Blog #6

The school website that I went to is West Orange High School. Their home page gives you a decision to go to multiple pages including academics and curriculum, athletics, grades, guidance, parents, and many more. They also have announcements you can read right when you open up their website. Some of the announcements they give deal with the bell schedule for FSA writing, the student testing Edmodo page, khan academy, and senior salutations. All the way on the right side of the home page they also give you a calendar that tells you all of the important dates and events that are coming up soon and/or in the next few months.

                I envision myself using technology to accomplish my professional responsibilities more efficiently and effectively by incorporating as much technology in my classroom without being too excessive. I would want to teach my students about the different educational programs they could use to be successful throughout their school years. I would also use programs myself, such as word and/or websites like Khan Academy, to teach the class. I would use technology to reach out to other colleagues and get their input on things.

Some of the skills I acquired from working on out last assignment, Wed Evaluation Wiki, is basically how to use Wiki and all of the things you can get out of that website. Some of the things that I did not like, although, is how confusing it all was at the beginning because you are working with two other people so you have to be on the same page. I would improve next time by just knowing how to work with this website in general. 

Blog #5

Some web 2.0 tools that I believe are useful in the classroom and helps support teacher professional development are the presentation tools, like slides and bullet points that help create, edit, and share presentations whether it’s for the class you are teaching or for sharing information in front of other teachers and/or your boss. I also think that mobile tools like podcasting, blogging, and media sharing are useful in the classroom because they can help get information out to multiple people and teachers can put quizzes and tests on mobile sites. A web 2.0 tool that I feel is not useful in the classroom and does not help support teacher professional development are the video tools. I feel like not a lot of teachers use videos to teach a class so that tool would not be necessary in the classroom.

An interesting web 2.0 tool that I might use when teaching is www.diigo.com. This website can be used to save and tag your online resources for easy access anywhere you go. This is helpful because teachers go to multiple classrooms and sometimes they may need the same material they were using in the last classroom and this website will make it easy for that to happen. Another thing this web 2.0 tool can do for a teacher is to annotate web pages and PDF’s directly as you browse online. This is useful because this way you can add notes and/or comments to an assignment that one of your students has turned in.

Diigo is also helpful for teachers because it helps them organize their links, references and personal input to create structured base through this website. This is great because having all of your work and assignments organized gives you less stress and helps you teach your students better because you know where everything is. The last thing this website is helpful for is sharing. You can share with friends, students, classmates, and/or people you work with. 
Some of the new skills that I required with working on this last assignment, the concept map, is to be patient. This took a lot of planning and time to create a good concept map that not only made sense to you but can also make sense to others that are looking at it. I can improve next time by giving myself more time to do this assignment and taking my time. I can use the skills I learned from this assignment in the future by applying this to a classroom that I am trying to teach when or if I become a teacher

Blog #4

One standard that I have located and decided to use is the “Multimedia: Literature” standard. This standard is basically all about media and how to include/attach it into documents, books, poems, etc. A web-based resource that my students could go to and use to learn all about that standard is http://www.cpalms.org/Public/search/standard#0. This website can give a lot to information to not just this one standard, but to multiple standards in case they want to learn more.

When I am working on assignments that require me to have internet-based resources, I would usually type in a key word and try to start from that and go through multiple resources until I found the one that fit the best with my assignment. My methods compared to those mentioned in the podcast are a lot simpler. The method mentioned in the podcast told us a lot of steps that should be taken to find an internet-based resource and my method to finding a resource does not require me to take as many steps and I get the right resource in the end.

Some of the new skills that I have acquired from the Web Hunt assignment mainly deal with the amount of new knowledge I have gained from reading the standards over and over again to choose the right one for the questions in the assignment.

Web Hunt Challenge

1    1. You want to teach your students about the Presidents of the United States, find a website that could be useful for you to teach your students.

2. You want to find a calendar for the new students you are going to get next year so you can start planning out new assignments and projects, find where you can generate a new calendar

Blog #3

The technology standard that I feel most prepared to teach with my existing knowledge falls under the “producing” technology standards. It is called “write to explain and/or inform” and it includes knowing how to head papers and how to insert graphics and figures and I feel like I am good with teaching others on how to do that. One technology standard that I need more preparation on in order to teach others deals with the digital media. I am not sure how to create audio recordings and/or insert them into a document.

                The technology software and applications I would like to use with my students would be any Microsoft Office program. The digital citizenship concepts that I will need to address to my students would deal with the protection of their identity on the internet. As they get older and start applying for jobs, they will have to be cautious of the things they put on the internet of themselves or of others because it can put themselves in jeopardy.

                Some of the new skills I have acquired from working on the Newsletter Design assignment deal with how to apply page borders, changing the margins to smaller ones and formatting the newsletter into columns instead of just one long page. I liked how creative I can be on this assignment and that I can put my own imagination into the newsletter. The things that I learned to do while creating this assignment can be useful in my future career because as a teacher, you will need to keep your students attention and the more creative you are with these things, the more attention you will get from them because they are being entertain from what they are looking at. 

Blog #2

                I have used Microsoft Word mainly for writing essays throughout high school and papers in college. Some of my teachers would tell us that our papers cannot be handwritten whatsoever or else they would not accept it so you would always have to go onto Microsoft Word and transfer your handwritten paper into a typed paper. I have also seen my teachers use it for tests/quizzes, syllabuses, and projects directions.

                When I write research papers, I would always have to cite the author or creator every time I would use what they said so it would not be seen as copyright, but instead fair use. As a teacher I would deal with these concepts by informing my students about copyright and the consequences if you do not cite your work. When developing my own instructional material, I would use my knowledge only but if I have to look elsewhere, then I would either write it in my own words or cite whatever website I got the information from. I would show them how to properly give credit to the original creator so they know exactly what to do.

                I did not acquire any new skills from Twitter since I already had one long before this class, but I did learn a lot of new things about blogging because I have never thought about creating one. I can use this knowledge about blogging and twitter in my future career by having my students create one of these things to get more connected with others and improve on their typing and writing skills.   

Blog #1

             In my opinion, computers are far more important than not important in the educational experience. First of all, basically everything is created with using a computer; syllabus’, tests, essays, projects, etc. Everyday our teacher hands us a piece of paper that is intended for class that she used a program on a computer to use. Kids are becoming more technically advanced every day because of the use of computers for their educational experience. If we did not have computers to learn and work from, we could do it but it would be a difficult process. There are some concerns that deal with technology due to the fact that some schools are not using computers as much as some other schools do. This may be because of school financial problems which can be very difficult for those schools to help children understand technology.
             The ISTE standards are a way to let students know specifically what they need to know about technology and the advances that may come with it. The standard that I find most interesting deals with communication and collaboration. Its goal is for students to use technology to communicate and work together with other students, whether in the same room or at a long distance. This is very helpful when it comes to online class because that is basically what they are doing; communicating, working and learning at a distance. However, I feel that not everyone should be expected to follow these standards because some have not had the privilege of learning about different technological advances in schools for students.
             When it comes to youth being labeled as a “digital native”, I disagree with that. If you are considered to be a digital native then it means that you have grown up in the digital age and you know all about technology. I disagree with youth being labeled this because not everyone has had the privilege to grow up with technology surrounding them simply because they could not afford it. When comparing my technological skills to my teachers, I find that the older and even some of the middle-aged teachers do not know how to use a computer as well as I do and they usually end up asking the class how to do something on the computer. Some differences that I anticipate between me and my future students is that they will know how to use technology better than me and I will not be able to fully teach them about the advances in technology because I am trying to learn myself at the same time.