ILP #3 Participation- Teacher Interview

MY VOICE THREAD TEACHER INTERVIEW
For my project, I interview a teacher, over facetime, who uses technology in education. I wrote up some interview questions and emailed Candance, who teaches grades 5-8 while using technology in her class, and asked her if I could interview her for a school project. We talked about the types of technology she uses in the classroom to teach and what she uses to prep for her classes. We talked about her favorite and least favorite tools to use and what kind of assistive and adaptive technologies are present in her classroom. It was a great experience to see the connection between what we are learning in EME2040 being used by a teacher in an actual classroom.

Blog Journal #8

Diigo has been a really useful tool and I am glad I have learned how to use it because it is going to be very helpful in my own classroom someday. Diigo is a useful tool because it allows teachers to share webpages with one another and point out the useful information on the page either by highlighting it or making a note. This is like a PLN because the teachers can connect with one another and share helpful information. Diigo is also useful for students and teachers to work together because teachers can share webpages and articles and different sources with the students to see and the teacher can highlight certain points and students can also make notes on the page and share with their peers what they found on the site. It is also useful for personal use because I can save webpages that I will need later on, and I can make notes on which information is most important and which sources will be most helpful.

            Using PowerPoint can support student learning at every level of Bloom's Taxonomy. It can be useful for the first level of CREATE especially because students can create their own PowerPoint to share with the class and that is a newly produced original piece of work that requires design and formulate and many other skills. A PowerPoint can also be useful to EVALUATE because students can evaluate different PowerPoints and even give their opinions and judge them. A PowerPoint can also be made is a response to something that can Evaluate their value, it could even be evaluating their skills of knowing how to use PowerPoint. It can also be used for ANALYZE by including ways for students to draw connections among ideas from class lectures into the PowerPoint. There could be discussion questions or even quiz questions including on the slides. Students can APPLY their own knowledge and include them on their own PowerPoint slides. The students can take what they have learned and apply the information onto slides that they can share with other students. For UNDERSTAND the PowerPoints can include discussion points so that students can discuss and explain the point that they were taught to see if it was understood. The students can use PowerPoints to help them remember information by creating their own because with the creation and time to create the students will better remember the information they learned.

tech trends

This website can be useful to stay informed on technology trends and how to keep up with them. It also helps professionals understand how technology trends impact them and how to incorporate them into their careers. As a professional, it is important to stay informed and up to date with the technology trends so that you can share with others and others can share with you. 

ILP #2: PLN

my voice thread

My PLN voice thread project was on Pinterest because I like to use Pinterest a lot and have found a lot of teachers do as well. There are a lot of different boards with teacher resources and all the teachers can connect with one another and share their materials. It is also fun because you can be creative and make cute boards for other teachers to see, share, and use. If you do not already have Pinterest I definitely recommend it and go ahead and follow some boards you are interested in and see all the cool resources that the other teachers have shared to their boards and join some communities.

Blog Journal 7

• So far using twitter has been fun and informative. I like that there is so much information on twitter and it is all so easily shared with so many different people. I have learned a lot about education with technology because teachers share on twitter about their tools in their classroom. There are so many benefits to using twitter because there are so many people with valuable information on twitter then you can easily get in contact with and share information and resources with. I have not experienced any issues but one thing that could be better is knowing which people to connect with and which resources are most helpful and reliable because there is so much information and people on twitter.

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• I like the web design project because we got to be creative while also learning about a helpful tool that we can and will have to use for our own class someday. I learned how to create a webpage for a class and add all kinds of things to it like images, calendars, links, and much more. I did not like the one we used to require you to pay to have more options. I would have also liked to have more options for formatting because the formatting was somewhat limited. Next time in my career, I can improve my webpage by including more categories and designs in it to make it more accessible, informative, and creative.

·                                                          my webpage

• I do not know of anyone using assistive and adaptive technology, but I know it is very helpful for students in a classroom setting. These technologies help students stay on track with the other students and hopefully do just as well despite any difficulties they may have. These technologies in the classroom maybe challenging for other students to understand and not be distracted by or be able to connect with those students. Also, as the teacher, I will have to understand how to help that student with each type of assistive technology they may have. It will take more planning and ability to adapt but it is amazing that these technologies are available to the disabled students to help them be just as successful as everyone else and be able to function in a classroom just like every other student without disabilities does.

Blog Journal 6

FSUS's second-grade class homepage has a lot of information provided by the teacher to help the parents and the students as well. There is so much provided information about the teacher, resources such as textbooks, important dates for the calendar, and projects. All of this information is provided by the teacher and allows the parents to keep track and be informed of all things related to their student's education. It is a great way for the parents to stay involved in the student's school as well. It is also a great responsibility for the teacher to maintain a welcoming webpage for the parents and students to access. https://www.fsus.school/Domain/37
     Once I become a teacher I will definitely have a lot of responsibilities technologically like maintaining a webpage for my class and updating homework and resources and important dates to help my students and their parents. I see myself using lots of modern technology in my classroom like smartboards, webpage creators, online communication platforms and so much more. I want to be able to use technology to help my students connect with one another and help them learn from other sources not just from me teaching them. I also think it would be really interesting to incorporate certain technology in my classroom like Virtual Reality and 3D printing like we saw at the Tech Sandbox.
     One specific technology I would love to see in my future classroom would be the 3D printing pen. My students could use these pens to literally draw in the air and create something in seconds with just a pen. It could be incorporated into an art lesson. It would be really cool for the students to get to experience this kind of creativity in technology. Another really cool technology I would like to use is the VR or virtual reality because this can be so useful in a classroom for so many reasons. One thing we could definitely use the VR for would be virtual field trips. Using VR we could take a trip anywhere in the world. If we were learning about something in a museum we could take a trip to the museum using VR. There are endless possibilities for the new technologies in the classroom and it is really encouraging to see and makes me want to be a teacher even more so I can use these devices in my future classroom and show my students how awesome it all is. 

Blog Journal 5

• Diigo was originally quite confusing and difficult to navigate. I have never used Diigo before so I had to learn how to use it for this past assignment. I liked that the website had many pages and subpages that were all linked to one another so when you want to get to another page you can get to it with one click. I did not like that the website was so different than the other websites and tools I am familiar with because it made it hard to learn how to use it. 
• When first introduced to the blogger website I was not looking forward to it because I did not like the idea of writing on a platform that everyone could see what I was writing. However, after a short time, I got used to the idea and started to enjoy the blogger website. It was interesting to see what everyone else was saying in relation to what I was saying. I also liked that we could edit and decorate our blog pages to make it more fun and aesthetic. It also helps the class get to know one another and see who had stuff in common with them. I have learned that blogging is a great tool to use in a class to help students connect and have fun sharing their opinions and information they find. 
• Wikipedia is a nice web 2.0 tool that is somewhat controversial in school. Some teachers do not like their students to use Wikipedia as a source in academic papers because they argue the information may not be reliable. However, I think it is a great tool and I will most likely use it in my classroom someday. This tool allows many people to publish information on a very large genre of information. Just about anything you need information on can be found on Wikipedia that is why it is so useful especially in an academic setting. https://www.wikipedia.org/

blog journal 4

•  A paragraph about your early experiences using Twitter. With whom have you been interacting and how have you found it beneficial?  How might Twitter be helpful in your future career?
• At first, Twitter seemed boring and a bit confusing. After a while on Twitter, I have learned a lot of different things about education and heard what other people have to say. I have been interacting with a few different educational resources and elementary school-related accounts. These accounts post interesting information about updates in school and cool technology that is being implemented in classrooms. One that really stood out was a post about Virtual Reality used in classrooms. 
• A paragraph about the digital divide.  How does the digital divide affect student success in schools? What are some causes of the digital divide?  Reflect on what you may experience as a classroom teacher and how this will affect your teaching strategies.
• The digital divide is the gap between the people who can access and have the ability to use resources and technology and those who do not have that option. This can cause a lot of problems, especially in a classroom. All students need to have the same access to online resources and different materials in order to learn at the same pace and keep up. However, for many reasons like poverty and lack of trained teachers and different academic resources or administration, it is possible for a digital divide to cause issues in the classroom. If I were a teacher someday and there was a digital divide in my classroom it would be quite difficult to keep every student on the same level and give them resources they may need to succeed. It would be a lot more work to help every individual student succeed despite the resources available. 
• A paragraph about academic software for students.  Identify two software tools you would like to implement in your future classroom.  Describe the software tools and why you would like to use them with your future students. 
• Two of my favorite software tools that I would like to implement in my future classroom are coolmath.com and quizlet.com. Both of these academic software programs are used to help students learn while having fun. Coolmath has a lot of games that involve applying the student's math skills in order to do well or win the games. Quizlet is used to help students study. It has different tools like flashcards, practice quizzes, games, and much more. In order for students to do well, they have to be engaged in what they are learning and one way to do so is to provide fun interactive activities pertaining to the lessons and these two academic software tools do just that.