Blog Post #5

The iSchool Innitiative

The iSchool Innitiative by Travis Allen was great. The idea that he came up with about transforming classrooms and learning into a mobile access situation was awesome! Allen thought of every possible idea there was to think of for students and teachers to successfully learn online and also for teachers to be held accountable for their actions and teaching methods. He talked about the availability of practically everything offered in the tangible world being offered all on one simple mobile device. Allen calculated the total cost of everything and it was almost astonishing at the amount of money that the school system would save on.

In Travis Allen's campaign video he's asking for people to support his quest on convincing schools to embrace mobile learning. Although Allen had some great ideas, I did have some concerns. I'll start off by saying that I have not looked into this mobile learning idea other than watching his YouTube video. However, some things that concerned me were about the underpriviliged children who go to school to get a hot meal because sometimes thats the only meal that they will eat. Or the children that are abused or feel trapped at home, that school would be their escape for the day. Will the mobile learning be taught in controlled settings like an auditorium or will the school have to pay thousands of dollars for the rights to use these apps and other gadgets to teach professionally?Besides those concerns, I think that Allen's idea is great! All ideas come with downsides but im sure when all of the kinks of the program are worked out, mobile learning will become a viral sensation all over the world.


The Virtual Choir

Jennifer Chambers's post about Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir was the coolest thing ever! It is amazing how much you can do virtually now. What is even more astonishing is that these people are total strangers. This was a great way to incorporate totally different sounds and pitches to create a sound that was simply beautiful. The use of the internet to incorporate things that are positive like this is awesome! It just confirms my thoughts of how the internet can help improve education for students in classrooms all over the world.




Teaching in the 21st Century

In Kevin Roberts's video Teaching in the 21st Century he talks about what it means to teach in the 21st century. Roberts believes that the most important thing about teaching is not to entertain but to engage students. He explains the differennce by saying that engagment is meaningful, solves problems, and is relevant but to entertain means to pass time, escape from problems and is obsolete. This was the coolest way to break to words down that are used interchangably but both can mean totally different things when it comes to educating students. Roberts believes that teachers are the filters for students. Sure students can get anything they want to know from the internet but who's gonna show them how to validate information or check sources. It is our job as future educators to teach our 21st centurty students how to check these things. We have to show them why wikipedia isn't a reliable source and the proper way to avoid plagerism. It is our job as teachers to educate and assist students with the proper skills of using the internet for educational purposes and safely for social purposes.

After watching this video I realized that he was right. We can no longer be the "Charlie Brown" teacher feeding students information that they probably already know. Our job is becoming the teacher that shows students the capabilities of their knowledge. In the words of Kevin Roberts we have to become the "Engaging teacher" not the entertaining teacher. Becoming an engaging teacher doesn't mean that you can't make learning fun; it means that we have to come uo with ways to teach that are like appetizers for the brain. We have to teach in a way that students can obtain and KEEP information that they can actually use in life.


Concepts of Flipping the Classroom

Dr. Lodge McCammon's idea of flipping the classroom is one that definitely enforces the engaging part of learning. His concept involves students watching podcasts or videos of lessons that their instructors have provided prior to attending class. Katie Gimbar's Why I Flipped My Classroom & Ms. Munafo's Flipping the Classrom are YouTube demonstrations of how these teachers successfully "Flipped" their classrooms. This activity allows students to work at their own pace in learning and understanding the lesson. After they've viewed and practiced the lesson, attending class becomes a review session where the teacher can answer questions and spend most of the class period practicing the lesson.

This is a great way to use the maximum class period time for learning and engaging! This would be a great way to teach my students about the parts of speech and how to create bibliography pages by providing students with activities to practice doing and recognizing these things properly. Flipping my classroom is something that I can definitely considder doing in my classroom some day.

Project #6

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Project #5 Presentation

Blog Post #4

Listening and Comprehension Podcast

The topic of this podcast was listening and comprehension. Ms. Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano is a former world language teacher who created this blog about effective learning of different languages by creating podcasts. Tolisano talks about how important it is to attch feelings to a word in order to make it mean something. I thought that this was a really cool way to think of a word when trying to learn it in a different language. Like the word "love" for example; Without meaning love is just a word, but if one associates the word to a passionately happy feeling, then the word begins to mean something to someone when they use it.

Tolisano also talks about the recording and editing process of podcasts. She talks about how the creation process of the podcast gives the learners a chance to interactively learn by reading the sound and hearing their voices say the words. I thought that this would be a cool way for learners to correct themselves. Sheesh why wasn't this invented when I was learning a foreign language?!

Podcasts in the Classroom

This was a video podcast by Joe Dale about how podcasts work well in the classroom. Dale refers to the learners in our classroom today as "millinials." These are kids typically born after 1980 and have not lived much of their life without some sort of technoligical influence. Podcasts in the classroom is a great way to use technology for educational influence. Dale shows us how using podcasts inside the classroom can graps the attention of the learners more efficiently. There is also an interview with Harry Dell, a middle school history teacher, about how podcastiing has effected his teaching methods. Dell uses the podcasts to animate characters during reading lessons from different exerpts in his lessons. He uses the different voices to make the podcasts more engaging for the learners and more interesting to listen to. The students also gave feed back about the podcast. They all seemed to really enjoy the idea of this interactive learning method through podcasts.

Podcast Collection

This podcast was by far my favorite. It is a podcast by Judy Scarf that gives you great tips on how to make a great blog. There were even two website included, How to Create a Podcast and Podcasting, that showed you step by step instructions on how to create a great podcast. This podcasting tip collection lists all the tips to succeed. There was something that was a list of periods to creating a podcasts. It states that every period is 42 minutes, there are 9 periods devoted to using audacity(the podcasting program) and a total of 17 periods to successfull create a great podcast. This podcast was something that I idefinitely bookmarked to my favortites because it is a very useful site and I know tht it will benefit me in the future with EDM 310.

Wordle Post Project #2

About Me

Blog Post Assignment #3

Peer Editing and Reviewing

This week we were assigned to watch YouTube videos on Peer editing. The first video we were assigned to watch, What is Peer Editing?, was about constructive criticism and knowing how to approach critiquing in a positive yet effective way. The video explained how important it is to compliment as well as criticize your peers. This was a great short video on how to know how to effective help someone with their writing without offending their work.

The second slideshow, Peer Editing with Perfection, was a slideshow reinforcing and breaking down all of the things that were discussed in the previous video. It emphasized the importance of complimenting before criticizing and demonstrated the proper way to critique someone's work.

The final video that we were assigned, Writing Peer Reviews Top 10 Mistakes, was a video with an elementary school child leading a video on how to teach her peers good skills on critiquing. It was a rather cute video that had some information within it that was very helpful. It explained how the way that you say something can come across as something either rude or constructive. Word choice plays a huge part in something being portrayed as either helpful or hurtful. Overall, these three videos/slideshows were very effective and will help me effective complete my future assignments in this class as well in my own classroom someday.



Adaptive Technology

Technology in Special Education was a great video! This video is about a teacher named Lacey Cook who is a special education teacher. She takes a video camera around her classroom to show how helpful technology has been in her classroom. Cook talks about how much easier is its for non-verbal students to communicate on the laptops and how something as simple as headphones and an ipod could keep disturbance levels down in her classroom during silent reading.

This video really put technology into a perspective that I had never really thought about. Technology has become a necessity in life especially in special education programs. Educational electronics can read to students who are blind or magnify words for students who cant see very well. Technology can allow students to communicate to teachers instead of teachers assuming things for their students. Technology has made a great impact on the special education community in the most positive way. Computers are instruments in the classroom that have become things may be second nature in a regular classroom but heaven sent to students who could not otherwise communicate or function in a classroom as efficiently.

Ipads for Autism

Autism is a growing condition within children in the upcoming generations. As a future educator, there is no doubt that I will have to teach children that are effected by autism.How the Ipad works with Autism is a video about how children with autism can learn with education apps on the ipad. This particular video shows how a young boy with autism is learning to count, read, and write with different apps on the ipad.

The Apple Education App store has all sorts of options to download for students in classrooms with or without learning disabilities. One app that particularly stuck out to me was one called "Sentence Maker. I am an english/education major so I thought that this would be a great way to teach my students the structures and parts of sentences. The apps that have been created to be compatible with technology and learning in the classroom is a great breakthrough for parents of students with learning disabilities that have not been able to effectively teach them before.

Digital Smarts

Harnessing Digital Smarts is a youtube video about a teacher, Vicki Davis, teaching her students how to blog properly, use social networking effectively, and use technology to their advantage. The biggest lesson that I took from this video is to get rid of the perception that you have to know everything about a subject before you teach it. She allowed her students to teach her certain things about technology that she had never even heard of. I thought that-that was a powerful tool to teaching, learning from your students. This was a video that I thought was cool and made me want to change the way english is taught in most classrooms with just physical books, pens and paper. We should become more hands on in showing our students how to cite sources, use the internet properly and know how to identify whether or not information is outdated or not. This was an awesome video!

Blog Post Assignment #2

Did You Know?

Dr. Strange created a version of Did You Know? for EDM310 students. The video focused mainly on the effectiveness of great teachers in the world. The video informed me of how behind our educators in this country are as opposed to other countries such as China and India. It amazes me to know that chinese students that are just "learners" will be more intellectual by being bilingual and more dominant in the world than the entire population of native English speakers that exist today. The video also talks about the importance of google, and how important and influential technology and computers have become to education and for the entire world. It informs us that our jobs as educators is to prepare our students for jobs that don't even exist yet!

Towards the end of the video Dr. Strange asks "Are you ready to be an educator?". This was a pretty heavy question after being informed of how heavy our job will be to educate the future of our country. This made me question my abilities and finally acknowledge the obligation that we as future educators have to impact the future for this country.


Did You Know 3.0

Did You Know 3.0 is a video created by Karl Fisch and Scott McCleod. This is the original platform video that was used by Dr. Strange as a platform for his very own "Did You Know Video." Did you know 3.0 was a video that talks about all sorts of cool things. This video takes you on a journey of how the world has evolved so quickly with the invention and production of technology. It talks about how when the first text message was sent and how there are more text messages sent per day than people that actually exist on the planet. The video talks about how 25% of India's population has a higher IQ than the entire United States' population. What really shocked me was when the video talked about how most of the information learned during a student attending a 4 year university's freshman and sophomore year will be outdated by the time they graduate. This made me question the whole reason to even be in school for that long if that information is useless now! This video is an eye opener for anyone, not just educators, looking to expand the way they evaluate and look at life and the significance of technology.


Mr Winkles Wakes

Mr Winkles Wakes is a short video about how the world has evolved over 100 years. There is a man, Mr. Winkles, who awakes from a 100 year nap to a world that is all very unfamiliar to him. He travels to a business office that has videos, computers, printers and all of the normal modern technology that has become useful in this century. However, this is all foreign as well as uncomfortable for Mr. Winkles. He then goes to the hospital and realizes that they cant help him either. Finally Mr. Winkles arrives at school. He finds this familiar territory and realizes that students are still learning reading, writing and math just as he remembers.

I thought that this story was a great way of showing people that not everything has to change to remain relevant and effective. Reading, writing and math are all essential subjects that we need to know to learn and grow effectively with technology and wealth. Sometimes consistency is the key to success.

Sir Ken Robinson: The Importance of Education

Sir Ken Robinson spoke about The Importance of Education in this short film. Robinson talked about how education seems to damage a child's imagination and creative abilities. He talks about how education is basically teaching students that making a mistake is one of the worse things that one can do. Robinson goes on to say that mistakes are what make creativity interesting but educators are frightening children into thinking that making mistakes is the ultimate crime.

Robinson also talks about how ironic it is that all around the world the significance of subjects in education are all ranked the same; 1st math, 2nd languages and sciences, 3rd humanities and on the very bottom is the arts with preferences of music first. I found this part of the speech shocking because I had never really thought about how society has dictated and influenced education so much. It seems as if society doesn't see it as a necessity to learn then it isn't listed as a priority in schools. Robinson even goes on to say that educators have seemed to kill dreams if a student focuses on arts instead of math. Sort of telling that student if you aren't good in one of the essential subjects then you wont be successful.

Another point that also stuck out to me in this film was the part about how education is slowly becoming an "inflation." Having a Bachelor's degree is merely a stepping stone to actually becoming what you wanted to be but the ultimate goal is your Ph.D. Overall, this film was a definite eye opener for educators as well as all college students pursuing their dreams. This was a great video!
P.S. Don't ever let anyone tell you that you can't do something.



A Day Made of Glass

A Day Made of Glass is a film that was assigned by Dr. Strange for EDM310 to watch. This film was absolutely fascinating. It was like a glimpse into the future and pretty much how we as educators will be teaching within our own classrooms someday. It shows how technology almost dictates the lives of two young girls through the day. They use these touch sensitive glass tablets to find what they want to wear, listen to music, and express their creativity by changing the templates to pink. The video shows dad using his touch screen sensor to control the dash board within his car. It also shows how technology with the classroom is touch sensitive.

Another thing that was cool about this video was how they informed you of the different types of glass such as fiber optic or weather proof. It also showed the importance of glass within hospitals and Dr.'s offices' when it comes to the latest technology and detecting things accurately and efficiently. This video was uber cool and a neat way to envision the future.