Week 2 Story

I must say that the reading this week has given me new insight to the way that I create my presentations. It has also required me to evaluate the ones that I have already created. I have found that my presentations, that I thought were not too bad, actually are. They are too long and more importantly give the students no emotion while viewing them. I am already educated enough to know that teaching has to be relevant and has to connect to real life examples in order for it to be meaningful for the students. I have never stopped to think that it has to be emotional as well. It might be easy to forget that President Kennedy is dead but one will never forget how they felt when getting the news. Learning can be temporary but emotions will last a lifetime.

Week 1 Story

Well, I have not a an opportunity to strongly attack the week's homework. Actually I've only done the picture project. I have to say that I am excited to see the end results of this project and even more excited to hear Louie's purpose of this project!!!!! :) So far I think that this might be the most exciting class for me. It is right up my alley as far as creativity and uniqueness. I also think that it is a great break from the boring technical components that we have recently covered. Anxious to learn much more in the next weeks.

Week Three

The first site that I chose to review was Inspiration. I am very familiar with this site because the district that I work for uses it along with Kidspiration. This program is very similar to Inspiration except the targeted audience is a lot younger. These programs overall are aesthetically pleasing and are easy to use.
Bubbl.us was very similar to Inspiration as they were both easy to use and looked very nice. Like Inspiration, Bubbl.us allows the students to organize information in a way that is not confusing and is fun at the same time. This is important in the classroom because organization plays a key role. With that said both of these programs would be an asset to any district or school. The only addition benefit that Bubbl.us offers is the fact that there is not a charge.
The last program that I viewed was Education Oasis. This program offered many templates that would be functional for the students. On the other hand it is not nearly as aestetically pleasing as the others. Another gripe that I have is the fact that the templates are not functional online. In order to word process them they would have to be copied and pasted to a program such as Word or a Google Doc. All in all, I was not impressed.

Week 2

Rubistar and Quizstar are great tools for any classroom and for all grade levels. I personally have worked with Rubistar. This tool is great because it automatically creates objectives and assigns them a point value. This is simply done by clicking on a subject area and a topic. The tool also allows the user to copy and past onto a document and revise the areas to make them more specific.

Quizstart on the other hand, is not a tool that I am familiar with. I briefly looked over the website and noticed a lot of similarities. Quizstar operates in the same way that Rubistar works except for the fact that it creates quizes instead of rubrics. I also noticed that there is a charge for the Quizstar. It is relitively inexpensive though.

All in all, both tools are beneficial to my classroom. They are easy to use and they are adaptable to different subject ares and levels. They are flexible with the content and can be used cross curricular.

Week One

Out of the two articles I really enjoyed reading the Principles of Teaching and Learning. This article sums up a lot of the important information that I learned throughout college. The format is also exceptional being that all major ideas are summed up into 7 points for teaching skills and into 8 points for learning skills. These ideas include the topics of motivation, prior knowledge, organization and engagement. These are all important skills that both the teacher and the students need to learn. The more practice each has with these skills the better they will become. This is beneficial to the facilitator because he/she can use these tools effectively to engage students into the curriculum while the student can use these same skills to evaluate themselves which will in turn make them more efficient learners.

Week 4

Wow I'm a little late. This week was yet another hectic one. Ending one school year and getting ready for summer school seemed to pose a problem along with my Master's Program. I think I have more on my plate than I can handle. But gotta keep movin' on huh? Anyway, I did not seem to gain a lot this week in class. The safe internet essentials were something that I was already aware of and the Second Life deal was a joke. I did learn a little about the privacy laws on the other hand that were interesting. Most importantly I learned that I am not doing anything illegal when I borrow or use stuff on the internet.

ED 520 Blog 3

This week I had a lot of fun working with my group again. It is very interesting to see where we all agree and disagree. For the most part we are all on the same page. For our group project we had the opportunity to investigate many different web sites which have potential to be useful in the classroom. Most of the tools we looked at were interesting and include: 280 slides, poll everywhere and Google forms. Others were unimpressive (Ta-da lists)... honestly what a waste of time.

Not much else to say this week. I am trying to close out the end of the school year and am exhausted!