IWB reflection

This assignment was a great way to get us to really use the IWB technology and become more familiar with it.  My first time around, I put in a good amount of time collecting resources but ended up making my first IWB as more of a powerpoint presentation.  The second time around, I put much more time into it.  I really found better resources and used that information to build more interactive pages to my lesson.  I tried to be creative in the way to get them to think about the Civil War but still make it somewhat fun.  I put a lot of time into this as I made a lot more pages than show up in my final IWB.  I created multiple interactive pages and then tried them out to see how they would flow in the lesson.  I finally decided which ones helped the best for the students and plugged them in.  I'm really proud of my state matching page and I'm happy that Professor Boyer was able to show me a new way to present the answers to pages without taking up space.  This will be beneficial for the future.  I would say I put in a great amount of time into this.  Not only did I re-do the IWB to make it more interactive, but I really sat down and thought of ways to make it better for the students.

I believe that this assignment was a great expierence for us as future teachers.  Like I said above, it really had us use all of the tools with SMART notebook and we were able to explore other resources for items that we could use in our lesson.  This assignment had me exploring the SMART exchange site a lot and that is a great resource to help with IWB lessons.  I now know through doing this lesson how benefitcial it is to engage the students into this type of lesson and I learned that it is pretty easy to make a lesson on here once I put my mind to it.  With the ease of making a lesson such as this, I feel like I could make these for almost any topic and that this would be a good and easy technology to have in the classroom.

Republicans Block U.S. Health Aid for 9/11 Workers

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/nyregion/10health.html?_r=1&ref=politics

The party that wants to preserve the American dream and protect us all won't even help those that helped others on 9/11.  What great people!

3 ways to intergrate technology in my classroom

When thinking of integrating technology into my classroom, I get bombarded with many ideas.  Do we use phones in the classroom for instant feedback and assessment?  Do we cut out discussion and send it to a discussion board online?  Those are just a few of the things that had gone through my head.  When I think about using technology in my classroom, I can think of many ideas but I have a few in mind that I think would fit just great in my 7th grade classroom, especially for social studies.  First of all, I want my social studies teaching to be very hands on.  Just like the actual senate, I was instant sharing of ideas.  With this, I want each student to be able to use a computer to write on communal board to share ideas anonymously and then we can bring the to the "floor" for discussion.  I could also use clickers or cellphones for this by allowing them to text answers or questions and use it instantly.  Secondly, I think it would be cool to have a camera in the classroom.  This would be so we could tape certain activities we do and I can upload them to a class blog or website.  With this, parents get to literally see what their children did in school that day and the students could even go back and watch it to see if they missed something or just to gain some extra knowledge.  With that, I would have a classroom discussion board for us to discuss topics outside of school and it would be a place where students could share ideas at any time.  I could post assignments, extra resources, and even reminders on the classroom page/site.  Lastly, I really want a IWB in the classroom.  I love the fact that we can make things so interactive and allow almost any subject to become "hands-on".  I would love to make all of my lessons more interactive and bring in as much technology as I could.  In addition to the classroom blog, I would encourage all of my students to create their own.  This way they can have their own space to share more of their own ideas and it could be a place to keep in touch with classmates and group members.  Of course I'd make room for some meaningful human discussion too.

PSA: Let's stop cyber bullying

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og17TnitukQ

I thought this assignment was by far the most fun and coolest tool we've used yet.  With that, I think that making videos like this is important and can be used in the classroom.  Students could easily make these and you could make videos for any unit.  Back to how it went for us though.  Dave and I work very hard on this PSA and put a lot of time into it.  We wrote out a script with a storyboard only after we had used multiple sources to cross-check our statistics that we put in.  We set up a lot of lighting and did a lot of filming to get the right pieces.  After this, we sat down and edited the video many times.  We made a few other versions until we agreed that this was the cleanest and best video we had put together.  We were extremely specific on everything we did and really tried to go above-and-beyond on this assignment.  We took a good amount of time on our script and tossed around other ideas on how we could focus on bullying.  We decided to choose facebook as our primary source.  We did this because more than ever, students are getting facebooks at incredibly young ages.  Also, its extremely easy to use and you can find anyone on it.  We did it as a personal message because it really helped show just how far kids can go by using facebook.

Making this video was benefitial to me.  Not only was it a great way to get a message out there, but now I know how easy it really is to use this activity in a middle school classroom.  These videos could be made about almost anything and can be done relatively quickly.  It would be a nice change of pace during lessons and the videos can be quite powerful.  Our hope is that someone could end up finding this on youtube and actually use it in a presentation.  Overall, I now know that this is a realistic activity to be used in the classroom.

Exit Slip

Todays new learning was our discussion on how to use and how not to use technology in the classroom.  We discussed how there are obvious advantages to using technology in the classroom but it is the end-all be-all to the classroom.  We need to find the correct ways of using technology to its maximum potential, not just use it to use it.  We watched a video on a teacher that integrated many uses of technology in her classroom.  She discussed the multitude of advantages that she sees within her teaching and her students learning.

Chapter 9: Rethinking................

What does it mean?  This question is huge and may not ever be answered fully but as teachers, we can try our best to find what it means for our students.  Technology is always changing and affecting our daily lives.  Education sadly, is not always changing.  We teach newer topics and yes we try to introduce some new technologies, but we are yet to be setting our students up for THEIR future, not our pasts.  With this being said, we need to figure out what all the technology and the changing world means.  There is no right answer per say, but I can assure you that there seems to be more of a current "wrong" answer.  We need to introduce the appropriate technologies in our classrooms to allow our students to have it at their disposal and learn how to use the technology to better their education.  This does not mean stray away from traditional schooling.  I believe that you still need to have discussions to teach students the imporatance of face-to-face communication and I even can say that you need to lecture at times to make sure your students can hold their attention for a set period of time and retain information.  I say this because our college schooling is set up to lecture us and challenge us to listen and soak up information the best we can.  In saying that, we need to introduce multiple technologies and ideas in our classrooms to help our students learn how they learn best.  I believe in finding an appropriate balance in my classroom to help guide my students down their educational paths.  I want them to figure out how they learn best but teach them all forms of learning.

exit slip

In class, we had another discussion group present.  They did a great job of being knowledgable about their area and they did great with discussion.  One thing we learned from their presentation is the "jigsaw" model of discussion and grouping.  I thought this was a great idea since it mixes everyone up and really lets you hear everyone else's view or what they discussed.  Beyond that, we were introduced to communicating with SKYPE and we went over more SMARTboard tips and tricks.  This was very helpful since we have our IWB coming up and it made more sense of what I had to do on Friday at McDill (presented a weather SMARTboard lesson, it went great!).  We were also introduced to our SWOT assignment.  This seems like a very interesting assignment but poses to be a great learning tool.  For this, we will create a screencast of our review of a service or product.  I choose to do Twitter.  With this, I will examine it's strengths and weaknesses.