C4K Summary

C4K 1

Sindy G wrote her blog this week about Thanksgiving and how she cooked mashed potatoes with her mom. I commented back to her telling I also enjoyed Thanksgiving and that my kids always love to help me cook big meals.


C4K 2

This week I was assigned Paige from Ms. Leatherwood's class. Her blog was about the baseball player Alex Rodriguez and his drug use. Paige wrote how Rodriguez was the greatest third baseman and she hoped that he would play again soon. She also gave some good information about how much money he made in a year and how much of that he spent on drugs. I commented back to her that I enjoyed her formative and opinionated post. I agreed with her on her points that "peer pressure" was no excuse for drug use and that everyone deserved a second chance.

C4K 3

Myla wrote her blog this week about a book she read called "Stone Fox". She gave a very good summary of the book she had read and encouraged her blog readers to read the book. I commented back to her that I enjoyed her post and asked her some questions like " Did she have a dog?". 

C4K 4

My comment for kids this week wrote her blog about a book she was reading called “Wonder Struck”. She gave some detail about the book but left the reader of her blog wondering what was going to happen next in the book. I complimented her on that fact that she didn’t give all the details of the book away in her post. She did a great job of leaving her audience questioning what was going to happen next and want to read the book.

Blog Post #7

I believe that as future teachers in a totally new technology based learning environment. I am going to have to continue to learn about the newest resources and more importantly incorporate them in my classroom. I think the best way to prepare myself  to "use technology  effectively as a component of my classroom instruction" would be to start using it now. As we are required to make lesson plans or teach lessons before we graduate, incorporate technology in those lessons. Then using the technology becomes routine and natural for when I am in my own classroom.



In the first two videos 
Using iMovie and the Alabama Virtual Library 
We all become learners
  Dr. Strange is discussing with two ladies from schools in Baldwin County about their use of technology in kindergarten classrooms. They ladies discuss their use of iMovie in their kindergarten classrooms and how the students were able to make book trailers. Also discussed was the resource "Alabama Virtual Library" a free resource that can be used for research by students. I am amazed that Kindergarten students are able to use iMovies to make book trailers with ease. I can honestly admit that I was completely confused and terrified by iMovie when it was assigned to me as a junior in college. I think it just goes to show what a different era students are learning in then I did when I was in elementary school 20 years ago. I have actually only heard of Alabama Virtual Library because of my daughter bringing home projects that required her to use the virtual library for research.

 In the video "we all become learners" the ladies discuss how everyone in the classroom becomes a learner and a teacher as well. She speaks about how when using iPads in her classroom its not just the teacher teaching the students it the students teaching other students and teaching the teacher. I think this is very important. As teachers we have to always be learners and be willing to learn from our students.

 I think my favorite video was the Top 10 reasons to use technology.
1. Students love it.
2. It engages the four key components to learning.
3. Professional Development.
4. Makes life easier for teachers.
5. Improves test scores.
6. Help students with low attention spans.
7. Learn from the experts.
8. Encourages homework.
9. Saves Money.
10. Removes obstacles.

Project 7 Part B

Video to my Students 

Video for the Parents

Blog Post #6

 In the series of video interviews with Anthony and Dr. Strange we learned that Anthony is a third grade teacher at Gulf Shores Elementary. Anthony is a former student of EDM 310 and a friend of Dr. Strange. Anthony expresses the importance of project based learning and gave examples of how he used it in his own classroom. He advised us as future educators about project based learning and how the lesson need to be "content driven".


Anthony gave us some great resources that he uses in his classroom icurio and Discovery Education. I think I will try to use both of those in my future classroom. Icurio is a search engine that is filtered for educational purposes so it is safe for students to search. The other feature that Anthony talked about was the storage component, this allowed students to store, organize and manage the information they find.



I think my favorite video was the Tips for Teachers I love to hear advice and tricks of the trade from actual elementary teachers. Dr. Strange talked about how in order to be a successful educator, we must continue to be good learners and to be flexible, both very important tips. Anthony expressed his opinion that "teaching is hard work" and that a good teachers make learning the art of teaching not just their job but also their hobby. Very good advice from both of them.

 Resources Used for this blog:


Anthony Caps Interview Part 1

Anthony Caps Interview Part 2

Icurio Interview

Discovery Education

Tips for teachers

Don't Teach Tech Use It

Additional Thoughts about the lesson

Blog Post 5

PLNs What Are They? What are Personal Learning Networks (PLN)? How can they help you as a teacher? How are they formed? How can you create your own PLN? Who will be the first additions to your PLN?

PLN stands for Personal Learning Network. PLNs provide a source for teachers to connect and link together in amazing ways. PLNS allow teachers from all over the world, to link useful information together and share with one another in the education community. I had never even heard of PLNs before this blog assignment. I think this resource is so interesting and very efficient in organizing a lot of resources and apps in one centralized location. As a teacher we can use this resource to not only organize different resources that we have. But also we can search through other educators PLNs and use their resources to find information for lesson plans or assignments.

When you create your own PLN using a website like Symbaloo you can add different apps or "tiles" to create your own personalized PLN. I created mine and uploaded some of my favorite websites such as twitter, facebook, Pinterest, You Tube etc. Then I also added some new resources that I found through the search engine on the site.


Jennifer's PLN

My Passion

My Sentence

C4T Summary

Week 1 C4T
Karl Fisch expressed her feeling about grades in her blog titled " What grade should they get". She is very strongly against grades and basing a students grade on percentages. She gives several examples of hypothetical situations where a student could actually turns in an assignment and receives full credit but it makes the total weighted grade go down. She also gave some real examples of how three teachers in her building graded differently for the sames assignments and students got the same grades but scored differently in the class.







Week 2 C4T

Karl Fisch wrote in her blog titled " If I had a million dollars" this blog was about her school district spending a million dollars on chrome book for the students at the high school. But the problem with that was because they had been asking for funds to provide netbooks or laptops for the students for a while. But not until the required test had to be taken on computers did the money become available. Then she felt like the money was wasted because a majority of the students had their own devices that they had access to through the "bring my own device" program. She said the the laptops just stayed in storage for most of the time while not being used for testing. She felt like there was a lot of other ways to spend the money to help the district. She gave some examples of that of hiring extra teacher and letting the schools place them where they needed them most.

 
 

Project 15

Yippy search engine seemed to be very user friendly I like the tabs on the side of the screen that allow you to narrow down your searches by time, source, or by sites. There wasn’t a lot of random options that came up it was specific to what I had searched for. 

Gigablast is a search engine that is said to run off wind energy so it’s a “green” search engine. Also another good feature to the search engine, is when you set up an account you can use parental setting for kid safe searches. 

wolframalpha the best feature with this search engine would be that with the “pro” version you can actually upload pictures or documents to search. 

 ixquick proclaims to be “the world’s most private search engine”. 

Blekko’s promise is that they are “categorically different”. This search engine is supposed to eliminate spam and being rerouted to unrelated sites. 

Duckduckgo this is my favorite search engine that I have found thus far. It of course promises to not share your searches and be private like most of the other search engines. But this search engine gave the best “tour” of how exactly the search engine works and what makes it better than the others. My favorite feature is that when you search a question the answer is on the top tab you don’t have to scroll thru countless answers to random websites. 

Dogpile has been around since before google but obviously nowhere near as popular. Honestly I wasn’t that impressed with what this search engine had to offer, it was basic. 

Bing is powered by MSN a Microsoft company. Bing is said to be Microsoft attempt to take over google but not nearly as popular. Bing claims to be the “decision engine”. One feature Bing has that is different is that it offers suggestion on the top and gives other search options. 

Blog Post 4

What do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher? 

After looking over all the resources for blog assignment 4 I realize that asking questions effectively is vital to being a effective teacher. I have set in countless classrooms where the teacher waits till the last 5 minutes of class and ask the class if they have any questions. I know see how ineffective that strategy is. As a future teacher I hope to use more effective questions asking to enhance my students thought process. I like the suggestions used in one of the resources given to always ask a variety of different questions. 

Some things to remember while planning questions to ask who will you call on, what type of questions will you ask. If the teacher calls on one student does the other students thought process stop because the pressure is off of them? The resources say yes so this is a less effective way to ask questions. I really like the idea of asking a question then pausing for a few moments so that the entire class was the time to process the questions before the teacher calls on the chosen student. 

As teachers we have to spend time preparing questions to ask our students just like we prepare the lesson plan and content and everything else. Also while preparing specific lessons, take some time to think about questions our students may ask us and come up with the best answer to better prepare, to answer their questions. Lastly I found a really good point in the resources given for this blog, as educators we can't ever stop learning from our students. So with that we need to be prepared to listen to the questions our students ask and maybe we need to take notes and use that question to enhance our lesson plan for the next time. 

I hope to use all this information to teach my student and ask question effectively. Ask questions often using different types of questions and calling randomly so that everyone gets a chance to answer at some point. 

Resources Links

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/asking-better-questions-deeper-learning-ben-johnson

http://teachingcenter.wustl.edu/strategies/Pages/asking-questions.aspx#.VNEekdLF98E

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/three-ways-to-ask-better-questions-in-the-classroom/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFMfEVdfDys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uKqs3D0Z0M

http://rightquestion.org/education/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vEGKEj0z4I