Final: Reflective Post

 

Photo credit to hackNY on Flickr

 On the first day of class, I remember you asking us to raise our hands if we thought that we should use cell phones/devices in classrooms... I did not raise my hand. If you were to ask us again I'm sure you would see the entire class with their hands up. As a student, I have never been in a classroom that was able to incorporate technology in a "fun" way to keep us engaged. Throughout this course, I got to learn about websites and games for students that I would never even think existed! I am more of an old fashioned learner, I always need things to be written down on paper and things of that sort but as we grow older, technology advances! As a future teacher I need to keep up with todays generation in order to be able to create success in my classroom.

     Our textbook, Transforming Learning with New Technologies, was very resourceful. It is filled with great information for 21st century teachers! It had information from educational websites and apps to how to communicate and collaborate using social media. Also, it included Web 2.0 Tech Tools at the end of every chapter. These are some tools that you could use to incorporate technology into your own classroom. After we read each chapter, we got to create blog posts on it reflecting on how we could relate to certain things and how we could use the information given to us in that chapter. We also got to learn how to use digital tools to make our blog posts even more fun to read and create! My favorite digital tool would most definitely be Kahoot. I think it's a great tool to keep students engaged. I will be using it quite often in my own classroom!

     As of our assignments, they were very challenging but do-able. We had many discussion posts like Educational Technology Best Practices/Resources, Assistive/Adaptive Technology for Students, Technology Tools for ELL Students, and Legal and Ethical Issues. I think all of these discussions helped us open up our minds to new things. It has definitely broaden my mind and made me more knowledgable on these topics! Being able to read what my classmates thought on these topics let me see many points of view and that is a great life skill to learn! We were able to give feedback to each other without negatively insulting someone else's opinion. In class discussions were also a great way to meet new people and share our own opinions with each other. We would put all of our different opinions together and get one source of outcome and present to the class what we came up with or what we, as a group, believe in!

     I had so much fun with every project we had in this course! We got to do so many different things like a Website Evaluation Rubric, a group Wiki page, a WebQuest, Collaborative Lesson Plan, and our own Teacher Webpage ePortfolio. For my Website Evaluation Rubric, I evaluated http://www.arcademics.com. I am so lucky I was able to find this fun website because it is very engaging and makes students wants to learn! We did two projects that involved working as a group. I very much enjoyed the Collaborative Lesson Plan project because I was able to meet with my group in person and share ideas and put them all together for an awesome outcome! I did not enjoy the Instructional Wiki so much only because we were only able to communicate in the Wiki. It was very hard because many people leave things until the very end and that doesn't allow you to get stuff done the way you would personally want it to. My most favorite project would have to be the Teacher Webpage ePortfolio. I enjoyed it very much because I was able to see all of the work I put in this semester and see how much I have grown in the technology side. It helped me actually put myself in the position of having my own webpage for my students and parents and trying to see how I would want to go about it in the near future.

     I had lots of fun this semester in this course! I learned so much about technology and its positive affects in the classroom. If I could change one thing in this course, it would be to have more group in-class discussions! I think it's an awesome way for people to really open their minds and accept new things and also meet new people! I have found many useful websites, apps, and games to use in my own classroom one day and this seriously helps me feel so more secure about my future. Websites that include lesson plans for teachers like WebQuest, help give you many ideas to do with your own students! I cannot wait to incorporate all of the things I have learned throughout this course into my own classroom. I truly believe I will make a great 21st century teacher!

   

 (2013, April 7). Retrieved December 10, 2015, from https://www.flickr.com/photos/hackny/8673949525/sizes/m/

21st Century Education. (2012, May 7). Retrieved December 10, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA1Aqp0sPQo

Kahoot! needs JavaScript to work. (n.d.). Retrieved December 10, 2015, from https://kahoot.it/#/ 

 Games. (n.d.). Retrieved December 10, 2015, from http://www.arcademics.com/games/

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Welcome. (n.d.). Retrieved December 10, 2015, from http://webquest.org/ 

Digital Blog Post #K - Chapter 4

Concept 1: According to the textbook, technology plays an essential role in assisting teachers in answering the "what to teach" question and I couldn't agree more. There is so much out there! Electronic databases, online encyclopedias, blogs, wikis, etc. The fact that there are lesson plans already made from teachers all over the world is amazing! Working in a preschool I have found this very useful. I have to create curriculum for the afternoon and I always draw a blank since I am not creative at all! I usually look on Pinterest for cool projects we can do according to the curriculum given to us. I love to keep my students engaged so I always try my best to pick the fun stuff out! Pinterest is always my go to website! For the lesson plan my group created, I first checked out some WebQuests to get some ideas. All of these online websites are awesome and helpful for teachers and for those who work with kids or have kids themselves!

Concept 2: Three factors that strongly influence how teachers think about assessment are personal experiences, standardized testing, and teacher tests. In personal experiences, teachers try to teach to their students how they were taught when they were their age. So if the teacher was lectured all class period, then the teacher will do the same with their students. Students are now taking standardized tests from kindergarten all the way to high school. From all of this testing, teachers conclude that only tests that matter are those that rank students according to their numerical scores on local, state, and national exams. Teacher tests are tests that teachers are required to take to get their teaching license. New teachers might assume that students must be assessed in the same way that they themselves were assessed and that passing a standardized test is the only truly valid assessment format. In my opinion, I completely hate all of these standardized tests and teacher tests! The standardized tests that I have taken throughout the years, I have known completely nothing on it. If I passed, it was always out of luck. Most questions are put in ways that no student can even understand! I have some experience in teacher tests! In order for me to get into a teaching program I have to take the GK tests and I still cannot pass. The tests has four subsets. It's extremely upsetting that we have to take all of these tests in order to do what we love.


Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

This kids' educational game requires a more recent version of Flash. (n.d.). Retrieved November 12, 2015, from http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.htm

Digital Blog Post #I - Chapter 6

Digital Blog Post #H - Chapter 9

Concept 1: Multimedia means combining multiple media-text, data, voice, picture, and video-in a single application or technology.  This means using computer presentations that combine words, pictures, sounds and etc. Multimedia use is extremely engaging! If you're a student like me, you NEED to see pictures and videos and all sorts of different tools for me to fully understand what is being taught and to actually be engaged in it. "Students engaged in learning that incorporates multimodal designs, on average, outperform students who learn using traditional approaches with single modes" (Metiri Group, 2008, p.13). This proves that teachers absolutely need their classrooms to become technology-infused in order for their students to be actively engaged and to be successful.

Concept 2: Photo taking and movie making with students is also another great alternative to keep students engaged. Students are immersed in media from the videos and pictures they take themselves to the movies they watch on television, in the movie theater, and on the internet. Photos or videos provide a vital way for students to remember classroom learning activities. Students can film using cameras to create still or moving pictures, act by being filmed as part of learning activities, edit the crafting that has been filmed into interesting visual presentations and viewing what has been produced. Since our students are 21st century learners I believe this is an awesome way to keep your class engaged and to have them do different things and keep the class fun! In my English class in high school, we were split up into groups and had to read a book with each other and when we finished the book, we were asked to recreate a big scene that happened in the story using our phones or cameras and cool effects. It was tons of fun! I absolutely loved it and so did everyone else in my group.

Concept 3: Podcast is an audio recording distributed online and accessed on computers or portable media players using free softwares. Vodcasts have also become popular. "Students are asked to watch lectures or information presentation portion of a lesson on videos outside of school and spend in-class time doing experiments and discussing academic content (Richardson, 2012). I think Podcasts are completely amazing and necessary in classrooms. To be able to save time by recording a lecture and having students watch it at home and then have more class time to do the lecture or experiments is a really smart thing to do! Podcasts also work great when you are absent and are still able to get the lesson that was done in school that day just by going online and listening to the podcast that the teacher has made specifically for those who were absent. This saves the teacher time from re-teaching a lesson to the student and it works extremely well for the student as well because he gets a chance to learn at his own pace and re-listen to these podcasts in order to understand the concept.

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

 "Word Search Maker." Word Search Maker. Web. 21 Oct. 2015. 

Digital Blog Post #G - Chapter 10

Kahoot! | Play this quiz now! Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Digital Blog Post #F - Chapter 8

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Digital Blog Post #E - Chapter 7

Kahoot! | Play this quiz now! Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc. Kahoot! | Play this quiz now! (n.d.). Retrieved September 27, 2015.