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. 

Creative Commons Picture

 

"CAT" by Bahman Farzad is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Blog Journal 3

 Hello everyone!

Today I will be talking about copyright and fair use, technology implementation issues, and some new skills I learned working on my newsletter assignment.

As a student I have to be very aware of copyright laws and fair use laws so I don’t steal anyone’s work. It is my understanding that copyright is a way that people legally protect their own intellectual property. This can be done by purchasing the rights to a body of work and if someone else wants to use it they must either credit the owner and/or pay a fee. Fair use is almost an exception to copyright laws and allows users to copy materials as long as the individual is not financially being compensated and they are not copying an entire body of work. Within a classroom copyright laws can have an impact on what resources teachers can and cannot legally show their students without getting in legal trouble. This includes things like photocopying or pirating textbooks when developing instruction materials. 

When ever something new is implemented there will always be issues that follow. By implementing technology into the classroom lots of issues can pop up. Two specific issues I want to focus on are academic dishonesty and decreased productivity. Academic dishonesty ties in a little bit with the above paragraph in regards to copyright issues. If students are not using their own work and stealing other peoples intellectual property that is a big issue and can easily be done with access to the internet. A solution I have for academic dishonesty is to require all work to be submitted through TurnIt In or other similar plagiarism checking websites. As for decreased productivity, this can occur as a result of over stimulation, or over access to resources. If a student has a computer in front of them and is being told to write a paper what is stopping them from getting distracted and playing games instead. This type of decreased productivity can possibly be curbed by requiring the students to be on the school WiFi/hotspot so that their activity can be monitored and certain websites can be blocked. 

For class, I had an assignment to make a newsletter for an imaginary class. I actually really enjoyed doing this assignment and I learned a lot. One skill I acquired was the ability to make text into columns. I did not know that Word had that function. I had some trouble getting it to work in a text box though. One way I can improve my newsletter in the future would be to use more varied colors in the letter to make it more visually appealing. My future career is as an Air Field Operator in the Air Force and I will be able to use these skills if I ever need to send out information to the Airmen beneath me. I will also probably need to gear it towards a different audience than my imaginary 2nd grade class. I have attached the newsletter bellow. 

Blog post 2

 As a digital native, I have been typing up assignments on Microsoft Word or Google docs for as long as I can remember. I personally prefer Google docs because I have been using it since I was in high school. It was easier for me to keep all my school documents in my Google drive. This was before Microsoft had made a place to keep files all stored together. 

I thought it was interesting that there was an international standard for educators on technology. The standard that is most meaningful to me is the collaborator. The collaborator is one who uses their peers around them and communicates with others to constantly improve. I think that constant improvement is what makes technology so useful and to use it best is to collaborate with others. 

I agree with the label digital native. Gen Z has never know what it was like to not have technology or be plugged into the digital world. The time when I noticed the biggest difference between me and a digital immigrant was when I was in elementary school. They would always be so slow when they were using technology which is almost  opposite the point. They were so far behind that they preferred to not even use new technology because it was too hard to catch up. I anticipate that it will be similar when I am teaching the next generation. I might prefer to use the technology that I am familiar with over the new fancy tech.