ILP 2: Design Prezi

For this Independent Learning Project i went over Prezi which is a free online software that allows you to make presentations. It really lets you be free and create something beautiful if you know how to use it. Prezi, if done right can be far more interesting than your regular stand alone power point in my opinion and i hope you guys give my voice thread on it a peek!


 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Blog 8

Every person comes to a point in there life when they need to learn how to use something that they have never seen, heard, or ever knew about. Recently I had to learn to use a program called Diigo, and I was not fond of it at all. The whole point of Diigo is to highlight, bookmark, and quote websites that you visit so that friends and colleagues can see what you have been looking at, and so that you can keep a sort of digital notebook of what you look at online. To that affect it is quite useful when you are trying to grow a learning network. or are researching something with someone else. Maybe as a teacher you want your students to research something and you can use Diigo to make sure they actually do research by having them highlight a website. However, in my experience using Diigo it was a headache to go through any kind of PDF form, which is primarily what I read. Also, when your group becomes large the feed looks chaotic and makes me stressed when i look at it. For these reasons I will most likely never return to Diigo for any personal activity.

As a student every single one of my teachers since I was in fifth grade has used power points to teach the class. I remember being so excited when my teachers first started using them because they were so new and fascinating and we could actually see what our teacher was wanting us to write down without them having to write it on the board or the projector. Being able to see the different pictures and charts helped us remember and understand material, and now you can even put videos into power points and they can help you apply the knowledge. You can discuss something with the class in one slide and analyze different answers on another or evaluate different arguments in the same way. The best part though is that if the children have access to school computers they can make their own power points and be creative!

As teachers in an ever technologically evolving world it is important that we stay up to date on new technologies that are coming out. One way we can do this is by finding websites that keep on top of technology. One such website is Popular Mechanics which keeps up to date with tech companies, new hardware, and other tech related articles.

You should check it out for yourself! https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

participation- Tedtalkx

For this ILP I wateched a ted talk about how technology could benefit the classroom if it was used more effectively. Below is a voicethread I made and I think it came out pretty good! https://voicethread.com/share/12218724/

Teacher Pages

Schools now a days have websites where you find important information like what teachers they employ and what there standards are for their children and other useful things. I decided to look at my high school website to see how my old teachers identified themselves. As I looked at the website I saw a bunch of teachers that I had not seen when I attended the school and I was able to see a bunch of information like the degree's that they obtained. Also, each teacher wrote a little introduction that anyone can read to get to know them a little better. https://home.somersetcollegeprep.org/apps/staff/

When I become a teacher I intend to use technology as an aid most everyday both in and out of the classroom. For instance if you have read some of my other articles I am really big on making note sets in Quizlet so that kids can easily study and have pre-made tests that they can use to practice. Also, I plan to integrate google classroom into the curriculum to make homework and its grading process more streamlined and eco-friendly. There are other online apps and software that I will probably be using when I am in a class. This week we also visited the tech sand box where we could use different new technologies that are making their way into the classroom. My favorite was the VR where you could immerse yourself in a premade environment. I was thinking that people could use the VR to experience speeches, wars, and other historical moments first hand. This way kids get a better feel for what they are studying because they can see what they are studying. The hardest thing about learning history is finding a way to relate to it and i think VR is a great way to help kids make those ties.

Blog 5: WEB 2.0 and My Experience

This week I did a voice thread, so instead of reading you can listen to this one. Just click here to start! Hope you enjoy!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

ELA standards, CPALMS, and my Newsletter

The ELA standards and Technology matrix for 11-12 grade has many items on its list and when reading it I was worried with the sheer quantity of how much there was. Upon further inspection I realized a lot of what it wanted me to do was using the same kinds of software, but for different reasons. So,  when it comes to things like using word and creating blogs and power points, those are my strongest suits and I am completely comfortable with them. Where I think I will struggle most with displaying data in Excel and some of he other software that i had never herd of. I mean, there is just so much that goes into using Microsoft Excel and it can get very complicated. I have had problems using it before, but hopefully I can get the hang of it since I will most likely be using it a lot when I enter the class room.

CPALM is like an online library consisting of different things a teacher might need to teach a class. It has lectures, presentations, lesson plans, and standards for educators. While it is nice and convenient I do not think I would use almost anything on this cite in my class room. I find that I best present things that I have made, and I have always felt as if the teacher was uninterested when they presented a power point or a lecture that they had pulled off of the web or a peer. I would however, use this source for inspiration and see what other people are doing for their lesson plans and incorporate those into my own. 

Recently, we worked on putting together a newsletter for class and I went wild. I had so much fun making it and formatting a whole lesson plan type thing for a class. However, it was not what I was supposed to do. After redoing it I was still happy with the end result and I still had a lot of fun making it, but i did feel a bit hindered in my creative process. Still, it was a fun way to learn to use word and all its different tools.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

M-Word, Copyright, and Social Media... OH MY!

Through out my many years of school I have used Microsoft Word many times. In elementary school I remember the whole class excitedly lining up and walking to the library and having the librarian teach us about using word. In middle school we used it again to do little reports and in class essays. Often if I was supposed to make a power point at home or right something down, I would use a different application called Open Office because I could not afford the absurd price of the software. This continued on until I was in eleventh grade when I began duel enrollment and was granted access to Microsoft office 2016. Having not used the real in many years, every time I had to make a power point or do something creative with the program I would go all out and be as creative as I could, weaving pictures and GIf''s into all my slides and design them with all kinds of colors and overtime it became one of my absolute favorite things to do. Most of my teachers in in high school and college also used power point for everything from morning questions to lectures and everything in between. Because of this, I never really saw them using Word unless they were making an assignment or test for us. Even then, they could have been using Word Pad or even Open office and I probably wouldn't know the difference.

I will be the first to admit my frugality. In the days of my youth, I would pirate everything from movies to music to games and other digital treats. As a student, many of my teachers would pull up clips of movies on YouTube to emphasize a point or liven up a lesson. Some teachers that I had were very unprepared and in the morning I would watch them frantically searching the web for a power point that someone else had made about the topic they were going to cover while I watched in horror. (I normally sat close to the teachers desk because it helped me focus.) Then they would stumble over this power point that they had just pirated while the students struggled to read the watermarked slides. I would often think to myself why they wouldn't just make their own slide shows so they could present better and not be so flustered during class. (Then a few weeks later I'd be reading an essay that I had written at 2 in the morning in a sleep deprived haze whilst my teacher was checkering other papers that were turned in for plagiarism.) As a teacher, and a student it is so easy to give into the temptation of procrastination and plagiarism. However, these can result in legal consequences which is why it is important to present information in your own words and in your own works.  I know many people who got in trouble for plagiarism, normally they would get suspended for two weeks and a zero on the assignment. They would always get tagged because the school used a special software that would read the document and match it to its own database and anything that matched on the web. I do not see plagarism as a problem because of these systems, but I would want to discourage it by splitting the projects into multiple assignments so that they would have to plagiarize multiple times, or reverse engineer the plagiarized assignment. Copyright laws don't bother me either because of how much I enjoy creating power points and tests and quizzes, plus after the first time I wont have to re-make the power points until the curriculum changes or I get tired of them, and I will only have to change a few words on assignments and tests every time.

Now, I want to discuss cyber bullying. Unlike copyright and academic honesty there is much less I can do to prevent this. I can not forbid high-schoolers from going on social media. Often times cyber bullying is complex and students will not want to show authoritative figures what people are saying or doing to them online because of how it may make them look. The best thing I advise to my friends as of now is abstinence from social media. There is something to be said about how emotionally and mentally draining these platforms can be. They are addicting and promote an unhealthy culture of self value through the validation of strangers, mutuals, and acquaintances. These can be avoided by setting your account to private and only letting close friends and family see your account of course, but then you're friend might let theirs see a post of yours and so on, until the one person or group that you did not want seeing your posts sees them. The best thing I can do is promise the students that I will listen, JUDGMENT FREE, to their problems and try my absolute hardest to do everything I can to make them comfortable again.  All three of these problems plague our schools, but we have to try our hardest to counter them.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Technology in the Classroom, and the Rise of the Digital Natives.

With the exponential growth that is happening in the technological world it is evident that it is making its way into more of our classrooms. With that there is a need for a baseline of skill that educators should have with these new technologies so that they can effectively use them in a classroom setting. The ISTE, (International Society for Technology in Education) has provided such a list for educators, students, and leaders. In their seven point list of standards the two that stuck out to me where Citizen and Analyst. Being a citizen according to the ISTE means being a role model and mentor to your students. As a kid/teen I think most people are rebelling because they're unsure of who they are, and they put up a wall to anyone in positions of authority to try and figure it out for themselves; which is why I believe this is going to be the hardest of the standards to meet. Being an Analyst is to use the tools and what you know about the class to help teach them better. This is more towards my strong suite because I am always thinking of different presentation strategies and organizational methods. I am a strong believer that everyone learns in a different way and to teach an entire class in one way is unfair and cruel to the children in your class.

With the rise in technology the new first and second world generations are growing up surrounded by electrical cords and LED screens and thus have become very proficient with them. Because of this many have started calling Gen Z the "Digital Natives." I find this accurate, but what must be remembered is that not everyone on the globe has access to these technologies. It does NOT APPLY TO ALL OF TODAY'S YOUTH! Gen Y, or the "Digital Immigrants." who were introduced to these technologies later in life are also fluent with these techs but at a slower pace. It is much like using a language, when you are born into a world that uses it, it will come much easier than if you came from somewhere else. Soon there will be a new technological breakthrough and the "Digital Natives" will be hopping onto the boat of whatever the new technology is. and the cycle will continue.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Introduction

Hello, my name is David Moore. This is my first semester at a real university, but I do have my AA degree which is in Secondary Education. When I had just started college I had no idea what I wanted to do when I got older. I went from wanting to be a chef, to doing EMT work, to nursing and I just couldn't figure it out. Then, in a career class that I had we had to do a project on our future occupation, and I loathed the teacher that taught that class. So naturally I did my presentation on teaching to spite him, and tell that that he was a horrendous teacher. Three years have passes since then and here I am, about o finish my education minor.

When it comes to technology I am pretty hit or miss, I can whiz through most android phones with ease because I had a part time job at Cricket Wireless. With computers I am pretty average and can figure my way through most things. When you put an iPhone or Mac or anything that runs OS or IOS I really stumble, I have a hard time using those types of tech. There have been multiple times at school where I have had to use a Mac and I have to have someone next to me that knows how to use these because I am always asking how to do something.

In this class i am hoping to learn to use different learning software that will be able to help with things such as grading, classroom organization, and the presentation of information to the class. So far many of the teachers that I have talked with still do much of their grading by hand and use software like Power Point to convey information to the class. I am hoping to break away a little from this and find easier and more effective ways to relay information to a class.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.