Technology

How important is it to incorporate technology into your classroom?

It is extremely important to integrate technology into the classroom because that is the age we are heading in to. I feel like almost everything we do uses technology now, so why not the classroom? Whether I like it or not, people are dependent on technology and know how to use it well (for the most part). If we try to seperate the students from technology we are only hurting them. They feel comfortable using technology, so if we can find ways to use it to teach them, then this will create a better learning environment. Most kids have a short enough attention span as is now, lecturing with a chalk/marker board will put them to sleep.

What are the benefits to you and your students?

For the students, as I said before, technology keeps them interested in the material and will help them to learn. The students use technology so much in their lives that taking it away from them will only hinder their learning. For them to learn the best they can we as teachers have to play to their strengths. Another advantage for the students is that by using technology in the classroom we may be showing the students some tricks that they did not know before. Technology may not only help us to teach them the content, but also teach them skills that they can use in other classes and in life.

As for me, using technology to teach allows me to keep my activities on record on the computer, which can be easier to organize sometimes than the old fashioned binder style. I can keep my technology skills up to date, and if I allow technology to have a presence in my classroom, I'm sure that my students can teach me a few tricks as well. Technology can also keep the class fresh for both the students and myself. With math, a lot has to be done the old pencil and paper way, but that can get dry for many people. Sprinkling in technology can keep the life in the class and give me different days too so I do not become monotonous as a teacher.

What are some of the challenges?

A major challenge when using technology in the classroom is not relying on it too much. Sometimes it can get really fun to play with the cool toys that technology has to offer, but too much technology can be a bad thing as well. I am sure it could also get easy to rely on technology too much, so if forced back into the pencil and paper way, the students might struggle. I would not want to see my students rely so much on technology that they cannot do basic skills on their own. A great example of this is in regards to the 8th grade class that I observed over the winter session. The students were so relient on their calculators that they could not do basic math in their heads, like 8/-1, which everyone should know how to do. Another problem that I forsee is that technology can be a distraction. Sometimes when trying to make a lesson exciting, teachers can lose sight of what the actual lesson was supposed to be about because they got wrapped up in the technology.

What are the important lessons you will take with you from this class and use?

For my age, I like to think that I am kind of old-fashioned. I still use a No. 2 pencil, not pen or a mechanical pencil and I still like doing math problems without the calculator to keep my mind sharp. I am far from the most technology oriented person. I thought that this class was going to be all about using the SMARTboard and stuff like that, but I learned a ton in this class. I learned more about Word and Excel, which I thought I knew everything about them. Now I know how to use simple tools like these in the classroom. We talked about how to use blogs with students, which I think is a great way to stay connected along with email. Learning how to use the SMARTboard was very helpful, and I fully intend on using some of the tools we talked about in class when designing my own lessons. Then there was the out of the box thinking that I liked the most, like using cell phones in the classroom. I think this is a great idea because people are going to have their phones on them anyway, why not use them? I remember being bored frequently in school, but if I were able to use my cell phone for class, things would get a lot more interesting. I also never knew how many great sites there were for teachers, and now I know how to use a site like Diigo so navigate the web easier for what I specifically need. The most important lesson that I learned from this course is that there is always another way to do something. No matter what the lesson or activity is, there is another way to do it somewhere out there. Technology keeps changing, and so should my lessons. What worked 5 years ago, may not work now. That is the main lesson that I learned in this class.

Electronic Portfolios

First I will post my link for an example of a good electronic portfolio: http://www.kids-learn.org/class98/

The thing I liked the most about this portfolio, and what I looked for when I was searching, was that this portfolio had a journal done by the teacher. The journal talked about the activity that the students did during the day. The one thing that I did not like was that the journal was not reflective, but she may not have posted that online. She also had links to the online activities that she used in the classroom so that others could use the same activities. Another nice feature is the guestbook link at the bottom of the page. This portfolio was made over 10 years ago, which is amazing because I could not find anything better when searching, yet people are still commenting on it saying how great the site is. It stinks that one cannot comment on specific entries like a blog, but in 1998, I do not know if that was really an option. The two things that I looked for were a journal of events and activities that the students participated in, witht the guestbook being an excellent bonus.

Here is the link for the not so good portfolio: http://www.cesa8.k12.wi.us/teares/math/it/samplePort/JAMES/Jim's%20Index.htm

For lack of a better word, this is pathetic. This portfolio was for the sole purpose of advertising himself for a job. No where on this site does the teacher show ANY activities that he would use or had used in a classroom. There was no journal to talk about anything that he did. This had absolutely nothing to do with inside the classroom; he had nothing to talk about with regards to students. I think the most important part of the portfolio is to show what one had learned and to show at least a few examples of things that have worked or that one things may work in a classroom.

Copyright

What law that we learned about in class surprised you the most? Why?

There were a lot of laws that we talked about in class that surprised me a little. In fact there are too many and I am trying to remember them all. I remember one specifically that was about copying pages out of a workbook and something else, with only the workbook being illegal to copy but I forget what it was. I was surprised about being able to copy recipies, just not the titles because the recipie is the important part, not the title. So my first thought is who cares about the title, the recipie should be copyrighted. Another thing that surprised me was the whole discussion on parodies. I was very surprised that someone could take someone else's work, just change the words or a couple things here or there, and get away with it. For example, parodies of songs using the same background music are ok, but then there was another song that took 4 notes from another song and they were guilty of copyright infringement. Then we also talked about how a parody of a play is ok even if it costs money to see, but charging nothing for putting on someone else's work is still illegal. I would think that if one does not make money off of it, then copyright may not be as strict, but that is not the case, which does kind of make sense. The parody case with the Saturday Night Live parody of the New York song really surprised me just because it was the same exact song. I could have gotten confused on some of these, this gray area is a killer.

Do you have any specific examples of teachers who have violated copyright law?

I cannot think of any major examples off of the top of my head of teachers who have violated copyright law with two exceptions. I know that I have been in school and a teacher has just put a movie on to keep the class quiet without us having any prior knowledge of the movie and the movie was not at all relevent to the class. Also, I know teachers who have made copies from textbooks or workbooks when they probably should not have because they only wanted to use ten or so pages from one book and it was not worth distributing the books to everyone. Other than those two I cannot think of examples of copyright infringement.

Is it your responsibility as a teacher to teach students respect for copyright? Do you think teachers should have to pay attention to copyright?

I do believe that it is a teacher's responsibility to teach students respect for copyright. I do not necessarily think that there needs to be a lesson in the middle of my math lesson about copyright, but maybe another class informing students about some major copyright laws. Music downloading is a big topic that could be addressed in schools. Besides outwardly teaching students about copyright, I think that teachers need to model the behavior. I can say that I got a few of the questions wrong when we played our copyright game because of what I saw my teachers do when I was in school. I saw my teachers do something, assumed that it was ok, so I thought it was legal. Now I know that I should not assume that all of my teachers abided by the law. Students are very impressionable and teachers are often viewed as role models. Students take note of what the teacher does, and a lot of times they will mimic that behavior because they assume that the teacher is doing what is right. That is why I think that teachers should have to pay attention to copyright; they are setting an example to the students.

Will you model copyright ethics when you are a teacher? How?

I will certainly try to model copyright ethics, but I doubt it will be easy and I doubt I will be perfect. Anytime I am thinking about copying something or showing the students something in class, I will have to look up a copyright law attached to it. Or, if I know someone working in my school who is well read on copyright law, I will have no problem asking for advice. I always have asked too many questions, and in dealing with copyright that is probably the safest way to go. I will try and think of the major questions we addressed in class though. For example, I will think if what I am doing will be taking substantial money away from the person who the work belongs to. How much of the work am I using? Does this definitely pertain to something that I am teaching? Questions such as those. Other than that, I just have to be careful and check myself often when looking at using someone else's work.

Interactive Whiteboards

How do you feel interactive whiteboards enhance teaching and learning?

Interactive whiteboards allow students to be more involved in their learning than with chalkboards or whiteboards. The interactive whiteboards are more engaging with the many different tools that teachers can use to gain the attention of the students. Students also enjoy when they can use the Smartboard because, quite frankly, it is more fun to solve a problem on the Smartboard than on a whiteboard. From a teacher's perspective, the Smartboard is like a powerpoint in that the teacher can use the same slides from class to class, but at the same time the teacher can write on the slides themselves, then erase the writing before the next class. The teacher can also use applications and interactive tools such as actually rolling a dice using the Smartboard. This makes preparation much easier for the teacher. As far as learning, students now are surrounded by technology in everything that they do. The regular chalkboard or whiteboard will most likely bore today's student, so the Smartboard engages the student using technology and all kinds of interactive applications. This makes learning more entertaining for the student and allows more learning to happen when the Smartboard is used correctly.

Was the technology difficult for you to learn to use?

I only scratched the surface with what the Smartboard software could do, but I did not have trouble using it. Everything was pretty simple and similar to other programs that I have used before. I felt like I was using a mix of paint, word, and powerpoint. There were also some other features that made it really easy to use. I liked that fact that I could highlight multiple objects and move them as one without having to group them. There were a few little things that I had to adjust to or have someone show me, but for the most part I think that I picked it up pretty quickly.

What are the pros and cons to having one installed in your classroom?

The pros of having a Smartboard in the classroom are that it engages the students and makes preparation easier for the teacher. As I said before, students are more interested in what they are learning when they feel that they are being involved and entertained. The Smartboard can do both. The Smartboard can really allow the learning to be interactive and it is a lot more fun playing with the Smartboard than going up to the front of the room to do something on a whiteboard or overhead. The cons of the Smartboard are becoming too reliant on it, using it too much, and not knowing how to fully use it. The first two points kind of go together. I can imagine that it would be very easy to rely on the Smartboard and use it for every single lesson. It does not matter how fun a lesson may be if the same lesson is done for two weeks straight, just changing the topic. This is especially a problem in math where a teacher could teach many different lessons the exact same way. The other problem with the Smartboard is not knowing how to really use it. Many teachers do not have training on the Smartboards, so they do not really know what it can do. The Smartboard can be just as boring as a whiteboard in the hands of the wrong teacher and it could also distract from learning if used the wrong way.

Think of some lesson plans you wrote in the past. How would you incorporate the Smartboard when teaching that content.

I have not written too many lesson plans up to this point, but I think that using the Smartboard would be much more effective than the basic whiteboard. Almost anything that I could do on the whiteboard, I can do on the Smartboard as well. I think that when doing examples of problems, the Smartboard can really help get the students get involved in the examples and learn more from them. Take for example the lesson that I am doing for our class. I am representing the quantities x^2, x, and 1 with blocks or tiles. Before having the Smartboard, I would have given the students the tiles and just talked about how to use them. But with the Smartboard, I can replicate the tiles using the Smartboard software and I can actually show the students how to use the tiles to solve problems. Showing the students works a lot better than talking at them.

Video Project

The video project that I thought of would be geared towards a statistics class, so probably seniors in high school taking an AP statistics or college prep statistics class.



The premise of the project is to come up with a survey, implement it, and examine the results.



The criteria for the project are as follows:



Students will:

• work in groups of 2-3


• come up with an original question about a topic of their choice, and the question must be approved.


• ask the question to a minimum of 15 people.


• predict what they believe the results would be.


• answer the question themselves before asking others.


• tape both the asking of the question, the thought process of the person being asked, and the answer to the question.


• incorporate at least 3 ways of displaying the results (bar graph, etc.)


• use a minimum of 5 transitions in the movie.


• use a minimum of 3 songs in the movie.


• give their opinion of the end results after the movie.

For the two days I will have to show the students how to use movie maker (unless we have Macs, then we can use that cool stuff), audacity, and how to find free music. Then, the students will edit simple videos, adding in some music and effects and exploring all of the capabilities that the programs have. After those two days in the lab, the students will have 4 school days out of class to complete the taping of the survey. After that, we will have two more in class days (a third built in if needed) to edit the project. After the project is due, as a class we will analyze the movies.

Goal: We will look at reasons for certain results that the students may not have considered before they started their surveys. For example, the way that a person asks a question can influence the answer to the question. The demographics can cause the data to look a certain way. We will look at differences depending on who they asked, which person asked the question, etc. This way, the students will be able to see how hard it is to survey people and all of the problems that can go into that. The project can also show that when done the wrong way, surveys can be misleading. We will also look at what worked as well (for example, if a student asked a question without hinting at an answer, etc.)

The first two days of the project will take care of the preparation. As for challenges, I think that we may run short on time. I would have to build in a few extra days to see how they are doing, especially with the out of class filming. That is another potential problem, having them do it out of class. Some people may not have transportation to stay after school or meet up with a partner at night. Problems with the programs are always a possibility so I have to be aware of that. Also, different people may already have different exposure to the programs, some may need more than 2 days to learn how to use them, some may not even need the one day. I will have to be very flexible with this project, especially the first time I do it.

Software Skills

Reflect on the software skills you learned and the projects you created. Was it beneficial to take time to learn these skills? Which do you think will be most beneficial to you? How will they help you in the teaching profession?



I honestly think that all of the software skills we learned to use will be helpful in the classroom, making it very beneficial to learn them.



I'll start with the one that I will probably end up using the least for secondary math students: Inspiration. I think Inspiration is a really great tool, and you can do a lot of cool stuff on there with inserting pictures and stuff, plus it is easy to use. At the same time I probably will not use it too much. Although, I feel that it could be a great tool to help a confused student who is mixing up different concepts. I could use it to map things out or demonstrate steps to solve a problem such as a factoring problem. I just probably wouldn't use it too often in daily lessons, more in special cases.



I feel that Publisher is a tool that I can use in teaching and possibly even more outside the classroom. I think that newsletters are a great way to keep parents involved in what the kids are doing. Being able to use Publisher and being able to make a newsletter relatively quickly is a great skill to have. I could send newsletters home every once in a while letting the parents know about what the students have been doing in class and other stuff like that. Even better would be if I decide to coach, I could use Publisher to make a newsletter about my team relatively quickly. Or I could show someone else how to do it easily and be able to send that newsletter to the parents of the players. Publisher can also be used to make more complex fliers. While Word is good for very simple fliers, if I want to make one look really good, Publisher is great for making fliers. These fliers can be sent home to parents, used to advertise an event or a fundraiser, or almost anything. Plus, with the templates already done, everything is so easy to make and takes so little time.

I feel that the most beneficial program that we used in class was Word. I knew how to use the basics of Word before, but I never knew how much I could use it until we went over it in class. Now I want to use tables for everything. Then there is the fill in form feature, which is amazing. A few days after we learned it in class I used tables to organize a fill in form to use for the overnight stays after the honors dinner. Word can be used for so much more than just writing documents. Word can be used for simple fliers, tests, quizzes, forms, templates, etc. Word also has an equation editor so I can use that to make math quizzes. So instead of having to type, underline, go to the next line, line the next line with the previous one, and type to write a fraction, I can just click the equations editor and type a fraction a lot easier. Organizing information using tables makes the document look so much better than tabbing and typing. I had no idea how useful Word could be until we went over it in class. As a teacher, I can make just about anything I need to in Word alone. Also, my classes can use Word as well. I could teach my classes how to use the equation editor, and I can build assignments off of that by having them use Word.

I think that all of the tools we used in the project were very useful, but I feel that Word is the most useful because it is so easy to organize information and can be used to make just about anything.

Inspiration/web resources

Is Inspiration something you would invest in for your classroom? List some ideas in your content area where you could incorporate it.

I would definitely invest in Inspiration for my classroom. To be honest I feel that Inspiration would be better for English or History classrooms or even better, elementary classrooms. I can definitely find applications in math for this though. Plus, with students relying on technology more and more, I am sure that I would get more students attention by having them make concept maps or venn diagrams on the computer instead of having them use pencil and paper. Sometimes students get overwhelmed with all kinds of different concepts, and I think that these maps would really help them organize their thoughts. Here are some places where I could incorporate it:

Steps/scenerios when factoring
Types of geometric shapes
Types of graphs
Scenerios to prove triangles congruent/similar
How to solve a system of equations
Graphs/common values of trig functions

What are your favorite web resources we covered in class? What do you think you would use most? Why and how? Be specific.

I like the social bookmarking sites the best of all the web resources we covered in class. I cannot even begin to count how many times I found a great web site, went away from it for whatever reason, and could not find it again. With social bookmarking, I never have to lose a site again. This goes beyond the classroom, but has many applications in the classroom obviously. I could use a site such as diigo to keep my personal bookmarks and my ones that I may use for school. I also really liked rubistar, even though I probably will not use rubrics too much for math. When I need to make a rubric, that seems to be a great tool to easily and quickly make rubrics. I tried making a rubric for my unit plan last semester for Secondary Methods 1, and it was a pain to make. It would have been nice to have a resource to use as a starting tool like rubistar. It was also interesting to think of ways to use blogs as an educational tool. I mean I have seen and read blogs before, but never thought of using them in a classroom. There are many ways I could use blogs to communicate with students, and hopefully keep them more interested in what I am teaching.

I think I will use social bookmarking the most of all the tools we have used in class. One of the things that I know that I have to work on is presenting material multiple ways. With social bookmarking, I can search for a topic that I am having some trouble teaching or that the studetns are struggling with, and maybe find a lesson idea from another person's tags. I think that it is awesome that I can tag a source, then look at who else tagged it, then look at his/her tags. It takes out the search engine, or the "middle man", so to speak. With all the stuff going up on the internet now, I think that it is harder to search for specific material, but social bookmarking can help a lot with that. I can also use the tagging feature to share links with my students. I can just tell them to look at my page when they go home, and they can look up web sites that suppliment the lesson. This is so much easier than spelling out websites for them to visit or having to hand them out. Plus, this means that I can tag many different types of sites, so that different learners can use different sites. The possibilities are endless. With the social bookmarking tool I do not have to use classtime to go over certain sites or tools that they can use because they can look them up on their own. Or maybe I can spend less time going over it because of how easy it is for them to find the site. This means more instructional time, which is definitely a good thing.

Social Bookmarking

Does Social Bookmarking have an application in your classroom?

Social bookmarking is a great way to organize a multitude of web sites not only for others to see, but for me to find as well. I think that social bookmarking definitely has an application in the classroom. Social bookmarking can allow me to organize web sites that I may need at a later time and web sites that I want to share with students. Anytime I come across a web site that I may want to come back to later, I can bookmark it and it is just a click away. I think it is a little harder to use a tool such as this in a math classroom, but I think that it can definitely be used by the students, mostly outside of class. This is a great tool for students to use when at home; since it uses technology they may prefer using social bookmarking as part of a homework assignment instead of the classis pencil and paper.

What are some ways it could benefit you and your students?

For my own purposes, I can use it to mark sites with good lesson ideas, references, or things I may want to show the students in class. Social bookmarking also allows me to share with other teachers and look at the sites that they have tagged. If I am stuck and not sure how to get a certain topic across to the kids, I can look up other people's bookmarks and see if there is anything I can use. Another way that it can benefit both myself and my students is in the teaching process. Everyone learns differently, and it is the teacher's job to make sure that every student understands the lesson. As technology continues to grow and as people become more reliant on it, I think that some students will start to learn better via technology. I can use social bookmarking to help my students by tagging certain pages for them to look up at home to suppliment the lesson. So maybe I would teach factoring to an 8th grade class, then I tell them to go home and look up a few links which describe factoring in different ways. From strictly the students perspective it could definitely help when researching for a project. If I tag some pages and give the students a start point when researching, then it can really help them. They also have some sites to fall back on if they struggle finding information.

Could it have helped you in the past?

I do not think that social bookmarking would have helped me a lot in the past in my math classes. in my other classes it could have helped me a lot more, but as for math I do not see a lot of areas where I would have used it. Where it would have been helpful would have been maybe finding videos or examples of how to do certain types of problems. Some problems can be done different ways and sometimes it is nice to see the multiple ways to do a problem, that way the student can choose the way he/she understands best. Another way social bookmarking could be very useful is if teachers would like to post solutions to problems. I know that some of my teachers assigned odd problems so that students could check the back of the textbook to see if they were right or not. The problem is that if a student does not know how to attack a problem, the answer will not help. If I had a list of web sites with solutions, I would have been able to understand a lot more of my homework when at home, and as a class we may have been able to spend less class time on homework and more on learning new material.

Can it help you now as an Albright student...how?

Math is one of those things that does not really change TOO much no matter what level one is doing. I mean my college math classes are significantly harder than my high school classes with all of the proofs and such, but the main way I think that social bookmarking could help me now is by having links to sites with answers, as I said above. Actually, I think it would be even better in a college class because with proofs, books cannot put all of the answers in the back of the book. The answer to a proof is in the work itself. I would love to be able to look at a proof that I don't understand and reason through the steps to figure it out on my own. At the college level professors do not have to worry as much about people just copying answers because if students are this dedicated to their majors, they will want to understand where the answer comes from, instead of just copying down an answer. Students will teach themselves if they must, then go to the professors if they need to. Social bookmarking could also come in handy in regards to my senior seminar class because we have to write a 30 page paper on a math topic. It would have been awesome to browse through bookmarks when searching for a topic, and even after finding the topic, so that we could find information on the topic. I feel like social bookmarking is a great tool when researching a topic. I used the bookmarks that Ms. Mislevy posted when looking for lesson plans incorporatin technology. I tried doing a Google search, but the search gave me a bunch of results that did not help me. After browsing through bookmarks, I was able to narrow my search down within those sites and go from where. This is much more efficient than sorting through a Google search.

Blog on Blogs

Give some specific ways that you can incorporate blogs into your classroom.

One of the great things about blogs is that they are public and anyone can access them. I think a great way to use blogs with math is to post problems on the blog and have students answer them. One advantage to blogs is that people who are shy may prefer to use blogs because they are more impersonal than being in class. A lot of students do not like to participate in class but in a blog they may be more inclined to respond to questions. Something specific that I think I can do is post very difficult problems on a blog, then give the students around a week to complete the problem for an extra credit possibility. A problem would arise here though because if one student would post the answer, then everyone has the answer because it is public. So I was thinking of putting the students into groups and give each group a different problem. Then the students could collaborate outside of school on the problems and I can also check their progress. The type of problem that I envision would be a very difficult application problem; one that would take a lot of teamwork to discuss and figure out how to do. One other thing that I could have the students do is post a sample question, like a test question, based on what we learned that day. So if we learned solving equations, the students could write a word problem where you have to solve for a variable. Then they could discuss eachother's questions.

What are the benefits and challenges to using this technology in your classroom? List some.

Benefits of using blogs in the classroom are that shier students may participate more on a blog, students can work whenever they want to and can ask questions at virtually any time. The problem is that responses aren't instant. For example, if there is a question for me, and I do not check until 2 hours after a question is posed, the kid may not check again that night. Another positive is that using blogs would probably be more to their liking because it involves techology. More and more students are starting to prefer the computer to pencil and paper so the students may love this. Another negative with using blogs is that there is not much to discuss with math, and I feel that discussion is the real strength of blogs. I feel like in a secondary math classroom, using blogs would be inefficient most of the time because there are better tools for math and we would not use the blog the best way that it can be used.

Why is it important to evaluate websites before using them in the classroom or in research?

With more and more people having access to technology and how easy it is becoming to use, more people are posting things online. The problem with this is that anyone, literally anyone, can post about any topic. I could post an article online analyzing Shakespeare when I know absolutely nothing about Shakespeare. What I write may be completely inaccurate, but someone reading it may not know that. The last thing that you want to do when making a presentation or teaching is to present something that is incorrect because it reflects poorly upon the presenter.

Do you think most people understand and apply these evaluation techniques?

I do not think that a lot of people evaluate websites. People are always looking for the quickest answer. I think that a lot of people search until they find an answer that sounds pretty good, then use it with no regards to what the source is.

How would you incorporate them into your classroom and student projects? What ways could you teach students evaluation techniques?

I think the best way to incorporate evaluation techniques is to demonstrate to the students how to properly search for and evaluate a source. I think this would also be the best way to teach them. I think if I would assign a project where students have to do some research and find sources as I guide them through the process they would learn a lot. Have them not only find resources, but also say how they know that it is credible or how they evaluated it. I would show them some strategies on how to evaluate a source, then assign the project. Then along the way I would set checkpoints where I would check progress and see how the students are doing. If I see a common mistake, I would take time to address the whole class.

joe

today i saw joe...it was amazing. my life is now complete