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