ILP # 2 - Edmodo

For my second independent learning project I wanted to familiarize myself with Edmodo. When we first used Edmodo in class, we primarily explored the Ed Tech group and explored several links discussing digital media use, but we didn't really look into utilizing the features on the groups we created for our future students.  I figured this would be a really good opportunity for me to do so!

In the group I created, I posted the Prezi I created for my first ILP. This Prezi contains all the information my students would need to do for the quiz that I created for them. I also made a poll inquiring their level of comfort with the sections we have covered so far in the chapter.

Here is the link to my Edmodo page!

This is my class code: 363jig

ILP - Prezi

For my first independent learning project I decided to do a Prezi! I feel that Prezis are really useful tools for visually prepresenting connections between topics. By inserting "information bubbles" inside of other information bubbles, it is simple to see how the presented content is a subpoint of an overall concept. I feel that Prezis are something that I will make use of in my classroom due to the fact that they are easy to use and are incredibly helpful with visually displaying information! The site also makes it simple to insert photos, alter text, add music, select themes, and so on. I personally view Prezis as a more basic version of Power Point, so I intend on making use of these for mini-projects.

Here is a link to my Prezi!

10 - Neat Technology!

I definitely learned a lot during this week's Power Point assignment. Due to the fact that this assignment made us create a far more interactive Power Point, I was cornered into becoming more comfortable with creating a web of hyperlinks between slides that was not linear at all. I can definitely foresee myself making use of this in my future classroom! In all sincerity I really did have fun with this assignment. While I was making questions for my make-believe classroom, a lot of the images I inserted were clues that could guide them towards the right answer! When I type it out like that it sounds kind of lame, but I felt like I was leaving little breadcrumbs for them to follow, haha. I actually don't have any complaints about this assignment at all! It was very straightforward and to the point, I enjoyed it a lot!

I can see myself using data collection in my future classroom to get a gauge of how comfortable my students are with the course content. For example, with my fifth grade students, I can give them periodic, anonymous surveys asking them about how comfortable they are with the various subjects we have been covering in class. Using the data I collect form this, I can alter my teaching styles/spend more or less time on a certain subject in order to accomodate their needs.

I enjoy reading my classmates' blogs because the opinions of my classmates can be so different from mine. This enables me to gain different perspectives that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to achieve. It's always interesting when I see someone take a miniscule detail that I wouldn't have ever paid attention and break it down and analyze it until he or she has an obnoxiously long paragraph!

A technology-related skill I'm highly interested in is incorporating the Oculus Rift into the classroom. I've already mentioned this before in a previous blog post, but I genuinely am excited about the educational prospects of this technology being incorporated into the classroom. Interactive games would be taken onto a whole new plane! While having students participate in interactive games is fine and dandy (that is still a step up from having them zone out while staring at a book all day), we as instructors would be able to evoke a whole new level of passion for learning if we could truly immerse students in the subjects we are teaching them. I'm thinking of three-dimensional recreations of conversations between our forefathers as they wrote the constitution, a three-dimensions travel through jupiter's atmosphere, the construction of three-dimensional rollercoasters with the incorporation of physics -- the possibilities don't end.

One way I intend on achieving my goal of incoporating technology into my classroom is by making use of the tech sandbox. When I was in high school, my teachers never really let us use the Smart Boards very often, which I believed to be a shame. They would limit themselves to one feature on the entire board and make use of that and only that, day in and day out. I definitely want to grow acclimated to the smart board and all of it's features so that I can give my future students the whole experience! I will also continue to research apps that assist in lesson planning -- I had never known how time consuming lesson planning could be until I took this course! And last but definitely not least, I will fight to the end to figure out some way to incorporate the Oculus Rift into my classroom!

survey - Concerned?

Me too

Link to survey about America and stuff!

Lia's Tech-y Persepectives

Flipped learning is defined as a style of learning wherein a student gathers information at home via a podcast or video. Therefore, when the student enters the classroom the next day, they are able to work on group assignments that enable them to reinforce and further understand the concepts that they have learned in their homes. In all sincerity, I'm not entirely sure if this is the best approach to teaching however. This is because of the fact that many students (especially those that are younger) are likely to lack the motivation to sit down at home and listen to/watch educational lectures or videos. As a result, these students would fall pretty far behind. A website I can forsee myself using for educational videos is http://www.ted.com/. Ted talks are filled with people that discuss topics that they are experts in, so I have always found it highly useful and reliable.

A website I can foresee myself making use of in the future in order to further develop as an instructor is https://www.teachervision.com/pro-dev/resource/5778.html

This website provides a vast array of resources for teachers. For example, the website provides list of assignments and activities that teachers can provide to students that can be catered towards times of the year or holidays. Additionally, the website also provides several lesson plans that are geared towards student's age groups, subjects, and so on. Different teaching strategies are also provided to teachers, including teaching strategies that specialize in teaching students with disabilities, which I think is highly effective. I'd actually like to take a second to stress how much I appreicate that. I spend a lot of time dwelling on how, in my personal experience, I have found our current educational system to be severely lacking when it comes to acknowledging students that are physically disabled, mentally disabled, or a combination of the both, so I admire how this site has set aside informative pages just to acknowledge this.

Some skills that I have learned from the Power Point assignment are how to set up a slide master. That was definitely a tricky thing for me to catch the hang of, and in all honesty I didn't even begin to get a grip on how the heck it worked until the end. Regardless, it is a helpful tool to know and it can definitely save the user a lot of frustration in the long-run. This is going to sound a little embarrassing, but this assignment helped me hone in on my animation skills as well. I had walked into the assignment thinking that animation was my forte due to a cool Power Point presentation that I'd slapped together in the sixth grade, but time really did wear down my memory. I definitely think that this assignment will assist me in putting together Power Point presentations for my students more smoothly in the future.

8 - Lia's Technology Adventures!

A technology advancement that I believe has the biggest promise for education is the creation of augmented realities. Augemented realities enable students to see the physical word through a computer generation that alters what you see, hear, smell and feel. An example of a really cool tool that enables one to experience this is the Oculus Rift. The Oculus Rift is a piece of technology that is strapped around the head. Once it is strapped onto the users head, the user is seemingly "transported" into a 3D landscape -- but in all reality it has been designed to produce a three-dimensional perspective that evokes that sensation. I believe that the implications for this technology is limitless. One of the educational uses that come to the forefront of my mind is how students can take far-more engaging virutal tours to areas around the word, or perhaps engage in three-dimensional reinactments of historal events. Maybe this is just me being really nerdy, but that sounds incredibly fun and far more interesting than having to listen to a lecture in class.

In my ideal, futuristic landscape, I would love to have holographs of prominent historical figures interact with my students, but I think that it is safe to assume that those types of developments are way farther down the line, A technological advancement that I definitely think would be efficient is the creation of an app that allows students to see what their peers are working on in real-time (assuming all students involved were partaking in educational activities online). I feel that this has great implications. Imagine four students are working on a group project on their ipads (provided to them by the school) and one group mate becomes curious about how far his or her other group mates have progressed with their share of the work. This app, theoretically, should enable the student to view the webpages visited, notes taken, and PowerPoint progress (assuming they had all decided to use powerpoint) in real time. This means that if, and I'm choosing random names, Stephanie became curious and checked the app, and Edguardo was currently searching for primary sources on the Library of Congress website, Stephanie should be able to see him search through the pages as he gathers information. Additionally, this app will be able to include highlighting and note-taking features to better convey thought-processes to fellow group-makes. The issue that I can foresee with this application is that it would only be efficient if it is used on technological devices that are strictly reserved for educational purposes. I highly doubt Stephanie would want to read Edguardo's facebook post about how he's craving chicken nuggets as it would not productive towards the assignment.
Unfortunately, I can not find a website with an application that is similar to this. The closest thing that I can think of is permitting other people to work on a word document with you on google drive.

In the podcast, the digital divide is defined as those who do and do not have access to a computer/the internet. I am definitely on the side of the divide that is fortunate enough to have access to both, given how I have had a computer in my home for as long as I could remember. As the podcast suggests, I anticipate the digital divide to exist within my future classroom as well. As an instructor, it will be my job to ensure that students who do not have access to a laptop or internet will, at the very least, have access to these tools in school. However, in these cases I will make an extended effort to try and provide these students with take-home laptops that can be used throughout the duration of the school year. I intend on teaching English to German students in their early high school years, and during this time frame students begin to recieve more and more assignments that require the use of a laptop (Ex: PowerPoint presentations, Papers, Classroom discussion boards, etc), and I would feel that I have become an inadequate teacher if I leave these students at such an extreme disadvantage. However, if these students simply do not have access to internet at home, the best option would be to alter our class schedule to make as much use of the computer labs as physically possible. I will also encourage the students that do not have internet access to feel free to use the computer lab whenever the feel fit (provided I speak to whomever is in charge of the lab in order to grant these students special permission first).

7- Nathalia's Adventures

Using Bloomer's taxonomy would be extremely efficient for helping students fully understand a concept. This is due that the criteria that Bloomer capitalized on (understanding, remembering, applying, analysing, evaluating, and creating) are essential for student learning. By using a Power Point that requires students to meet all of these bases, I will be ensuring that my students fully understand the content. I will explore criteria such as criteria by encouraging students to use animation. Students will be taking the content that they have learned and presenting it in their own way through avid use of imagery. By doing this, they are taking in the information and producing -- creating -- their own content.
In regards to how I will keep an eye out for things such as their evaluation of the content, I will provide my students with overarching questions that will require them to condense and present the information in an efficient manner.

I feel that adaptive technologies play a major role in helping students with both physical and mental disabilities to learn in a classroom students along with their able-bodied peers. One of the adaptive technologies that I thought was pretty neat was the verbal spell checker due to the fact that it reads out the misspelled word to the student to bring attention to the error. Afterwards, an array of words that the student could have been attempting to spell is presented to the students. I feel that this is especially important for students with attention deficit disorders, and this can be essential in helping them learn. I also believe that reading guides would be helpful for these students as well. In regards to students at have issues with auditory process issues, I can use FM listening systems (which I have never heard of until recently), which limits background noises and amplifies the teacher's voice. I have not used any of the adaptive technologies that I have listed, but I have used reading guides (which is an online tool that highlights lines of texts as students read) to help keep me focused due to the fact that I had ADHD. A challenge that I percieve with using adaptive technologies is that neurotypical and able-bodied students will become jealous of students with disabilities for recieving what they would consider "special treatment."

Working on the web page design assignment gave me a general idea of how websites are organized. This is a useful tool for me due to the fact that I will soon be making several professional sites about myself in order to promote myself as a teacher. Even as a teacher, I will constantly be making websites detailing assignments, announcements, and events for my students, so there really is no escaping it for me! So I really did appreciate this assignment because it gave me a chance to get my feet wet, so to speak. The only thing I didn't like is how the website lagged a bit the first day we were all working on it in class, but because so many people were using it at once it couldn't have been avoided.

http://nathaliaedwards2019.weebly.com/