsey

Blog Post 6

 Hello Everyone! 

This week we put together our Portfolio’s which I really had a lot of fun with. A couple of the portfolio items required using the site Diigo. I had never used it before and I had some difficulty with it in the beginning. After watching some tutorials and then seeing how Professor Choi did things in class, it was much more clear. Downloading the google chrome extension made the whole process much easier to understand as well. What I do not like about the website is how it looks, I think they could improve their web design.

I have found that I really like blogging! It is a fun assignment and I like being able to just share my thoughts. I know that I have the small audience of just this class and that makes it easier to be honest. What I do not like about blogging is that sometimes it feels too structured. I did have a lot of fun learning all the different components of forming a blog, since that is something I had never done before. 

One interesting Web 2.0 tools that would be good for teaching in the classroom is Weebly. I have used Weebly before and it is a very easy website building platform. This would be helpful in the classroom with disseminating information, or suggesting good education links. Another good thing about this website is it has a blogging feature and it is free so it is at no cost to anyone to use.  https://www.weebly.com/

Thank you for reading!

Lindsey

Blog Journal 5

 Hey Besties,

Thank you for tuning into my blog, it is a pleasure to write for you. I feel like Carrie Bradshaw. Before taking this class I had only used Twitter for personal comedy, not networking or education. Since starting a Twitter account for this class, I have reached out to a couple of education accounts. I have not really found it to be that beneficial, but I also do not think I will be using Twitter for my job in the future either. I have a job with the Air Force and Twitter would be most beneficial to that job by keeping me updated with news.

The digital divide is considered to be the gap between people who do not have the same digital resources. This can severely impact students opportunities after they graduate and go up for jobs. Students with access to tech are going to be more prepared in the ever increasing world of technology. As a classroom teacher I would want to be careful about assigning homework that needs to be completed on a computer or using WiFi and also giving students who are effected by the digital divide more tech time while at school. 

Academic software is very helpful for students to stay organized and edit and submit assignments. Two software tools that students can use are Microsoft office and Adobe. Microsoft office has a lot of different applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which can be helpful in creating content. Adobe would be beneficial when editing documents. 

Blog Journal 4

 Hello everyone!

As we learned in class, teachers use ELA standard as a guide for what to teach. For this post I chose to discuss one of the second grade standards. The standard LAFS.2.SL.2.5 states “Create audio recordings of stories or poems; add drawings or other visual displays to stories or recounts of experiences when appropriate to clarify ideas, thoughts, and feelings”. To me this sounds like using audio tools to record stories and using some animation to make the audio more interesting to the students. I feel prepared to implement this standard since I have a basic understanding of audio tools and I can draw. This would definitely take a lot of practice to be able to do well though.

For consistency sake, when researching the CPALMS Educator toolkit, I chose to stay with the 2nd grade. For the subject I chose science, and looked into STEM resources. I found a lesson plan for creating a garden, which includes drawing a map, and cataloguing vegetables. I thought this was a really cool resource because there are 20 other lesson plans just in that page.

As a digital native, I would like to think that I am a proficient internet searcher. I was surprised to learn about some of the advanced search methods from our lecture. I will absolutely be using those in the future. I would have liked to be taught how to search up things on Pinterest since I know it was mentioned as a good tool for teachers.