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.

3 Educational Facebook, Digital Citizenship, and Creating Newsletters

Good Evening Readers!

Last week my ed tech class learned about a social media site known as Edmodo and we created our own profiles. I really enjoyed Edmodo and found it to be a very useful website. I would refer to it as an educational Facebook because of its design that appears and funtions much like Facebook, the popular social media site. Edmodo is a great tool for not only educators but also parents and students. Teachers can send out classroom news and updates, post links and activities for students, and have students complete quizzes and surveys. The majority of people have had a Facebook profile at some point in time so Edmodo and its concept should be fairly easy to grasp. Edmodo also appears to be a safer site for students than Facebook because its content is monitored by the teacher and there seems to be less spam and click bait links.

One type of technology I would like to use in my classroom are wikis. In chapter 9 of the textbook, a wiki is defined as "a website that presents collaboratively written content". Last semester I used wikis in my biology lab. We were placed in a group of four students to complete  project and our assignment was to enter the information we had gathered into a wiki document. We could all view the same document and enter information into it, and the wiki kept track of which student entered what information. That is helpful because oftentimes, in group projects the majority of the project is completed by one hardworking student and the rest of the group members slack off. That is not fair to the person doing all of the work so by keeping track of who is entering the information, the educator knows who actually contributed to the assignment. Teachers in a fourth grade classroom could use wikis to promote collaborative creative writing. The teacher would easily be able to identify which thoughts belong to which student. If the students were attaching images to the wikis they could be educated in a quick lesson beforehand about which images fall under fair use and which images have a copyright and should be avoided. I would teach my students how to adjust the search options on google images to find pictures they could put in their wikis.

I found the newsletter assignment to be a bit challenging because I lack creativity. I was blown away by some of the newsletters today when we looked at each other's in class. I instantly felt like my newsletter needed drastic improvement but I seem to lack a lot of the skills that others used to create their newsletter. I did learn how to create columns in only a certain section of the page which was quite helpful. I liked how people were able to express themselves in the designs of their assignments. I wish we would have spent a bit more time in class learning how to improve the visual aspects of the newsletter because mine looks pretty boring. I would love to learn how to section off my newsletter better and how to create a cute border like the nautical rope border I saw on one student's newsletter in class.

2 Microsoft, Copyrights, and Twitter

Throughout my entire educational career, I have used Microsoft Word in a variety of different ways. In elementary school I leaned how to type using the program by creating small works such as poems, sentences using weekly spelling words, and completing short book reports. In middle school, as the level of difficulty of the school work increased, so did the projects I was creating in Word. I began to type lengthy essays and research papers which had to include headers, footnotes, and specified margin sized. I also used Microsoft Word to help beautify science fair display boards and make them appear more professional. In high school I took a digital design class where I learned many different ways to use Word such as creating magazine pages and promotional flyers. In college, I mostly use Microsoft Word to type up notes for class and academic papers. In the past, my former teachers have used Microsoft Word to create study guides, exams, and newsletters regarding classroom news and information. As noted in the textbook, I would like to use Microsoft Word as a way for my future students to journal about their summer vacation and the wonders they experienced. They could also present a few of these fun journals in class to enhance public speaking skills. Word could also be used by the kids to create "All About Me" pages that can be helpful for the teacher and for a new group of students to find similarities among each other and encourage interaction.

In all honesty, I do not have much experience with copyright or fair use. Teachers of mine have always stressed the idea for students to not plagiarize but not much has been taught about copyright and all that it entails. The only way I was even taught to avoid infringing on copyrights was to create a works cited page at the end of a powerpoint or essay to credit the author you borrowed ideas from. By reading Best Practices for Fair Use and listening to Copyright and Fair Use podcast, I learned that tiny bit of information I had been previously taught about copyright was incorrect and that citing sources is not how to properly use works that have copyrights. Before I become a teacher I want to become aware of all of the copyright laws that apply to works I may be using and I also want to educate my students on these, especially because I never was. I could create a powerpoint to give an overview of what a copyright is and how to go about properly using things that have copyright laws attached to them. I could even create an activity to help the students understand the concept. Also, before my students begin an assignment that may infringe on copyright laws, I will educate them on how to correctly and lawfully complete these assignments.

I really have not learned anything new since we began using our twitter accounts but that is probably because I have been a member of the twitter community for about six years. During high school I was very active with my twitter and was obsessed with always reading the newest tweets that my friends and celebrities had posted. I was on the site all the time until it started to feel like a chore. I have not used twitter much in the past year or two until we began using it in tech class. Although it became a bit much for me, twitter can be a very important tool for communicating and sharing ideas with other educators and brainstorming new classroom techniques and activities with them. I fully supports using social media to expand one's "toolbox" as a teacher.

1 Technology and Life as a Digital Native

Over the last twenty years, the world's reliance on computers has exploded. What used to take hours of searching through a library and encyclopedias is now information that is almost instantaneous, all it takes is a few strokes of a keyboard. My entire educational career I have used computers for assignments, projects, learning games, and presentations. One thing that is for sure, computers do not seem to be going away any time soon. Students and teachers alike must adapt to the ever-changing skills of technology and figure out how to utilize them as tools to further improve educational possibilities. With computers, information is easier to obtain which makes students with short attention spans more likely to complete their work, rather than struggling through hours of book research. Chapters 1 and 2 stress how important it is for students and their teachers to become competent in computer skills in order to achieve higher success in life and to avoid being left behind by more qualified competitors. Computer skills can make the difference between a student being accepted to college, getting a job, or receiving a much-needed promotion. I agree with the book's view points on this issue. In class it is always easy to point out during student-created powerpoint presentations which students are skilled with the program and which students are struggling. The skilled students have more elaborate and well-designed presentations which usually earn them higher grades than those unskilled students who had a white powerpoint with bland black font.

The thought of having my own classroom one day soon is extremely exciting. I want to make the greatest impact that I possibly can on my students and that is going to require that I use creative, technological resources to make learning fun and memorable for them. I plan on having my students create blogs to reflect on topics we have just learned or to further their creative writing and journaling skills. I have always enjoyed online review games teachers have created, like Jeopardy. These online games make students forget for a moment that they are working and learning, but at the same time they are expanding their knowledge through the use of fun activities. Through this course I hope to learn the skills to make my dreams of being an amazing teacher become a reality.

I agree with the title of "digital natives" that is being given to today's generations of children, at least in first world nations such as America. A digital native is someone who does not know a life without computers and such technology. I am a digital native. When I was a little kid the technology may not have been as advanced as it is today, I had dial-up internet, but I was very familiar with the technology and how to use it. My five year-old neighbor can navigate himself to youtube, select a dinosaur video that he wants to watch, and even skip the ads without even knowing how to read. Kids these days (digital natives) now have the steps memorized of how to get where they want on many iphones, ipads, and computers without having any literacy skills which is much more than I can say for many literate middle-aged adults (digital immigrants). It is always difficult when teachers are completely incompetent with computers. I think it hinders my performance as a student. One of my professors does not use a powerpoint or any type of teaching supplement besides lecturing. He does not have a single thing on the projector. As a visual learner, I struggle to understand a lot of the material in that course. I'm sure there will be many differences between how I use technology and how it is used by my future students. That is because technology is changing every day and as an adult I will probably have more to worry about than how to use the latest app. However, I do want to maintain proficiency in as many programs as I can to help my students as much as possible.