7 Bloom's Taxonomy and Assistive Technology

Bloom's Taxonomy (pictured above) is, according to the textbook, "a method for categorizing differences in thinking skills; it involves six levels of cognition ranging from recall of knowledge to evaluation of knowledge." Using Bloom's Taxonomy could help me better organize my PowerPoint lessons for my future students in a way that gradually increases their knowledge to help it "stick" in the students' memories so it can be easily recalled later. For example, if my students were learning about humans harming the environment through deforestation and pollution I could set my PowerPoint up like this:

• Remember: define the topics and express the basic concepts
• Understand: students can identify from a group of images on the PowerPoint which types of actions are harmful to the environment
• Apply: break students into groups and have them brainstorm ways to solve problems that humans have created within the environment
• Analyze: have each group present their ideas to the class and then the rest of the classmates analyze the situations and decide how helpful they would be to solving environmental problems
• Evaluate: students can vouch for their ideas and weigh the pros and cons of each problem solving idea
• Create: students can use online technology or physical objects to create ways to help the environment such as building models of a sea wall to help prevent beach erosion

In the podcast, it defines assistive technologies as "technologies that help people with disabilities more effectively use computing technologies". Students who are visually impaired may use voice recognition technologies in order to have physical, typed documents because they are unable to see the keyboard to type like someone normally would. Conversely, they may also use text to speech software to read documents and literature aloud. Daily organizers are also noted as an assistive technology. They can be helpful to everyone, not just students struggling with dyslexia. I have used a daily organizer since elementary school and I would most likely forget to complete the majority of my assignments without one. I am so busy that assignments often slip my mind. I find it very helpful to have my organizer as a reminder of what I have and have not completed. Concept mapping software is an assistive technology mentioned in chapter 4 of the textbook. It helps students better view and manipulate ideas that they have brainstormed. We used this type of software recently in class to create out concept maps and I found it to be very helpful. Recorded books are another assitive technology mentioned in the textbook. These are used by dyslexic individuals, those with reading or visual impairments, and by average people. I had a friend who listened to recorded books in his car because he preferred it to listening to music. He was an avid bookworm and wanted a way to continue the books he was reading while driving, whether it was fifteen minutes to school or on a road trip. I used recorded books in high school when reading classic novels as part of my required summer reading. A lot of the topics were difficult to understand and relate to but I found it helpful to hear the story being read aloud by someone and sometimes the recording even included short explanations of what was happening in the story in more understandable phrases.

I found the web page design assignment to be extremely frustrating in the beginning. None of my changes to my site were loading in the classroom and it was not allowing me to manipulate the site well. Once I got home and started working on it I had a better time. I found Weebly to be a very easy tool to use. When I designed a web page in high school we had to do it through coding and it was a nightmare. This program made everything so much easier. I learned that class websites are a great way to interact with parents and help them feel involved. I am happy to have the knowledge of Weebly in my "teacher toolbox" for my future classroom. I loved how everyone used the same program but our websites all had such diverse design elements.

Check out my website:
http://myerssecondgrade.weebly.com/

Using Photography to improve PowerPoints

This presentation that I found on Slide Share conveys the idea that using photos in a PowerPoint not only improves the design and catches the reader's attention, but it also helps the audience retain the information.

6 Classroom Websites, Productivity Technology, and Web Evaluations

In my search for a classroom website I stumbled upon this amazing site created by a teacher named Brandy Carter. Mrs. Carter is a fifth grade teacher at Youngsville Middle School. I am in complete awe of the aesthetics of the web page and how detailed it is. It has resources to help students improve in each subject area, links to educational games, and even internet safely rules. She has posted an online memory book of pictures for each year that she has been teaching and of the activities that the students participated in that year. I know the students’ parents have signed a release form to allow pictures of the students to be posted but I think if I was a parent I would rather have pictures and information such as a daily schedule to be password protected. Every day on the news there is a story to be told about an online predator targeting children and I would rather not have strangers be able to publicly view where my child is at every moment while they are at school.

According to the podcast, productivity is defined as things that help you complete everyday tasks more effectively and efficiently. The podcast mentions using Diigo, which I wrote about in my last blog post, as a productivity tool. Diigo lets users annotate websites and online documents and keeps them organized for future reference. Teachers often use classroom management software which is defined in chapter 7 of the textbook as "off-the-shelf or customized software written for educators to help them manage school and classroom tasks". As I mentioned in class today, a productivity tool I would like to use in my future classroom is the Focus Time app. We all know just how short a student's attention span can be. This app breaks up the day into increments of 25 minutes of focus time and 5 minutes of break time. During that break time teachers can keep students engaged through discussions about the lesson or they can participate in a fun GoNoodle activity, it doesn't have to be just idle time of the students sitting there. By giving students a break it redirects their attention from the tedious nature that can come out of reading and focusing on one topic for a long period of time.

From the Web Resource Evaluation I learned a lot about the availability of resources within Google. I was completely unaware that I could use my Gmail account to so easily craft a website. I loved how easy it made collaborating with classmates. It took the frustration of one person completing the majority of the assignment out of the group project which was wonderful. That is what I hate about group projects, there is always an uneven amount of effort among the group but everyone reaps the benefits of the grade and the wiki eliminated that. I enjoyed the group of girls that I worked with and I think we all contributed well to the assignment. When we first began the assignment, honestly, I was dreading it. It seemed like it was going to be so in-depth because we had to create the website before we even began working but it turned out to be a breeze. There really is not anything that I disliked about it. I would love to use this resource in the future to better facilitate collaboration and tech skills between my students.

5 Web 2.0 and Concept Mapping

Web 2.0 is a wonderful addition because students can collaborate with each other and share ideas. Web 2.0 includes social media, youtube, wikis, google docs, and more. Web 2.0 can be a blessing and a curse in a classroom. Although it gives students a broader range of technological dynamics to work with, it also gives room for students to have negative interactions with each other and outsiders. Facebook and other social media sites are a great way to interact and reconnect with people but I do not believe that they should be heavily relied on in a classroom. Students often use sites like this as their main way to cyberbully other students. Adult predators could also prey on students through these sites by pretending to be someone they are not. A social media site like Edmodo that could be better monitored by a teacher would be a more viable alternative. Wikis and Google Docs are Web 2.0 products that I strongly believe in. With this technology, students can collaborate and work on group project more efficiently and on their own time. I personally prefer Google Docs over Wikis because the educator can tell which student entered what information. This helps reduce the likelihood that one student will complete the work on their own while the rest of the group's members slack off.

Another Web 2.0 tool used in class to enhance teaching and student productivity is Diigo. Diigo is an online tool that allows users to save and organize online resources, annotate web pages and other documents while browsing, organize links and references, and share this work with other group members. This site would be very helpful while drafting a research paper. I always find it to be a bit stressful to have numerous sites saved in the favorites tab of my browser for reference while I am researching and then when I go back to that site a week or two later, while I am writing my paper, I have completely forgotten what information or quote I was going to pull from that source. Diigo could help eliminate that struggle because I could highlight and annotate each web page so I know what it was that I found interesting about that source.

Diigo could also be used to help student complete a group project. Long gone are the days where a group of five students have to hover around a single computer for hours to complete a group project. We all know how extremely difficult it is to align all of our hectic schedules so that we can meet up to work on a group project. Most likely, only half of the group will actually show up at the designated time. With Diigo students can easily share the links and annotated sources that they have discovered in order to collaborate more freely. Diigo would also be helpful with e-books and other online text resources. The child development course that I am taking requires an e-text as opposed to a physical textbook and I strongly dislike the fact that I am unable to easily make small notes in it or highlight important topic. Diigo could help minimize the level of stress I feel of not having a physical copy of the text book

Last week we used Webspiration classrooms to create concept maps based on world war 1. Before beginning the assignment I was a bit stressed out just thinking about it. It seemed like it was going to be a tedious and time consuming assignment. I have only ever created something similar to a concept map online used the SmartArt feature of PowerPoint and it was not fun. To my surprise, Webspiration was extremely easy to use. It does most of the work for you, you just have to enter the text. I found it difficult to put all of the information on the war into one map without it looking cluttered so I created two concept maps and a map that resembled a timeline. I am pretty impressed with how they turned out and will definitely use this source in the future. I would love to create study guides and graphics for my future students who are visual learners using this tool. The only thing I would do next time to improve my concept map is take more free reign creatively with it.

4 Standards, Internet Research, and Web Hunts

•           SS.5.A.1.2:  Utilize timelines to identify and discuss American History time periods.
•            http://www.capzles.com/
•           Concept-Mapping tools could be used to create timeline graphics
•           I would use a concept-mapping tool such as Capzles. Teachers and students can use this site to create timelines and personalize them by adding photos, videos, audio, and text. If students were discussing the Civil War they could add photos of the war’s progression and of key documents in the war. They could use the audio feature to create voice recordings of them telling an anecdote from one of the timeline events.

In my opinion, the Internet is an amazing tool to use for student research. It allows for quicker results and the Internet is full of seemingly limitless. Internet research is useful because it saves students from spending hours in the library searching for a specific quote and it also does not limit them to the library’s content on the subject. It is not useful when students use unreliable sources such as Wikipedia, which can be altered by anyone and contain false information.

In the past, I have not paid much attention to whether something is open source or open content. After learning more about both of these in EME2040 and by listening to the related podcast I now am aware of what I should and should not use. Instead of taking advantage of the content I find on a source I should evaluate whether it is reliable and the stipulations that go along with using those ideas. When I first got my laptop in high school, I was not willing to pay over a hundred dollars just to obtain Microsoft Office. Instead, I downloaded Open Office, which is an open source that is mentioned in the podcast. Open Office is very similar to Microsoft Office and has word processing, spreadsheet, and powerpoint options. The only problem with Open Office is that it the format of created documents is often altered or unable to be downloaded by those who are using Microsoft Word.

Through completing the web hunt, I have acquired skills such as using Google Scholar to find academic articles. Also, I was previously unaware of the fact that I can use quotations to better filter search results and find more specific sources. Typing “define:” in front of a term gives you an instant definition which can be helpful when you are reading a textbook or another type of document with terms that you do not know.

Web Hunt Challenges:

1. Find a primary source video of the Columbia space shuttle disaster.
2.  Find an educational game that tests students’ multiplication skills.
3.  Find a free audiobook that students can use for Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger.