Virtual Frog Dissection

Original Image: "Poor Thing"
Flickr Photo by shouldbecleaning
Released Under An Attribution 2.0 Generic Liscense
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In my TE 401 course, some of my classmates decided to integrate technology into their final lesson by doing a virtual frog dissection. As they presented in class, I realized that this website appeared to be a tool that students could really learn from. Therefore, I decided to spend this week looking more deeply into the contents of this virtual frog dissection.

This website could make a lot of great connections for the kids. For example, it gives them an outline of how the frog's body systems are similar to and different from a human's body system. This allows the children to take the information that they are learning and extend it beyond the frog that they are cutting open in class. The more connections the students can make between the frog's body system and the human's body system, the more they will understand why it is important that they are doing this frog dissection at school.

I also think that it is very valuable that this website portrays pictures, in addition to providing a vocal track that tells you additional information about the pictures. This website then appeals to more than one type of learner. It satisfies both the auditory and visual learner.

If I were using this technology with my class, I would allow them to first watch the introduction. This tells them why frog dissection is important and what commonalities they can expect to see between humans and frogs when they are dissecting. I would then have the students watch the "external anatomy" video. I would tell the students to follow along with the video and see if they can find everything that the video is talking about on their own individual frogs. The students can then watch each part of the virtual frog dissection and complete their own live frog frog dissection along with the video. The video is broken down into a series of shorter videos that describe how to locate each of the frog's body systems. If the students feel that the video is moving too quickly, they can pause it, cut open the frog, look for a particular part of the body system, and then start the video again.

I think that using this video as a tool during the frog dissection would be extremely useful. Every time that I have ever had to do a dissection, the directions were in a paper and pencil format. This is difficult because it is often hard to tell what you are supposed to be looking at, from written directions. Even when there were drawings of the inside of the frog attached, it was difficult to tell if what I was seeing inside the frog was the same as what the arrow was pointing to in the picture. By watching a video of an actual frog dissection while you are in the process of dissecting, you can look at the real frog on the screen and compare it to the frog that you are using in class.

Blogs, Wikis, and Webpages: What's the Difference?

Blogs, wikis, and webpage sites like google or weebly are all excellent resources that teachers can utilize, but each are good for different things. Blogs are a great resource for sharing information with fellow colleges. Blogs are most useful when they are updated on a regular basis because then other individuals will check your blog frequently for new information. Blogs are written by one person, and other people may leave comments on the information that you have posted. They become almost a source of dialogue between the initial blogger and fellow people in the blogosphere. Blogs can be a platform for discussing issues and for sharing information between your network of friends and collegues. I use blogging to find out good sources of technology that I can use in the classroom and also to read about good teaching practices that I might want to implement in the field.

Wikis are a little bit different because it is not simply the creator who posts information and everyone else comments on the information that they posted. Instead, anyone that the creator has authorized to do so can edit the site and add their own information. Therefore wikis would be a great place to have a class website because you could post things like the snack calendar and parents could edit that calendar to tell you when they are planning to bring snack for the class. You could also post good educational websites for children, and parents could add websites to your list as they found them. On wikis, you are all working together to effectively construct a space with useful information. Wikis could also be helpful when working on group projects. One person could post a draft of the project, and all other members of the group would have a chance to look over the project and edit it before it was turned in to the teacher.

Sites like Google and Weebly are great for portfolios because other people are not able to edit these sites. They are simply a platform for displaying information. You would use these tools to create websites where your intention is for the public to view the site but not necessary participate in the process of creating or improving the site. For an online portfolio, you would want an employer to view all of the information that you posted. However, you would have no need for an employer to comment on your Google site because they will ask you any questions that they have during an interview.

Therefore, blogs, websites, and wikis are all great resources that teachers should utilize. However, which form of technology you choose to use will depend upon what your intended purpose for your audience will be.

Wikispaces

Original Image: "Wikispaces"
Flickr Photo by thomcochrane
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The Wiki that I have created is a way for me to communicate with parents outside of my classroom. On it, you will currently find a November snack sign up so that parents may sign up for a day to bring snack for the class during this month, if they choose to do so. Also, you will see that there is another page which has useful internet links for children. These are a variety of educational web pages that I have found that will provide students more practice pertaining to the topics that are covered in class. This practice is presented in a fun and exciting way. The goal of including these websites is to make students want to learn outside of class because it is fun for them. This is something that my six year old cousin's teacher has done on her website, and my cousin really gets into playing these games. As a result, she uses her teacher's website frequently.

I can see a variety of ways that Wikis could be used in the classroom. You could use a wikispace to create a site that will better connect you with parents at home, as I have done. On it, you could post the student's homework each week. Maybe you could post a few exceptional examples of student work on the Wiki each week, with different students being recognized all the time. This would encourage parents to actually check the Wiki frequently because their children would want to show their parents that they were the one selected as an example of exceptional work this week. You could also have parents sign up on the Wiki to help out with events like holiday parties or field trips.

As a teacher, you could also have students set up Wikis to assist them with group projects. This could mean that students post group projects on the wiki and then all the students in the group can have access to the Wiki at all times, continually editing and revamping the assignment until it is due. It could also mean that this is a way for the students to communicate so that they don't have a stream of 50 emails back and forth pertaining to the project. This way all of the information that they need for their group project would all be in one spot.

In one of my deaf education classes, we used the wiki in this way, and it proved to be a very effective technique to ensure collaboration and to keep everyone up to date with what we were working on, especially because our group of colleagues was spread out between Michigan, Maui, and Guam. However, we only took advantage of the Wiki for editing purposes, not for group communication. I think that our group could have been much more effective if we had used the Wiki instead of email for communication. Emailed communication became very difficult because my inbox was soon filled with 50 group emails that were spread out all over my inbox. This made it very difficult to locate and access the emails when I needed to refer to them again. Overall, I think that Wikispaces can have a wide variety of positive impacts in the classroom as long as teachers know how to utilize them!

Bibme.org

If you get a chance, check out Bibme.org! For me, one of the most annoying tasks associated with writing a paper was completing the bibliography or works cited page. However, this site makes the process quick and easy. You simply type in the pertinent information from your book and select APA or MLA. Then the site creates the citations for you. If you don't want to type in the name, author, copyright, etc., you can simply type in the name of the book and the site will find it. You then click on the book and it brings up all the pertinent information for a works cited page for you. You click again and the site adds this information, in the correct order to a running works cited column that it creates on the side of the screen. When you are finished, you can import this information right into a word document. This is a great website that makes citing resources much easier!

Pageflakes

I have recently discovered Pageflakes, and I am really enjoying it. In fact, I like it so much that I have set it as my new homepage. Pageflakes is a website that has different applications that I can tailor to my interests so that when I log on to the internet, links to all of my favorite pages are accessible instantly. For example, on my Pageflakes homepage I have decided to have applications which connect to my gmail, delicious, flickr, facebook, and Google Calendar accounts. I also have applications that show me the weather and movie showtimes for East Lansing. In addition, I have a customized To-Do list, and a calculator. You can also make Pageflakes into your RSS feed so that you have everything in the same location. I have not yet done this because I really like using Bloglines, and transferring over all of my information seemed like quite a daunting task. You can even like pageflakes to your Twitter account if you want to!

One thing that I didn't like about Pageflakes is that you can only link to the applications that it has provided for you. Therefore if there is something that you really enjoy using and you want to put that on your homepage as well, you can't do it unless it's included within choices that Pageflakes gives you. Also, you can only link the mail function to popular email systems. Therefore, I was unable to link it to my MSU mail. Overall though, the positives outweigh the negatives. I love that I can get a lot of information all in one spot as soon as I log onto the internet! I would recommend you check it out, and tell me what you think!

My PLN

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I love my Personal Learning Network because it allows me to easily access information that will be valuable for my profession. One of my favorite tools that I have obtained access to through this course is my RSS feed. I am currently using Bloglines and I couldn't be more satisfied with it. Using this technology allows me to quickly see if anyone that I am following has posted new information. This way I do not waste time searching every blog that I follow to see if new information has been added. One of the features of blogger that I really enjoy is having the ability to put the different blogs that I follow into categorical folders. This way, if I know that I only want to look at blogs related to social studies learning, I can click on that folder and focus on those specific blogs. My RSS feed does not limit me to professional information, but also allows me to follow blogs that fall within my non-academic interests such as sports or deafness.

I have tried to give Twitter a chance, and I do like that everything on twitter is very concise. Therefore I can search through different feeds until I find something that appeals to me. I can then look further into it if there is an article that is tagged within the post. However, I can't get myself into the habit of checking it like I do with my rss feed. I tried to post at least a few times a week during the first half of this course, but I have a hard time because I am longwinded and so I have to constantly think about how I can shorten my message. Over time, I have posted less and less on Twitter and instead posted more on my blog instead because my blog allows me to write as much as I want in one post. Therefore, I don't think that Twitter is something that I will use in the future, after this course.

Overall, I think that developing a Personal Learning Network has really helped me to figure out where to go when I want to find specific types of information. Now, I have a network of colleges, and I feel as though I have sorted through some of the blogs that I didn't like as well, to really find the ones that were the most helpful to me. I can now find information on specific topics more quickly and easily than I have ever been able to in the past.

Grouping Students By Topical Knowledge

My deaf education professor is very excited about grouping students by their topical knowledge. In order to do this, you would need to really know your students well. You would need to ask them questions at the beginning of a unit to establish what kind of notions they already held about the topic that you are teaching. Then you could group students into three groups, the group that knows very little about a particular topic, the group that has a decent amount of knowledge, and the group that knows a lot about the topic. As a teacher you would teach the same topics to all three groups, but each group would learn about the topic in a little bit more depth.

This would also mean that when you were testing the students, each group would be expected to know a different amount about the topic. You can't expect the lower group to know as much by the end of your unit as the highest achieving group, so there would need to be different levels of assessment involved.

There are a few things that I really like about this approach. First of all, it allows teachers to meet all students where they are at. Second, the students will move from group to group based on their topical knowledge. Therefore students will not always stay in the lower achieving group or the highest achieving group all the time. Instead they will bounce around from group to group and learn to work with many different children in your class.

However, there are also a few things that make me hesitant about this approach. It sounds terrific in theory, but I don't know if it would be easy to implement this all the time in the classroom. It would be very time consuming to come up with three different versions of the same lesson for each lesson that you teach. Also, this type of teaching relies heavily on teamwork, and if I was teaching a class of students who didn't work very well together, this approach could be very challenging. Overall though, I do think that the benefits to this type of teaching outweigh the negatives. Therefore, I would definitely utilize this method some, if not most of the time in my own future classroom.

Google Calendar

This week, I decided to explore Google Calendar. I often have a very difficult time with organizational skills. I try using a planner every semester, but often I stop writing in it after the first few weeks of school. For my job, I usually have a lot of small projects going on, so I often write down lists of things that I need to do as I think of them on a scrap piece of paper. However, often because this is just on a piece of loose-leaf paper, I do loose it rather easily.

One of the people that I work with loves using Google calendar, and so I have been wanting to look into this to see if it would assist with my organizational skills. When I sat down and began creating this calendar, I discovered a lot of features that I really liked. First, this calendar has a lot of really intuitive features. For example, for events like classes, it gives you the option of selecting that the event will occur on Monday, Wednessday, Friday, or Tuesday, Thursday. You can also select that the event will happen daily, every other day, weekly, twice a week, etc. That way I don't have to go through and write in Every single time that I have TE 401 manually. My calendar will go through and fill in every class period of TE 401 if I tell it to. I also liked that I could color code my events. Therefore I could pick one color for my work events, one for my school events, and one for extra-curriculars.

One of my favorite features of Google Calendar is that it allows me to create tasks on my calendar. There is also a task list that pops up to the right of my calendar. The tasks have a little box next to them that I can check when I have completed them and Google Calendar will draw a line through the tasks that I have completed. This way I can visually see that I am accomplishing these things.

I think that using this feature of Google could be something that would really help me organizationally, and I might be more apt to use it since I am on my computer a lot for class and work. Also, I wouldn't have to carry around a planner with me at all times. I like that I have the option of accessing my Google Calendar on my phone because I pretty much have my phone on me at all times so it would be easy for me to check my calendar any time that I needed to. I also like that I can have my Google Calendar send me reminders via email or text if I think that I am going to forget to complete a task or go to an event that is on my calendar.

Overall, I think that in my teaching career, this would really help me because I am going to need to be constantly organized in order to have my lessons prepared and ready to go for my students. I will need to remember to grade certain papers and tests so that I can get them back to my students in an efficient time manner. I will also need to remember when parent teacher conferences are and when IEP and professional development meetings will be held. These are all things that Google Calendar could help me with.

I also think that young students may have fun using Google Calendar to learn about how to read and use calenders in their daily lives. I believe that you could really engage students by using this technology to look at phases of the moon. You could also incorporate Google Calendar into math to figure out how many days until the students favorite holiday. Overall, I think that I mostly see using this form of technology for myself as a teacher, but it definitely has applications for my students as well!

Cell Phones in Education

Original Image: "Cell Phone Cameras"
Flickr Photo by Compujeramey
Released Under An Attribution 2.0 Generic Liscense
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This week, I decided to explore cell phones in education. Two of the most interesting resources that I found on this topic were:

Mark Prensky's Article: "What can you do with a cell phone?"
AND The Innovative Educator Blog

I have to admit that before I read these articles, I couldn't really see how cell phones could be beneficial within the classroom. However, over the course of this reading, I learned some really interesting things about cell phones. First, I learned that most cell phones that we are using now are more powerful than the computers that we were using ten years ago! Much of education is not making students memorize as much information as they can. When students are out of school they will be not be merely relying on the information that they learned while they were in it. Instead they will need to know where to find the information that they need. Using their cell phones is one way to do this. Students and adults have their cell phone on them almost all the time so it makes sense that they would use this as a tool for answering their questions. If I need to find out what the capitol of Bolivia is, I can use the texting feature on my phone to text GOOGL, and in about 10 seconds I will have my answer.

I was really surprised to find out that in high school, my roommate used cell phones in her physics class. She was learning about sound waves, pitch, and frequency, and her teacher used a recording device to record the different keys to show that they all had a slightly different pitch. Then they graphed the pitch of the keys and talked about why they were different.

At first, I thought that cell phones in education could only be used at the middle or high school level. However, my roommate also pointed out that her mom is a nurse, and she has had children call her during their class for a project where they were practicing using the phone, communicating back and forth using this medium, and asking questions to obtain information. The children had to write their questions before they made the phone call. They also had to practice taking her address so that they could send her a brochure. This is a really neat use of cell phones because everyone has to use the phone frequently throughout their life. Therefore these children are having the opportunity to obtain and practice this life skill.

Some other really cool ideas that I read about for using cell phones in education were using them to poll student's responses,locate definitions, find currency conversions, look up math equations, locate language translations, read news articles and current events, use google maps and the GPS feature on different cell phones, use the digital camera feature for classroom projects and presentations, record a particularly interesting lecture to share with others or listen to again, and to educate students on the appropriate social use of cell phones. I learned a lot from these articles, and I would highly recommend that you check them out too if you are at all interested in this topic!

Positive Features of Blogger

There is one feature in particular that I LOVE about blogger. I can't tell you how many times I have been thankful that it automatically saves my work every few minutes as I type it. A few minutes ago, I accidentally clicked out of a post that I was working on. For me, it is one of the most frustrating things I can think of to be almost done with a project on the computer, when you lose the information that you are working on and have to start all over again. Unfortunately this is something that happens to me more often than it should. However, with blogger, I can just go into my recent history and find the exact document that I was working on and keep typing.

Neat Science Experiments!

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Flickr Photo by Andrew Huff
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This is a neat blog that I found that describes some cool science experiments that you can do with elementary school students. They are all hands on activities that I think that students would really enjoy such as creating a volcano. I believe that these experiments would fit really well into the GLCES for each grade. It also describes why science fair experiments are beneficial to students. Check it out if you have the time!

Retracting Recess Privlidges

Original Image: "Ryerson Public School Playground"
Flickr Photo by Striatic
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One management technique that I have observed many teachers using in their classrooms is taking away time from recess when students are misbehaving. Often the teacher will not say anything to the students. She will simply walk over to the board and erase a minute from the recess tally in the corner of the board. This usually gets the student's attention and they all quickly become silent. Although this tactic achieves the desired results short term, I don't think that it is a very effective management technique. Children need their recess time to burn off some of their energy so that they can refocus themselves and concentrate again in the afternoon. If children are misbehaving, they probably need their recess time even more because they are being forced to focus all day long and they simply need a mental break. Also, by cutting down on recess time, we are punishing all the students when it may not be every child in the room who was misbehaving. What do you think? Have you ever experienced this in your field placement? Is it ever an effective strategy?

PLEASE READ: Deaf Education Program at MSU

This week, I decided to write about an education topic that has been personally upsetting to me. As some of you may know, due to budget cuts, they have decided to eliminate the deaf ed major at MSU. However, we are one of only two programs in the entire state of Michigan to educate teachers of the deaf. The other program, at Eastern Michigan, only focuses on teaching children in an Auditory Oral setting. However, there are many other deaf children who are educated in Total Communication, SimCom, and mainstreamed settings, etc. In state teachers will not have the option to teach in a Bilingual/Bicultural setting, and out of state teachers will be highly unlikely to move into our state, which has one of the lowest economies an highest unemployment rates in the entire United States. Where will the teachers of these children be educated? All children deserve qualified teachers.

These are the children that are already behind when the reach elementary school. Without qualified teachers, they are going to be victims of the system, continuously falling behind because of their teacher's lack of education about how to teach them. I worry that if we have a lack of teachers in these types of settings, eventually anyone will be able to get their deaf education certification, simply by taking a test. This would be a shame for the children who are counting on educated teachers to assist them and to recognize and address their needs. No Child Left Behind maintains that we need to have Highly Qualified Teachers!

In addition, MSU has just revamped their deaf education program in order to better prepare teachers for the type of setting that they would like to work in. As a teacher you can follow one of three tracks, Bilingual/Bicultural track, itinerant/consulting teacher, and Auditory/Oral. We are in the first year of this new program, and it seems like a shame that we will have to get rid of it before it even kicks into full swing.

There has been an extremely large outpouring of support from colleagues around the nation on this topic. Everyone is trying to figure out what they can do to make a difference. So far, I know that there is a petition that can be found on the "Keep Deaf-Ed Major at MSU" facebook group. There is also a letter writing campaign going on to the dean, Dr. Carole Ames (cames@msu.edu). Thanks for taking the time to read this. As you can see, it is an issue that I am extremely passionate about. Anything that you can do would be appreciated, even if its just joining the facebook group or signing the petition. We have to do everything that we can to try to make it so that this program is not canceled.

Everyone is a Star: Digital Storytelling

This is a lesson that I would present to the children at the beginning of the year. It would present an excellent opportunity for me to get to know my students and for my new students to get to know me. I would have the students complete a digital story that falls under the category "Everyone is a star." I would explain to the students that everyone is a star because they are all unique. Everyone has special talents and abilities, and I want the students to each have a chance to showcase their talents for their classmates and for me. Therefore I will give the children some time to create a digital story that tells me why they are a star. The more that I know about my students individually, the more that I can cater my lessons to their interests in order to captivate my student's attention and encourage them to see the material that I am teaching as relevant to their lives. I want my students to want to learn.

I would present the digital story below for the students so that they have an idea of what I am expecting from them before they begin this project. This would also give the students a chance to get to know me, and what I like to do a little bit better. This would also be a chance to have children in the lower elementary grades practice their writing skills in a more enticing way than the traditional pen and paper format. I think that children will be more eager to complete this assignment if they get to use some of their creativity to produce a digital end product. Students could either use their own pictures, or find pictures on the web to use for this project.

I used slide to create this digital story. I loved this technology because it was so easy to use. There are explicit buttons for uploading pictures from different sources. After I chose the pictures, I just went down the line, through the steps of adding transitions, backgrounds, music, titles, and words. After I chose the music, Slide automatically added the copyright information to the digital story. The only thing that I didn't like about this technology was that I couldn't figure out how to create a blank slide. I wanted to have the title read, "Everyone is a star." I originally intended to follow this with a blank slide that said, "I am a star because..." I would then go through all of the pictures and captions that described me, and end with another blank slide that said, "What makes you a star?" However, since I couldn't figure out how to add blank slides instead of ones with pictures, I had to revamp my plan a little bit.

Also, in this slideshow, I used my own pictures. However, I wanted to ask those of you who are reading this: if I had used pictures that I pulled off of Creative Commons, where would you suggest that I put the copyright information? Do I put that right in the PowerPoint with the digital story information, or do I add it as an appendix on my blog, but not in the PowerPoint? What are your thoughts?

Wi-Fi

Original Image: "wi-fi"
Flickr Photo by Palagret
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I was told a really interesting thing by one of my colleges today. She said that she found out that if you are using public wi-fi, whether it is in a cafe or at home without a protected password, it is very easy for anyone (with the knowledge and skills to do this) to hack into your computer and view the same thing that you are viewing. This means that if you put passwords into online banking statements, email, etc., it becomes easy enough for another person to find out these passwords and save them. After hearing this, I will make a commitment to being much more careful with the types of things that I do using public wi-fi.

PowerPoint Presentation

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This weekend, I went to a conference where the keynote speakers presented using a PowerPoint. During this presentation, I truly realized the application of the Beyond Bullet Points reading. Nearly everything that the presenters said was also scripted on the PowerPoint, which was very visually overwhelming for me as an audience member. Also, sometimes there was so much information on the screen that the text needed to be very small. I was in the second row of the auditorium and I often had a hard time reading the screen. In addition, the background of the PowerPoint was black, and the presenters highlighted text by changing it from white to violet or dark blue. This meant that there wasn't a lot of contrast between the highlighted text and the background color, making it very difficult to read.

However, one thing that that I did really like that these presenters included was video clips from popular movies which were relevant to the presenter's topic. These caught my attention and refocused it on the topic at hand. Now I have a much better understanding of why it is important to structure PowerPoints in a way that is condusive the the learner and not just convenient to the presenter!

Benefits of Skype for Deaf Children

Original Image: "Kurt entertaining via Skype"
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My deaf education professor is always telling us that for children, the problem with deafness is not a lack of hearing, but rather an abundance of isolation. Especially for kids who sign, their time in school may be the only opportunity that they have to talk to other people in their own native language. Most parents of deaf children do not know sign language, and the other children and adults on their block would not be familiar with it either. Even in school, if a child is mainstreamed, the only person that he may be able to directly talk to could be the interpreter in the classroom. This isn't giving the child a lot of time to interact with children that are his own age.

One way that this can be combated is through the use of Skype or ivisit. These features could allow the child to work on their homework or simply chat with another deaf child who may not be close enough to physically see the child in my class each day. Imagine that this child now has someone to interact with, instead of having very little communication during his time outside of school.

It isn't an ideal situation, but using this technology to foster communication would be making progress in the right direction for that child. The only thing that I worry about when using Skype in this type of capacity is that if you have two children talking to eachother at home, where the teacher cannot easily monitor the conversation, you might get into instances of one child bullying another.In this instance, the teacher may never find out about this. Do any of you think that this would be an issue? If so, how do you think that we could combat it?

Within the context of the classroom, it would also be really neat if I was working on a weather unit, and we could Skype in with a deaf classroom in Florida for five minutes a day. I could have one of the children ask them what their weather was like. We could then make a graph of the weather in Florida versus the weather in Michigan over a certain period of time. This would teach the children social skills and show them that learning transcends subjects. This could be both a math and science lesson. In addition, you could add in geography. For example, I could teach the students map skills by showing them where Florida was, and where in Florida these children lived. We could also calculate how far this classroom was from our own through the use of maps.

Check Out This Slideshare Presentation

I think that it is a really cool idea to add audio to this powerpoint. That way, students who miss class, need extra reinforcement, or forget something that you said in class can come back to this PowerPoint at a different time and review it. However, I found adding my voice to be very difficult. I do not have a microphone on my computer so I was unable to add sound. Therefore, I borrowed my roommate's computer, which is a Mac and saves all audio recordings to to an M4a file. However, in order to upload sound files onto slideshare, they need to be in an MP3 format. Therefore, I enlisted my roommate and her brother to help me figure out how to convert the file. They played around with it for an hour and a half until we finally figured out how to do it. On the bright side, I learned that you can go to the website zamzar.com to transfer a M4a file to an MP3 file, and they will email you the new file. Although the end product turned out pretty well, I'm not sure that the experience that I had trying to figure out how to add the vocals was worth it. I probably would not use this technology again, at least not on a Mac. I'm still not really sure how we finally got the files converted and uploaded, and I don't know if I could duplicate the effort if I had to do it again. I also don't really like listening to myself talk online. I always feel like is sound a lot different than I intended to. Also, the sound quality is not perfect. There are a few crackly spots where I recorded over something that I had already said. Therefore, I have mixed feelings about this type of technology.

Cleaning Your Ear Molds

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Personal Learning Network

So far, I think that my personal learning network utilizes a lot of great tools. I love being able to read about what other students are learning in their classrooms and their field placements. I feel like a great deal of what they are learning is really relevant to me, but they are not necessarily topics that I've thought about before or heard about from my teachers. I love when someone writes a topic on their blog that is more contraversial, and I have the opportunity to read multiple different people's opinions about the topic. I feel like I can really learn the most when I have the chance to see both sides of an issue. However, potential drawbacks to this are that it can be difficult to keep up with posting in a blog, twitter, webpage, etc. We all have busy lives and I feel like it would be easy to let updating my PLN slip by the wayside. Also, it's really easy to read someone's comment and to think that you will respond to them later, and all of a sudden, a whole week has gone by and you are just remembering to respond to their post. By that time, however, they probably aren't checking back anymore to see if you responded, and you have lost their interest from the initial post.

However, tools like the RSS feed are really helpful to ensure that you don't get bogged down in the time that it takes to check multiple blogs, several times a week. This tool allows me to go to one place and easily see if any particular blog that I follow has updated their feed since the last time that I checked. If they haven't, I will know quickly, and I won't waste my time traveling to their blog page. Also, tools such as tweetdeck do the same thing for twitter and facebook. It allows me to quickly see the updates since the last time that I visited either of those two website, without having to sift through information that I already have read. Also, it allows me to sort out new tweets, pictures, status updates, etc. so that I can quickly focus on exactly what I am looking for. These features do help save a tremendous amount of time.

I think that I would prefer to read less blogs, more frequently than read a huge number of educational blogs. It seems much more overwhelming to remember to check a lot of different places. Therefore I think that it is much more beneficial to find a few blogs that I enjoy and check them more often. As far as following educational blogs on twitter, I have found that most of the ones that I have chosen are okay, but I have had to sift through a lot of information that wasn't that useful. For every piece of really good information that I found from a tweet, I had about seven other pieces of information that I looked into but didn't really think was valuable. However, the one thing that I do really like about giving and receiving information on twitter is that the posts are very short, and thus quick and easy to read and write. Therefore, the amount of time that I spend on twitter at any one moment in time is very minimal, and thus I don't find it to be as time consuming as blogging. Therefore, I think that the PLN is a great tool for exchanging information and learning good information related to teaching and technology from my peers and experts on the internet. The only problem seems to be the time needed to stay on top of it. However, tools like RSS readers and Tweetdeck do aid in making the upkeep more manageable.

PowerPoint Presentation: Cleaning Your Ear Molds

I liked this activity because it gave me the chance to play around with Google Docs a little bit more than I was able to last week. I chose to create my powerpoint on Google Docs because it is always much easier to use technology that I am already familiar with. In addition, I prefer having as much information as possible stored in one spot. Therefore, the idea that I can go to one site and get my resume, my powerpoint, etc. is much more appealing than having to travel to several different types of sites to access different documents that I have created.

I chose to do my presentation on cleaning the ear-mold portion of the hearing aid because this is something that my students will need to become familiar with. Often parents clean children's ear-molds for them because it is easier and faster for the parent to do it than for them to wait for the child to figure it out. However, being able to take care of their equipment will give these children a sense of responsibility. In addition, it isn't always something that their parents will be able to do for them. Eventually they will need to be responsible for the cleaning, and school is a great environment for students to practice this and learn the proper way to clean their ear-molds without damaging them. This is one of the many skills that deaf and hard of hearing children need to learn in order to become independent individuals!

Publicity through Technology

Original Image: "[Paper]tiger James {Explored}"
Flickr Photo by Shot_by_Cam's Photostream
Released Under An Attribution 2.0 Generic Liscense
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

For my job, I work on planning events for the University Activities Board. The next event that my committee is putting on, is the Rudy Currence concert, with special Guest Sunny Side up. This event will take place on Friday, October 23. The concert begins at 9:00 at the International Center, and doors will open at 8:30. Rudy Currence is R&B style singer who has written songs for Mya and has a song on the Minority Report soundtrack. Sunnyside Up, on the other hand, is an acoustic Indie-Pop duo, formed by Michigan State students.

Now that I have told you a little bit about the event, I would like to tell you why technology has made publicizing this event so much easier. We now have a UAB twitter and facebook page that will present information about this event. The facebook page, not only allows me to invite my friends to the event, but it also allows all of them to invite their friends, sending the invitation out to a much wider range of people than I could do by myself. Twitter essentially does the same thing by allowing anyone who gets our tweets to retweat the information to their friends.

We also have a UAB email listserv, which gets sent out once a week on Mondays. This allows those individuals who are on our email list to see the events for the upcoming week, with a little blurb about each event, and decide which ones they think that they might be interested in participating in.

In addition, I have learned to use Publisher to create posters that can be printed and posted around campus to pique the attention of students in the residence halls and on their way to class. We also use computer software to create the table tents that are placed on the tables in the cafeterias, in order to inform students of what events are taking place on campus each week.

Finally, we have a webpage that students can visit to get this information: uabevents.com. Using all of these different facets of media, we are able to use technology to get information out to a much broader group of studens. However, all of these ways of getting the word out involve computers, either to send out information over the web, or to design hard copies of posters and signs that will be distributed around campus. Therefore, it would be very difficult to reach such a large population of students without the use of technology!

Google Docs

Original Image: "The duckies invade Google"
Flickr Photo by Yodel Anecdotal's Photostream
Released Under An Attribution 2.0 Generic Liscense
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en


I think that google docs could be a really exciting piece of technology to use in my future classroom. It would be an excellent way to work on the writing process. For example, students in the classroom could post their prewriting, and then their first draft of their papers or stories that they are writing. Then other students could view these documents and add their own comments about what they think would make their peer's writing better. This would mean that students could be working on these projects at any point during the day, even outside of the classroom, because they would always have access to their peer's work.

I love the idea of students being able to collaborate on a piece of writing. In this way, through the use of google docs, two students could be writing a story together. For instance, they could each write alternate endings to a story, and, on the document itself, they could have a conversation about which ending they wanted to use and why.

This would also be a great tool for teamwork because the teacher can see who is posting what material and when. This can help the teacher to monitor that every student is pulling their own weight. However, I do think that it is important for teachers to be constantly monitoring student's work while they are using google docs. Because students can post whatever they want to the internet using this feature, it would be easy for them to tear down another student's work, and that is not a way that this technology should be used in the classroom.

Also, before teachers allow students to collaborate through the use of Google Docs in the classroom, they might want to have a conversation with their students about how to give good feedback and constructive criticism. It is always easier to tear someone down if you don't have to look at them face to face. Instead, you just have to type something on to the web. That is the one precaution that I would want to take when using google docs.

Breakfast for All Students Program

Original Image: "Breakfast"
Flickr Photo By Malia's Photostream
Released Under An Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic Liscense
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/deed.en

At my placement for TE 401, my teacher was telling us about a new program where every child recieves breakfast each morning. She was unhappy because there is already an extremely low amount of time that students are actually being educated in academics during the year, once you take out specials like gym, art, library, etc. This program would take out another half hour every morning from the time that is allotted for teachers to teach their own curriculum throughout the day. When you add up a half an hour, every day, for an entire year, this is a lot of time that could be spent teaching one of the core subject areas.

I understand this outlook, but I can also see the other side of the argument. Food is one of student's most basic needs. Many of these children do not come from the best homes, and they may not be getting breakfast before they are sent off to school. If a child comes to school without their most basic needs being met, how can we expect them to function for an entire school day, and put forth their best effort? I think that we need to tend to children's most basic needs before we can move on to teaching them.

Also, it seems like there could be a way to be productive while letting the children eat their breakfast. For example, my teacher reads a story to the students every day when they return from lunch. Maybe she could use the time while the students are eating to read this story, and she could use that time after lunch to tend to other academic matters. What are your opinions on this issue?

Google Earth

Original Image: "NIN Tour on Google Earth"
Flickr Photo By Nine Inch Nails Official's Photostream
Released Under An Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Liscense
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

I have never really had the chance to play around with Google Earth before, and as a result, I always thought that it was just a fun application. I never really considered that it may have some technological relevance in the classroom. However, now I can see that there are endless ways that google earth can be used to enhance classroom learning.

In the most basic way, if you were teaching young students about their community, you could pull up an interactive map of the community in which students could move the cursor around and see the different buildings that can be found in their community such as their own house, the supermarket, their school, etc. Students can even travel back in time to see what their community looked like in the past.

However, Google Earth is no longer just limited to viewing the earth. If you were learning about the moon, for example, Google Earth would be a great tool to suppliment what you were teaching children in the classroom. Imagine if you could give students homework that was to go play on Google Earth on their computer. This is something that is interactive and fun. If students enjoy the homework that you are giving them, then you aren't going to have to fight them every day about doing completing it.

The moon feature of Google Earth is really cool because you can explore the moon with real planning charts that were used during the Appolo missions. You can also see all of the artifacts that humans have left on the moon, and view the spacecrafts that we have sent there. You can even zoom in to see any of the Appolo landing sites on the moon. Once you arrive there you can see real video of Neil Armstrong on the moon and actual photographs taken by astronauts themselves. Obviously, most of your students will never have the chance to travel to the moon, but using this technology they can see what the surface of the moon looks like right from the comfort of their own classroom. I think that this would make the moon more realistic for my students. Otherwise it may be difficult for students to make connections with something that they have only seen at a very far distance in the night's sky. Similarly, if you are learning about space in your classroom, you can use Google Earth to explore stars, the Milky Way, and other locations within our universe.

There are also some really cool features of Google Earth that teachers might want to use with your students if they are learning about Mars. For example, students can see what Mars looks like today, but they can also go back in time and see maps of what early scientists thought that mars looked like. They can then compare and contrast what we know about Mars today to what we thought that we knew about Mars in the past. Students can also follow the path of the rover, Opportunity, which is still on Mars today. This is great if you are teaching your students about different space missions that NASA has been involved in. What I love about this tool is that if you want to learn more, you can click on the travelers guide icons, and an information box will pop up to give you more in depth information about what you are viewing. Children can also look at high-resolution photos that have been taken by NASA spacecrafts as recently as a few hours ago. Picture like these are tools that will engage student learning, and you would be hard pressed to find such up to date information on any other website.

The oceans are another science topic that Google Earth could assist in learning. This section includes National Geographic videos of the ocean, and videos of Cuusteau's torch-lit journey through the ocean. Students can also learn about sea creatures that live in particular parts of the ocean, and take quizes to assess their knowledge of what they already know about particular aspects of the ocean. Children can follow the path of an actual whale-shark or take a look at the Marienna Trench, which is one of the deepest spots in the ocean.

Finally, if you were taking students on a class trip, this could be a very useful tool to use. For example, before we went to Washington D.C. in eighth grade, we could have viewed different 3-D images of the White House or the Pentagon. My high school foreign language class took a trip to Europe our senior year, and it would have been really cool to have taken some 3-D tours of the city that we were going to or some of the historical buildings that we would be seeing. This would have given us a way to get our feet wet, and to get excited about the trip. In addition, it woul have given us a better idea of what to expect, before the trip.

I believe that Google Earth has so many applications in the classroom because you can use it in its most basic form for younger children, or you can explore its more complex functions when the children grow older and the topics that they are learning also become more complex. The last feature of this program that I found really was that students have the ability to label and record the places that they have traveled within Google Earth. Students can then take the experiences that they are learning about in the classroom home, in order to show their parents, and they can be proud of what they are learning in school.

In order to use this technology, I, as a teacher would need to understand how it works, in order to teach my students how to use it. I would then need to narrow down the content area so that I knew if I would be using the ocean application, the moon application, etc. I wouldn't want to overwhelm my students with all of the information that I just presented above at once. In addition, I would need to have knowledge of the content area because I need to be able to answer my student's question about the content that they are seeing on screen, and also because I need to be able to evaluate that all of the information that they are gathering from Google Earth is accurate. Finally, I need to know how to teach this content knowledge because I cannot solely rely on technology to teach my children a specific subject. It can supplement the learning process, but technology cannot be responsible for being the entire teacher on a particular subject.

OIC Movies

I recently found this great website called OIC Movies. It is basically a television channel that uses ASL as the main form of communication. This would be an excellent website to introduce to a deaf child who signs. Most of you who are reading this are probably thinking, "I'm a general education teacher. I'll never have a deaf child in my classroom." However, over 90% of deaf children are now being mainstreamed so there is a good likelyhood that you might have a deaf child in your classroom.

Often children in deaf classrooms use Signed English, which is similar to ASL, but uses a lot of different signs and a very different word order. Therefore, by showing children videos using ASL, you can familiarize them with the langague that they will be encountering for the rest of their lives and not simply the "school language."

This website has news, entertainment, money, health, tech and science, travel, public service, and opinion channels. Therefore, no matter what your children's interests are, there is something there that might appeal to them. Imagine if you could give a deaf child homework that was to go home and watch a science show in their own first language. I am a firm believer that you need to make homework interesting, relatable, and relevant to students. It is only then that you are going to be able to engage students in learning the material that you are presenting them with.

Idea.ed.gov

Today in my deaf education class, my teacher suggested the idea.ed.gov website to us. It talks about statewide and district wide assessments, early intervention, evaluation and reevaluation, funding, highly qualified teachers, etc. What I really liked about this website is that we all have enough reading to do for class, and the last thing that we want to do is a little extra reading on legislature or requirements for special educators. However, this webpage is great because it has a variety of videos that you can watch if you are really interested in these topics but don't want to take the time or energy to read about them. The link that I have provided takes you to a really cool video called "Individualized Education Plan (IEP)- Changes in Initial Evaluation and Reevaluation." This talks about implementing the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), and creating an effective IEP for your students.

Because the parents, the general education teacher, the special education teacher or provider, speech therepists, audiologists, etc. are all expected to be part of the IEP meetings, it is not impossible to think that most of us in this class will be involved in an IEP meeting at some point in our teaching career. Therefore it is important to know what will be expected of us as educators when creating an IEP. Teachers also can look at how we can create the most effective IEP for a child in this type of collaborative setting.

In my CEP 436 class today, I also learned that many teachers are encouraged to make the goals in a student's IEP as broad as possible. That way, parents cannot really gage whether or not the students have met the goals that they were expected to meet by the end of the school year. This is simply not right. As educators, we should expect more out of ourselves and our students. We should set measurable, attainable goals, and we should be constantly monitoring to see that the students are achieving these goals. If they are not, then we need to look at restructuring our teaching style to better fit the needs of the student, instead of making the goals so broad that we can't really tell if the children have met them or not.

Hands and Voices: The Pop-Up IEP

Hands and voices is a really neat website for deaf educators, and especially parents of deaf children, because it attempts to give fair and unbiased information about hearing loss. There are two other websites that are well known for their credible information, but they are definately biased towards a particular way of teaching deaf children. AG Bell is the website that you can go to for the Auditory Oral method of teaching, and the American Annals of the Deaf is the website that you can go to for a signing approach to teaching.

I know that no one else in this class is a deaf education major, but it is a very real possibility that some of you may have hard of hearing or deaf children in your general education classrooms because The trend towards inclusion of these kids is steadily increasing. In fact, about 90% of deaf children are now being educated in the genera education classrooms.

There is a particular page that I would like to highight on the Hands and Voices website. It is called "The Pop-Up IEP." Often when parents try to advocate for their chid in IEP meetings, they are met with obstinance from schools. Schools may say something like, "Sorry...we don't have the money," "We're not convinced that your child needs that," or "You must be in denial, your expectations are too high for your child." This web page includes a table with many of these common answers inside of it. The parent can then click on these phrases, and they are taken to another page where they can see what the school is required by law to do for them, in each of these different cases.

Many teachers, and especially principals and administrators, don't want the parents at their school to have access to websites like this. Sometimes, it is hard for schools to provide special education students with everything that they need, especially when the school has limited funds and a lot of other children to educate. Therefore, if they can get by, taking the easier or cheaper route with a child, then they are going to try to do that. However, it is imperative that parents are well educated advocates for their children. They know what is best for their child, and they need to be able to demand that the school provides everything that the law says that it should. Although it may make the teacher's job more difficult, it is important to undersand that what that IEP will be doing for the child in the long run will outweigh any difficulties that the teacher might experience.

netTrekker

I have just started using netTrekker through Michigan LearnPort Website, and I love it. It was introduced to me by my deaf education professor, and it is an excellent resource for teachers. It allows you to look at the state standards for many different states as they relate to each subject.

You can also search for lesson plans that have been written by skilled teachers. In addition, you can sift through the lesson plans by grade and subject. There is also a rating underneath each of the lessons to tell you how valuable other teachers who have used them have found them to be. In addition, there is a section where you can search for photos to use in your classroom. This is great because it will only give you pictures that would be appropriate to use in your classroom, unlike a google or yahoo search engine. For example, if you were to use google images to look for a picture of a screw, you may end up with some very different images. However, using netTrecker, you would be able to find exactly what you were looking for without any of the inappropriate pictures.

As an intern and a first year teacher, I think that this website will come in especially handy because it will be very time consuming to come up with all of my own lessons from scratch to teach every day. This website is a place were I can find quality information without haveing to search all over the internet! The website is so well organized that it makes it quick and easy to locate the information that I am looking for.

Twitter

I'm still not sure how I feel about Twitter. I kind of think that it's overkill to hear about what everyone is doing every minute of every day. Also, I am a very long winded person, and whenever I try to write in the text box, my message is always just a few characters too long. Therefore, I always end up trying to figure out how to shorten it without writing in shorthand.

However, when am reading messages, I do appreciate the brevity of them. I feel like in college classes, we often get bogged down with reading, and its nice to get the main idea from posts that are only a sentance or two long. Often, if I want to know more about a specific post, there is a link to a website where I can get more information. However, if I am not interested, I will know right away not to click on the link from that post.

I also like following some of the educational posts because it forces me to be constantly thinking about what I can do to make myself a better teacher. However, some of the tweets that I have been following are not very good. For example, I'm not a fan of the k3teachers twitter account. All of the posts catch my attention with their topics, but when I actually click on the attached link, it's never very informative. For example, I was excited when I saw a link to songs that are good for lower elementary teachers to use in their classrooms. However, when I clicked on the link, it was mostly camp songs, and those are not really relevant for the classroom. Another post was about good Iphone applications for children. The article that it was linked with suggested that as a parent, you get several applications for your Iphone so that when your child is bord at the grocery store, you can give them your iphone to play with. First of all, I'm not sure how I feel about using technology as a babysitter, and second I don't really know how this relates to teaching. Therefore, its taking me some time to sift through which educational tweets I find relevant, and which ones I should disgard.

Overall, I am still unsure about how I feel about twitter. I can see how it can be a good educational tool, but I don't know if I will continue to use it after this class is over. In addition, I don't think that I will ever really use it as a type of social medium.

My Ireland Slide Show

I hope that you enjoy my slide show. All of the pictures that I included were taken on my study abroad in Ireland. I had a lot of fun playing around with the picnik editing features. The only thing that frustrated me was that there were a bunch of features that I couldn't access without an upgrade. I kept trying them, and deciding that I really liked a particular feature and then when I went to save it, I realized that I couldn't because I didn't have the upgrade. Usually, I sit at the store forever, editing my photos. I think that this website will come in extremely handy because I can edit my pictures from home, and I won't need to spend hours at the store trying to crop my pictures, remove the red eye, etc. I will definately use this website in the future. I also think that It's great that I can save my pictures to Flickr, which will allow me to free up some space on my computer and my digital camera.

Screenshots

I love having the ability to create screen-shots. I have never realized that this was an option before, and it is much simplier than I thought it would be to create one. I think this will be very helpful in this class, especially, because I often have questions about what I am seeing onscreen. However, it is extremely difficult to ask others my questions when they do not have the ability to view what I am seeing. Also, I can draw arrows and insert text in order to point out to others exactly what the problem area is. This is a really neat feature!

Creative Commons And Media Use

How can I use this image in my future classroom?
If I can find a job in the lower elementary grades, then I would love to teach younger children. At some point, these children will need to learn the different continents. After we have talked a little bit about them, I could ask the children to use this image to point out to me the location of each continent. This way, I could assess their knowledge and see if they are really understanding the message that I am trying to teach to them.

Original Image: "World Map 3D"
Flickr Photo By kcp4911
Released Under An Attribution 2.0 Generic Liscense
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

Also here is a link to my flicker page!

Technology: A Help or a Hindrance

In so many settings, I have seen technology make our lives easier. For example, at the summer camp that I work at, we have computers in the main lodge. Originally, I couldn't see the purpose of having computers for campers to use. Couldn't they unplug themselves for their week's stay at camp? However, eventually I found these computers to be very helpful, especially when I had homesick campers, toward the end of each week. If they were worried that their parents wouldn't get the letter that they had written before camp was over, I could suggest that they emailed their parents. In addition, we would get an almost instantaneous response from their parents, instead of having to wait a few days for the mail to arrive. This was often much more comforting to the children, and also made my job a lot easier. Another example of useful technology is exemplified through my cell phone. I love getting emails on my phone because it saves me from having to log onto the internet several times a day in order to check my mail. In addition, it also allows me to respond to my friends, coworkers, and classmates very quickly.

However, on the flip side of the coin, we have become so accustomed to depending upon technology that when it doesn't work it is very frustrating and often debilitating. For example, most of my classes are set up so that all of our homework is on angel. Therefore, when angel is down, it is nearly impossible for me to get any homework done. This is not only frustrating, but it causes me to easily fall behind on my homework. In another instance, I rely on video chat on my computer to communicate with my classmates in Maui and Guam for a project for my Deaf Education class. When we logged online last night and couldn't locate eachother, none of us knew what to do. By the end, we were all frustrated because we had spent an hour trying to find one another and worked on very little of the actual project itself. Therefore, although technology makes our lives a lot easier, we have come to rely upon it so heavily that when it doesn't work, it can also make our lives much more hectic.

Teach Science For All Blog

I found the "Science for All" blog to be very interesting. The link for this blog is http://teachscience4all.wordpress.com/, incase you wanted to view it. Science, in itself, is very interactive in nature because so much of science is based on our own observations about the world around us and our experiences. However, this blog shows teachers how they can make even the bookwork and memorization part of science interesting. It includes science themed rap songs, which I think is an excellent idea for upper grade students. Everyone can recite the lyrics to their favorite song, but not everyone can tell you how far the earth is away from the sun. However, by putting information that students need to know to a catchy beat, these students are more likely to remember and retain what they are leaning in school.

You can also view a really interesting video about a retired astronaut who now works with children on understanding science, and making it interesting and relevant to them. One way that he does this is by working at a space themed miniature golf course, where each hole contains a mini lesson about space. Before you putt each hole, you learn about escape velocity, anti-gravity, etc., and how well you address these concepts determines how successful you will be at putting the ball in the hole. This is a really cool way to make learning fun for students. It combines a recreational activity that we already know that students like to do, with a learning experience. The only concern with this tactic that I forsee is that there would need to be a facilitator there all the time, because otherwise students may skim over all of the information at each hole and simply play the game like regular miniature golf.

Response to New York Times Article

I read a really interesting New York Times article today. If you would like to take a look at it, you can find it at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/education/05charter.html?_r=1&em. Essentially, the article was talking about a new experimental teaching philosophy. A school was opened up in New York where eight teachers who have been selected through a strict interview and observation process will teach. These teachers are considered to be the best of the best. The school is based on the idea that innovative teachers, not technology or small classroom sizes are the key to student success.

As a reward for good teaching, these educators will be paid two and a half times as much as the average teacher. The school will be using public money for everthing except for the lease for the school building. However, because of the large salaries allocated to teachers, there will be cutbacks in other areas. For example, there will be no assistant principle, and teachers will have responsibilities that will extend beyond that of the traditional classroom teacher. For example, there will be no substitute teachers, except for when teachers take extended leaves of absence. Teacher coaches will not exist, and these teachers will not only have to work longer days, but also will work more days throughout the year. In addition, class sizes at this school will be large, averaging about 30 students per class.

I was wondering what you thought about the theory of education at this school. I feel like with all the extra strain put on these teachers, there might be a higer burn out rate at this type of school. Also, although I too believe that the most important factor in student success is the quality of the teacher, I think that classroom size and availability of technology will have an impact in every teacher's classroom. Even the best teachers are only one person and thus can only handle so many children on their own. Do you think that paying teachers more and making them go through a stringent screening process is the best way to attract qualified teachers? Do you think that public funds should pay for these teachers inflated salaries, when other items and positions within the school (such as technology, administrators, coaches, and substitute teachers) are being eliminated?

Assigned Blog Week 3

I have seen technology be very helpful in many of my college classes. For example, in TE 401 this week, we took a field trip to the MSU Children's gardens, and I was amazed at how much technology was integrated into that experience. When children come to visit these gardens on field trips, each of them are given a camera to take pictures of all of their favorite parts of the garden. What our guide told us was that there is no point in taking pictures if you are never going to do anything with them. Therefore, he uploads all of these pictures online so that the kids can view them, show their family and friends, and even print them off if they choose to.

It is also extremely important to the staff at the children's gardens to make the children feel connected, even in between their visits there. Therefore, every class that goes to the gardens has their own website called the "Wonderwall" where they can post science related questions, and expect answers to their questions to be posted within 24 hours. The children can also draw pictures to place on the wonderwall, and when there is more than one person in class on the wonderwall at once, the students can crash their lightning shaped cursors together in order to create thunder. Combining all of these elements makes this a fun program for the children, that they will want to come back to again and again. However, before the children are allowed to use this site, their teachers have to talk to them about the site being a privlidge. If any of the students post anything inappropriate, then their whole class will lose the privlige of using the website within about five minutes of the post being submitted, and their teacher will recieve a phone call about the student's inappropriate behavior.

There are two things that struck me about the technology that the children's garden is employing. The first was that they are very trusting of children. They gave the kids digital cameras to play with and allowed them to poste whatever they want on the wonderwall, trusting that the children would act responsibly. What I have observed is that when they give children these responsibilities, the students do not take them lightly. No elementary student has ever broken one of the digital cameras at the 4-H Children's Gardens, and there have only ever been two incidences of inappropriate posts on the wonderwall, both from students of the same class. The second thing that struck me was how much time the children's gardens were willing to put into developing technology that will be an effective way of reaching out to students. It takes someone a lot of time to make sure that all of the children's questions get answered within 24 hours, but it is important for children to know that it is good to wonder about the world and thatthere is a place that they can go in order to get their questions answered.

The final thing that the MSU Children's Gardens employ technology for is the creation of their website. If you haven't had a chance to check it out, you should do so. The link is http://4hgarden.msu.edu/kidstour/tour.html. When you follow that link, you will see an interactive map of the gardens with yellow dots that you can click on. When you click on a dot, it takes you to a specific place in the garden, and there are educational games that you can play at each particular spot. This is another fun way for children to feel connected with the gardens even after they have left.

My lesson design and instruction in deaf education course also utilizes technology in order to allow students in Hawaii and Guam to take our course as well. The professor's lecture is videotaped and viewed by these students. Since some of them are, themselves deaf, there are interpreters in my classroom who sign in front of a camera which is then broadcast to the students in Guam and Hawaii. This not only helps these students, out of state, but also helps me because I can go back an listen to parts of the lecture that I didn't really understand the first time. I can also improve my receptive ASL skills by watching the lecture in sign language. Finally, I am having my first experience with i-chat later tonight when I will be meeting the members for my group project who live in Guam and Hawaii. However, because of the time difference between these two places, it was very difficult to set up a meeting time. However, I believe that it is very beneficial to use technology to enable us to form groups with other students outside of our class; they will no doubt have different experiences with deaf children because the environment where they live is very different than my home environment. By comparing our experiences with their classroom experiences, we can broaden our perspectives on deaf education.

Reflection on Week 2 Assignments

I am finding the new types of technology that we are using in this class to be very interesting. Most of the sites that I was asked to go to for week two of this class are things that I have never heard of before. My favorite site that I was asked to go to is the delicious bookmarking site. Usually, I end up digging through old emails to find the URL for the Wikis that I use in my deaf education classes, but now all of the sites that I frequently visit are bookmarked and neatly organized for quick accessability.

I am also really enjoying looking at the blogs that other students have created for this course. I have never really thought of blogs or twitter as professional development tools, but I am quickly learning that they can be. It is refreshing to hear others ideas about teaching and technology, and the videos that my classmates posted really caught my attention. I previously thought that because this class was online, I was going to be much more isolated than if I had taken it in a classroom. However, I feel like I have the opportunity to talk to all of my classmates and see what they are thinking a great deal more than in many of my other classes, especially my large lectures.

I also am a fan of the rss reader that I have created because it sends all of the information from my collegues' blogs to one central location. It is so much easier when I can visit one page and click on different names to see the blogs that I haven't read yet.

Another thing that I have discovered is that it is easier for me to comment on other's blog posts than to write my own. I think that this is because other people's posts often spark an idea in my head or get me thinking, and it is simple to have a dialog back and forth with them about how their ideas relate to mine. However, if I am writing my own blog posts, I need to come up with an idea from scratch and that is sometimes more difficult.

There is one last thing that is still proving to be difficult. Learning how to work with technology easily becomes very time consuming because I need a lot of extra time to play around with the different forms of technology that we are using in this class before I can fully understand them. The labs that had video tutorials, however, really helped out this week because I could visually see how the different technologies worked before I attempted to create my own.

My Technology Background:

I am really excited to take this course because I am not very adept with technology, at this point in my life. I am just now learning how to load pictures from my camera onto my computer, and most of the time I need to ask my sister for help whenever I get a new phone or need to do something new on the internet. I think that it will be great to learn more about technology so that it can be a resourse that I use frequently in my classroom instead of something that I shy away from. Also, as a teacher of deaf children, I am going to be constantly relying upon technology in order to adapt my lessons to better fit the needs of the children in my classroom. Right now I have a facebook page. I also have a myspace, but mostly because I never figured out how to delete the one that I made in middle school. I couldn't tell you the last time that I used it. I just recently created a twitter for this class, which I can't believe, because I always thought that I would never be interested in twitter, but I guess there's a first time for everything. I do wish, however, that I would have been blogging earlier, because it would have been a great way to keep my friends and family updated during my study abroad in Ireland this past summer. I am currently learning how to use the Wiki pages, as they are required for both of my Deaf Education classes this semester. As I use a PC, I am not very familiar with apple computers, and it takes me a lot longer to do things on a Mac than on a PC. I can competantly use the technologies that are familiar to most people of my generation (i.e. texting, email, google, powerpoint, and microsoft word) Overall, I think that this class is going to be a little bit challenging because I struggle with learning new technology. Therefore, it is going to take me some time to go through and really learn how to use all of the technologies that are being presented within this class. This is my first online course, and I think that it may be a little bit of a struggle for me to figure out how to use these technologies without someone physically showing me the step by step instructions on how to set up and run different forms of technology. Therefore, I have a limited background in technology, but I am looking foreward to broadening that background so that I can utilize technology within my future classroom and within my life.

About Me:

I am a senior majoring in Deaf Education. As such, I am currently learning ASL and I am a member of Signing Spartans. In addition, I am involved in a few other on-campus groups this year including, Kappa Delta Pi, where I hold the position of publicity chair. I am also the Multicultural Director on the University Activities Board, where I work with a committee on events for Global Festival and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We also plan other events that reach out to a diverse crowd, in addition to planning three late night events each semester. Our first late night event is the Dating Game on Friday September 18, which will be similar to the late 60's, early 70's game show by the same name, and I couldn't be more excited about it! For the past seven years, I have spent my summers as a summer camp counselor, where I have worked with a lot of phenominal children. At Lions Bear Lake Camp, I worked with children who were deaf, blind, and had juvenile arthritis. I have also worked for several summers atCamp Lu Lay Lea, and Camp Timbers, which is a YMCA camp. This past summer, I spent six weeks studying abroad in Ireland. During my time there, I traveled all over the country, making it to Cork, Blarney, the Cliffs of Moher, Sligo, Galway, Dublin, Belfast, Giant's Causeway, Derry, Wicklow Mountains National Park, the Aran Islands, and Dun Laougahaire. I would highly recommend study abroad to anyone who is looking into it. In my free time, I like to swim, run, waterski, snow ski, and read. I love watching Gilmore Girls, One Tree Hill, and Friday Night Lights during the week. I also enjoy going to the MSU football games on Saturdays, although I was a little bit dissappointed with the outcome of the MSU vs. CMU game yesterday.