Project #15 SMARTboard Instruction Part 2

Final Report on PLN

My PLN has grown significantly since I started it. I have added most of the link to the blogs of teachers from my C4T's, as well as many other sites that I have stumbled upon while researching information. I have found so many valuable resources through EDM 310 that will be of great assistance when I start teaching in my own classroom. I have also helped others develop a PLN and organize it with Symbaloo for their jobs. I also created a PLN for my 7 year old daughter. She loves playing educational games on the computer, so I organized her Symbaloo to make getting to all of her favorite web pages easy. I know that my PLN will continue to change and grow with me. Thats what is so great about having one.

Blog Post #13

NO E-MEDIA FAST FOR ME!
Not being able to use any electronic device is impossible for me. It is very difficult in a world where everything revolves around technology to avoid it. There are two things that were absolutely impossible for me to avoid, and that is the computer and the cell phone. Some of my other classes require daily use of a computer, so that was impossible to avoid. I also could not go an entire 24 hours without using my cellular phone. It was not for reasons such as facebook, etc... I have small children and have to be able to be reached for different reasons weather it's to make arrangements for someone to pick them up from school in the afternoons, or in case one of them get sick at school. 
Some media is a very important part of my every day life. Even though I was able to go without all of the other "banned" media, it was not easy. I realized that I have learned to use every media product in an educational way whether it is for me to learn with or for me to teach with. I knew that technology was something that was always changing, but to be honest, I did not realize how important it was going to be when it comes to education.
It is detrimental to the lives of our children that we enforce technology in the classroom. Everywhere you look, a child is listening to an ipod, playing on an ipad, laptop or portable game system. If we bring them into a classroom that only consists of books, pencils, and paper, they are going to be bored. We have to have passion about teaching, which means that we have to always be looking for and learning about new innovative ways to keep our kids engaged. 

C4T #4

Middle School Matrix
Hadley is a Middle School History teacher at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her most recent blog post, Brain Research for the Classroom #ASCD, was done to see the learning pattern of the kids in a classroom. What they found was amazing! She found that no matter what the task, after 20 minute of class the students lost focus. She decided that she was going to change her teaching strategy to accomodate this learning  pattern. 
I think this is a great idea. If we know the learning pattern of our students, we can plan our lessons around these intervals. This is definitely something that I will think about when making lesson plans for my classroom.


It's Always in the Eyes was a very inspiring blog post. Hadley described the passion of an elementary teacher, Liliana Aguas, who won the ASCD's Outstanding Educator Award. The most interesting fact was that the teacher had not planned to be a teacher, she actually wanted to be a scientist. It wasn't until she took an education class her senior year in college that she changed her mind. Hadley says that the sparkle in her eyes said it all. I love knowing that there are still teachers out there that have the passion to teach children. So many people want to become a teacher because of all the holidays off, or the health benefits that they really do not take pride in what they do. They do not understand that they have the power to shape the lives of these young children. 

Blog Post #12

Using visual thinking methodologies, Kidspiration provides a cross-curricular visual workspace for K-5 learners. Students combine pictures, text, numbers and spoken words to develop vocabulary, word recognition, reading for comprehension, writing and critical thinking skills.

 Kidspiration helps students:

-Develop strong thinking skills

-Strengthen reading and writing skill

-Build conceptual understanding in math. 

*For this assignment, I would like you to download the 30 day free trial from Kidspiration and choose one of the assignment to complete. After completing the assignment, write a blog post explaining Kidspiration, and tell me if you could use it in your classroom.

________________________________________________________________________

Kidspiration works the way students think and learn and the way teachers teach. As students make visual connections, they build fundamental skills in reading, writing, math, science and social studies. Kidspiration offers activities in all curriculum areas, so students use visual learning naturally and confidently.

What it can do:

Develop Strong Thinking Skills

With Kidspiration, students use graphic organizers to express thoughts and explore ideas and relationships. They create graphic organizers including webs, concept maps and Venn diagrams to clarify thoughts, organize information, apply new knowledge and build critical thinking skills.

3,000+ symbols in Kidspiration's Symbol Library provide visual support for concepts taught in K-5 language arts, social studies and science. Students can also import symbols from other sources. Symbol Search helps students search and find just the right symbols to express their thoughts and ideas.

Strengthen Reading and Writing Skills

With Kidspiration, students create, organize and explain ideas and information visually. They develop stories and descriptions using engaging visual tools and explore new ideas with thought webs and maps. Using Kidspiration, students combine pictures, text and audio to develop comprehension, organize ideas and create stories.

• Integrated Picture and Writing Views connect students' visual thoughts with written expression in a single click. In Picture View, students develop thought webs and other graphic organizers. In Writing View, they expand their ideas into written expression. As they visualize, plan and organize, students build essential skills and confidence in reading and writing.
• Visual continuity between Picture View and Writing View links images with written expression. When students click from Picture View to Writing View, they see symbols from their graphic organizers, reinforcing the connection between words and their meaning.
• Kidspiration pairs symbols and words to build and strengthen literacy. Emerging readers and early learners use Kidspiration symbols and graphic organizers to communicate stories they've heard and ideas they develop. Older students use symbols to explain more complex ideas, show relationships and demonstrate understanding.
• Kidspiration Word Guide supports vocabulary and reading comprehension with easy access to nearly 13,000 words. It includes sight vocabulary from the Dolch and Fry word lists and aligns with TESL vocabulary to support ELL and ESL students. Each entry includes definitions, recorded speech for pronunciation, synonyms and antonyms, parts of speech and sample sentences. Word Guide pairs 1,400 words with images to enhance word recognition and comprehension.

  Build Conceptual Understanding in Math

  Kidspiration extends the proven principles of visual learning to mathematics with visual math tools. Combining the hands-on learning power of manipulatives with all the added benefits of computer interactivity, Kidspiration's math tools help K-5 learners grasp essential and sometimes challenging math concepts.

This is actually a picture of the assignment that I did. This software is absolutely amazing! It is definitely something that I will use in my classroom when I become a teacher. I chose to download my trial as a student so that I could actually try the software as a student to see if it would really work.

Kidspiration includes curriculum content, teacher tools and standards-aligned lesson plans in language arts, math, science and social studies developed specifically for grades K-5, along with 150+ activity templates.

• The templates give teachers classroom-ready resources and provide a launching pad to customize and create lessons for individual learners, small groups and the whole class.

                                                                                                                                                              

Creativity and Curiosity: My Thoughts- Special Post #12A

I do believe that schools in the United States inhibit creativity/curiosity in the classroom today. There are several conditions that contribute to this:

• Need for success, limiting risk-taking or pursuit of unknown.
• Conformity to peer group and social pressure.
• Discouragement of exploration,  using imagination, inquiry.
• Differentiation between work and play (e.g., learning is hard work).
• Disrespect for fantasy, daydreams.
• Reward systems.
• External locus of control.
• Need for closure and rigid time lines.
• Need for security and acceptance of product.
• Perfectionism.
• Low self-concept.
• Anxiety.
• Competition.

These are just a few, but in my opinion, there are a few that are more common than the others. I think that the need for success is the biggest. When I say this, I am referring to the need of the school. When the school's standardized tests scores are not where they need to be, children are taken out of other classes, such as art and P.E. and are doubled up on subjects where improvement is needed. Although these subjects are important in education as well, so is the ability to use imagination. 


There are things that we can do as teachers to facilitate creativity and curiosity.

• Provide an environment that is rich and varied in stimulation, safe, and accepting.
• Teach with materials and methods harmonious with each other and with the teacher.
• Delineate clearly and repeatedly the aims of this type of program.
• Allow free interplay of differences.
• Make environment and materials friendly and nonthreatening, thereby allowing disagreement and controversy without hostility (this allows children to engage freely in behavior underlying creativity).
• Reduce anxiety in classroom, especially that created by teacher.
• Handle differences as confrontations, not as conflicts.
• Find integrative elements in differences.
• Allow unifying concepts to emerge.
• Allow individuation and differentiation within the unity.
• Foster positive change in directions congruent with student's predilections in cognitive and affective areas.
• Provide situations that present incompleteness and openness.
• Allow and encourage lots of questions.
• Produce something, then do something with it.
• Grant responsibility and independence.
• Emphasize self-initiated exploring, observing, recording, translating, inferring, testing inferences, and communicating.
• Provide bilingual experiences resulting in development of greater potential creativity due to the more varied view of the world, a more flexible approach to problems, and the ability to express self in different ways that arise from these experiences.
• Allow rather than control.
• Be receptive.
• Value and model intuitive behavior.
• Give opportunities to investigate ideas of successful, eminent people who used intuitive processes.
• Give opportunities to try out intuitive behavior (e.g., in problem-solving).
• Treat the child with respect and allow freedom to explore the universe.
• Create an atmosphere with really good music, books, and pictures as a natural part of the child's world.
• Treat ideas and questions respectfully.
• Respect the child's privacy.
• Value the unusual, the divergent.
• Help the child learn by mistakes.
• Avoid sex-role stereotyping.
• Encourage self-expression.
• Teach the child to look and really see.
• Help the child learn to trust the senses.
• Permit the child's own creativity to emerge.

I truly believe that if these things were done in every classroom, that the rate of "killing curiosity" would decline. There are many jobs that require creativity to a certain extent, teaching being one of them. When you are a teacher, especially at the elementary level, you must not only be creative, you must inspire creativity and curiosity. It is our job as future educators to want to do this. 

Elspeth Bishop is a writer for InGoodMeasure.net. She was born and raised in Colorado and now enjoys skiing, playing tennis, and hiking in the mountains of Salt Lake City, Utah.Find out more about Elli through Google+

Progress Report on Final Project

My group, TACE, has decided that we are going to make a video of two future classrooms. One will be with a teacher that has continued to be a lifelong learner, has kept up with the technology, and uses it in the classroom. The other will be of a teacher who does not. We want to show the importance of the use of technology in the classroom by examining the environment in which students are more stimulated. We have a meeting set up for this week to discuss it further. I am really excited about this project!

C4K Summary For April

Angie was the student that I was assigned to mentor in the Student Blogging Challenge. She is 11 years old, in year six, and lives in Australia. Angie started blogging a year ago, and loved it so much that she decided to enter the blogging challenge. I was really excited that I was assigned to Angie, she has commented back every time I have written to her! That was a first for me since starting Comments For Kids. Being a "beginner" blogger, it is a truly amazing feeling to communicate with people all around the world through blogging. Angie and I talked about the events leading up to her Easter break, which for her was the end of term 1. I found that she enjoyed supporting fundraisers for the children's hospital, which I thought was amazing. She also had a really touching post about Easter, and what it meant to her. I was really thrilled when she made her last post before her break where she mentioned myself, and another EDM 310 student on her blog. She wrote about how great it was to receive such nice comments from us, and how interesting our blogs were. That, for me , was a very rewarding feeling.

Daniel is a student in room 9 at Pt England School. Daniel was assigned to make a personal profile of himself to present to the class. I thought this was a great idea. Making a video of yourself is a great way for people to get to know you. It is much better than just writing down some things about yourself because it allows for you to show a bit of your personality. The greatest part is that the students are learning important ways to use technology in the classroom.

Blog Post #11

Ms. Kathy Cassidy's Skype Interview and First Graders in Ms. Cassidy's Class
     Ms. Cassidy takes the same approach in her first grade class that we are using in EDM 310. She was given five computers about ten years ago and decided that she must find a way for her children to use them. Her class now has a webpage in which they can access to go to different sites with educational material incorporated such as alphabet videos. In order to secure the privacy of her students, Ms. Cassidy sends home a form at the beginning of the year that has to be signed in order for the children to get online. She also does not use the students last names, or put their names on any of their pictures. Ms. Cassidy knows the importance of using technology in the classroom. She made a comment that Dr.Strange has made to us several times, we have to be  lifelong learners. The ways that we were taught years ago just do not work anymore. We have to keep up with the technology and incorporate it as much as possible.
     I love the idea of having a class webpage. It is like having different learning centers in your classroom for the children, but they are all on the computer. The only problem that I could see would be not having enough computers for all of the children to use. In this case, you could break the class into groups and let so many use the computer at a time while you are working with the rest of the class on something else, then you could alternate. Like Ms. Cassidy says, we must take advantage of the tool that we have today!
   

Project #14

Blog Post #10

Do You Teach Or Do You Educate?
     There are many reasons for which I chose Education for my major, but it wasn't until after having children of my own that I knew that's what I wanted to do. As a mother, it is a wonderful feeling when your children learn to say their first word, or take their first steps. It is such an incredible milestone, and you were the one who showed them the way. Before you can blink you are teaching them to tie their shoes and how to ride a bike! Young children are like little sponges waiting to soak up everything that they can, and I wanted to continue helping not only my own children, but other children to learn everything that their    little heart's desire. It is truly an AMAZING feeling!
     To teach someone is to show or explain how to do something, to give information about or instruction in, to encourage someone to accept something as a fact or principle, or to cause someone to learn or understand something by example or experience. To educate is to give intellectual, moral, and social instruction to someone. The two should go hand-in-hand, shouldn't they? I think that it is important to do both. When you are a teacher, your students are with you at least seven hours a day, 10 months out of the year. I know that my children love their teachers dearly. They look up to them in such a way, you would be amazed. You have to not only teach them, but you have to guide them. They are our future!

Tom Johnson's Don't Let Them Take The Pencils Home
     In the post, Mr. Johnson is having a disagreement with Gertrude, the School Curriculum Instructional Interventionist Academic Specialist about weather the children should be allowed to take their pencils home from school or not. Gertrude insists that by them taking the pencils home, the wrong message is being sent. She claims that research shows low-income families see pencils as toys. She also believes that they will have lower standardized test scores if they take the pencils home for this reason in particular. 
     What Mr. Johnson is arguing is that this is total nonsense. I can't help but to agree! Does the so-called "drill-and-kill bubble test" really measure what someone has actually learned? I don't think so. I have written about this same topic a few times now, and my opinion hasn't changed thus far. In most cases, as soon as the information that was "drilled" is tested, it is also forgotten. But to appease Gertrude, Mr. Johnson says that he has met with the parents and students and explained ways that the pencil should be used for learning. Gertrude still doesn't believe that the students will be held accountable at home. In reality, all that matters are the test scores. They are what determines many things for the school. It is really a shame that the emphasis on a standardized test score can threaten the jobs of teachers. The biggest question that needs to be asked is: What are they really learning?