~L
Sunday, 19 January 2014
ePortfolio- Do or Don't
This past week in class we discussed portfolio's (the binder and paper kind) and ePortfolios. We talked about the pros and cons of both types of portfolios on getting a job as a teacher. We then as a class discussed what types of things should be in a portfolio, and what types of things should not be, although mostly we just had fabulous ideas ;) I created a wordle to show you some of the things we thought should be included in this important (or not important to some) document.
As I begin to create my portfolio and collect artifacts, update my resume and all that fun stuff, I wonder how crucial it is and how big of a difference it will make when heading into a job interview. As students in the education faculty we get mixed messages, some professors say it's good to have, others say its kind of a waste of time no administrator has time to look at it. Who knows!?! I guess we'll all make one, just to have, hopefully keep it updated, and maybe it will give us an edge when it comes to job interview time!
~L
~L
Last Semester- Back in the ICT Classroom
Here it is, the beginning of my last semester of my University career. It is an exciting and VERY scary time, but I think mostly exciting. As we begin this second week of classes I already find myself counting down the weeks till our final student teaching placement! But first come the unit plans, the professional development sessions and of course, blogging.
After class yesterday (Monday) I found myself wanting to blog about something Mike (Education ICT master) mentioned in class.
We began by discussing how people often say this generation is getting to much "screen time." We sit in front of screens like laptops, iPads, iPhones, etc for too many hours. We think these kids (and maybe even adults) are losing the social aspect of growing up. We believe too much screen time means no socializing and perhaps lack of thinking on our own. Yet when we look at people reading books, we never make the same assumptions. We think they are learning, and expanding their vocabulary and views on the world, we never think "Those people are missing out on socializing and stunting their imagination and creativity." But chances may be that those who have a screen in front of them are expanding their creativity by blogging, or editing photos, or reading up on the latest news from an article that someone tweeted. This sparked a different way to look at the issue of screen time and its negative connotation. Just think about this for a minute and the next time you think to yourself, "those kids should get out and play." In this day and age things are changing a mile a minute, this is one way these "things" are changing. Technology is here to stay, think about it, grow and continue to adapt.
~Lindsey
After class yesterday (Monday) I found myself wanting to blog about something Mike (Education ICT master) mentioned in class.
We began by discussing how people often say this generation is getting to much "screen time." We sit in front of screens like laptops, iPads, iPhones, etc for too many hours. We think these kids (and maybe even adults) are losing the social aspect of growing up. We believe too much screen time means no socializing and perhaps lack of thinking on our own. Yet when we look at people reading books, we never make the same assumptions. We think they are learning, and expanding their vocabulary and views on the world, we never think "Those people are missing out on socializing and stunting their imagination and creativity." But chances may be that those who have a screen in front of them are expanding their creativity by blogging, or editing photos, or reading up on the latest news from an article that someone tweeted. This sparked a different way to look at the issue of screen time and its negative connotation. Just think about this for a minute and the next time you think to yourself, "those kids should get out and play." In this day and age things are changing a mile a minute, this is one way these "things" are changing. Technology is here to stay, think about it, grow and continue to adapt.
~Lindsey
Sunday, 3 November 2013
It's been awhile....
Well since my last post I have completed a second student teaching placement, worked all summer, started my 5th and final year of my university career, and almost completed a third student teaching placement.
I decided I should start blogging again, I really enjoyed it when I started, but I have just become preoccupied with "life."
Maybe to start I should talk about my second placement in a grade 7/8 multi-level classroom. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot from my cooperating teacher. She used so much technology in her classroom and really had the students engaged in everything she did in her class. I ended up teaching a social studies unit that I had created on Ancient Rome, which was fun, but after I completed it I found so many other things I would have loved to have done. I also did many science lessons, that my cooperating teacher and I created together, and I taught. The group of kids I had were also very smart and pushed me in my thinking, when asked many questions.
The class used the ipads on a regular basis as well as my cooperating teacher used the smart board everyday in her lessons. From this I learned so many things, and I have a list of awesome apps that fill up pages in a notebook. Student teaching in this class was an awesome experience, and I learned more in those 7 weeks then I had in the weeks prior of sitting in a classroom. The best experience is just to put yourself in front of a class and teach.
The summer flew by, and here we are. I have two weeks left in my fall placement, and am thinking about wrapping up the first semester.
I cannot say how much I am loving elementary school. I am teaching in a grade two class with 18 students and I feel like I have found where I want to be. I am planning like crazy, teaching full time and loving it. My cooperating teachers are extremely helpful and really letting me explore and take in the whole teaching experience.
I planned a whole unit on "Community" and the kids have really taken to the activities and I feel like they will just pick up whatever you throw at them.
My mornings consist of ELA, which is daily five, journaling, poem learning, brain breaks and plenty of fun. They love to do daily five and sometimes ask to do it. I try and mix things up a little bit, just so its not the same thing everyday, and they are always willing to do anything. In the afternoons we do math workshop, which again they are crazy about (anything that involves moving around and different activities they love) as well as social studies and art occasionally. I am just loving everything about grade two. :)
Anyway, my plan is to post some of the stuff we do in class, some of the resources I use etc. So stayed tuned, I will keep this blog going!!!
-LB
I decided I should start blogging again, I really enjoyed it when I started, but I have just become preoccupied with "life."
Maybe to start I should talk about my second placement in a grade 7/8 multi-level classroom. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot from my cooperating teacher. She used so much technology in her classroom and really had the students engaged in everything she did in her class. I ended up teaching a social studies unit that I had created on Ancient Rome, which was fun, but after I completed it I found so many other things I would have loved to have done. I also did many science lessons, that my cooperating teacher and I created together, and I taught. The group of kids I had were also very smart and pushed me in my thinking, when asked many questions.
The class used the ipads on a regular basis as well as my cooperating teacher used the smart board everyday in her lessons. From this I learned so many things, and I have a list of awesome apps that fill up pages in a notebook. Student teaching in this class was an awesome experience, and I learned more in those 7 weeks then I had in the weeks prior of sitting in a classroom. The best experience is just to put yourself in front of a class and teach.
The summer flew by, and here we are. I have two weeks left in my fall placement, and am thinking about wrapping up the first semester.
I cannot say how much I am loving elementary school. I am teaching in a grade two class with 18 students and I feel like I have found where I want to be. I am planning like crazy, teaching full time and loving it. My cooperating teachers are extremely helpful and really letting me explore and take in the whole teaching experience.
I planned a whole unit on "Community" and the kids have really taken to the activities and I feel like they will just pick up whatever you throw at them.
My mornings consist of ELA, which is daily five, journaling, poem learning, brain breaks and plenty of fun. They love to do daily five and sometimes ask to do it. I try and mix things up a little bit, just so its not the same thing everyday, and they are always willing to do anything. In the afternoons we do math workshop, which again they are crazy about (anything that involves moving around and different activities they love) as well as social studies and art occasionally. I am just loving everything about grade two. :)
Anyway, my plan is to post some of the stuff we do in class, some of the resources I use etc. So stayed tuned, I will keep this blog going!!!
-LB
Tuesday, 5 March 2013
Things I Have Learned
Well folks, I have FINALLY completed my final project. I have learned so much throughout this course and I could have added a lot more now that I think of it. This project was a real challenge for me, not coming up with things I have learned but creating the powerpoint and adding audio and then syncing it together so it all fit. I guess that's another thing you can add to the "Things I have Learned." I really enjoyed being in this class and I learned a lot of valuable "stuff." I hope I can take another course like this again next year to help expand on the stuff I have taken away from this year.
So here is my final project. It took a lot out of me this past week....I'm glad I finally got it done!
#thingsihavelearned
-LB
So here is my final project. It took a lot out of me this past week....I'm glad I finally got it done!
#thingsihavelearned
-LB
Wednesday, 27 February 2013
Presentations- So many things to learn
Ok, I lied a little in my last post about that being our last mandatory one! Ooops sorry. So yesterday in class we did some presentations on research we had done on education and technology related topics, and it was really fun and informative. Our group did a little presentation entitled "The Internet, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" if you would like to check it out here's the link https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ErYv_zr4MNtcYhiK5iqU9O64-vkTF1lqO-A3bAtl3W4/edit
It gives you some food for thought about the internet and its uses ETC.
Anyway there were a few other presentations, and they were all very well done, quite engaging and had plenty of useful information. I found one presentation that really stuck out. It was entitled "How not to steal from the Internet." As a University student you think you know how to cite sources and that you'll never plagiarize because you don't want to get that AD on your transcript, but in actuality we do it anyway. When we make presentations we add pictures from Google images and never say where we got them from or "give credit where credit is due." So this got me thinking, how many times have I taken some information from the internet and not cited it? Probably too many to count now. So this presentation gave us helpful resources for ourselves as well as for our students on the proper way to use resources we have gathered from the internet and what many of the "Terms of Use" categories mean. I think I'll keep this presentation and its resources handy.
I would like to give everyone a big high five for a job well done. I feel like we have learned a lot about the internet and technology in this class (Uhhh duh Lindsey this class is called Internet for Educators!) stuff that I never would have thought to talk about. So yay us!
-LB
It gives you some food for thought about the internet and its uses ETC.
Anyway there were a few other presentations, and they were all very well done, quite engaging and had plenty of useful information. I found one presentation that really stuck out. It was entitled "How not to steal from the Internet." As a University student you think you know how to cite sources and that you'll never plagiarize because you don't want to get that AD on your transcript, but in actuality we do it anyway. When we make presentations we add pictures from Google images and never say where we got them from or "give credit where credit is due." So this got me thinking, how many times have I taken some information from the internet and not cited it? Probably too many to count now. So this presentation gave us helpful resources for ourselves as well as for our students on the proper way to use resources we have gathered from the internet and what many of the "Terms of Use" categories mean. I think I'll keep this presentation and its resources handy.
I would like to give everyone a big high five for a job well done. I feel like we have learned a lot about the internet and technology in this class (Uhhh duh Lindsey this class is called Internet for Educators!) stuff that I never would have thought to talk about. So yay us!
-LB
The End is Near...What does the future hold?
Well folks, the end of the semester is nearing and for many in this class, you will move on to bigger and better things. This is one of the last "mandatory" posts for my internet for educators class and I really hope I can keep up the blog posts as I embark on my second student teaching placement because I have really come to enjoy it and my cooperating teacher, I found out, is the technology "guru" in her school, so this was really exciting for me to find out.
Education has come a long way, even from when I started school, which really wasn't that long ago. Technology infused classrooms are where education is at right now. Technology is how the 21st century learner is going to learn , we have moved past the textbook phase and into the tablet phase. Technology is the "it" thing and so as educators we must accept this and go with it. Looking at the Horizon Report I was surprised at all the ways technology is being brought into the classroom. All of the tools and techniques that involve learning through technology really lets all learners have the opportunity to use technology.There was a piece of information that stuck out to me from the report and that was, at what point is there too much technology? How do we as teachers know what to use and what not to use. We can't keep using the same types of technology and techniques over and over again because then we aren't growing and changing at all either. I guess as teachers we will have to figure it out ourselves, it will take some mistake making but I think eventually as we find out our own unique teaching styles it will become a simpler task. The future of education has lots of changes ahead of it. But I know one thing, it will be very technology oriented. We won't see the effects of these implementations for a while, as everything takes time, but I am sure the benefits of having the world at our fingertips in the classroom will be great. Taking this class and learning about all the exciting things that education and technology have to offer makes me even more excited to be heading into the classroom in two weeks. Although it will be a challenge, I'm ready to learn. Being a 21st century learner is a great advantage and I can't wait to be a 21st century connected educator.
Next up is a little slideshow that is a presentation and a mashup of everything I learned and taken out of this course!
-LB
Education has come a long way, even from when I started school, which really wasn't that long ago. Technology infused classrooms are where education is at right now. Technology is how the 21st century learner is going to learn , we have moved past the textbook phase and into the tablet phase. Technology is the "it" thing and so as educators we must accept this and go with it. Looking at the Horizon Report I was surprised at all the ways technology is being brought into the classroom. All of the tools and techniques that involve learning through technology really lets all learners have the opportunity to use technology.There was a piece of information that stuck out to me from the report and that was, at what point is there too much technology? How do we as teachers know what to use and what not to use. We can't keep using the same types of technology and techniques over and over again because then we aren't growing and changing at all either. I guess as teachers we will have to figure it out ourselves, it will take some mistake making but I think eventually as we find out our own unique teaching styles it will become a simpler task. The future of education has lots of changes ahead of it. But I know one thing, it will be very technology oriented. We won't see the effects of these implementations for a while, as everything takes time, but I am sure the benefits of having the world at our fingertips in the classroom will be great. Taking this class and learning about all the exciting things that education and technology have to offer makes me even more excited to be heading into the classroom in two weeks. Although it will be a challenge, I'm ready to learn. Being a 21st century learner is a great advantage and I can't wait to be a 21st century connected educator.
Next up is a little slideshow that is a presentation and a mashup of everything I learned and taken out of this course!
-LB
Saturday, 23 February 2013
Show and Tell, Technology Style
I have three apps that I would like to share with the blogger world (and my class). I was doing a little thinking about some of the struggles or maybe things in class that we used or did that could be enhanced by technology. So the first thing I thought of was writing. Students struggle with ideas about what to write about whether it be in their daily journal or for writers workshop. I found an app that has thousands of writing prompts on it. You click on it, give your phone or Ipad or Ipod a shake (I downloaded it on my iPhone) and BOOM a writing idea that's a little bit out of the ordinary but should spark their imagination.
Another idea that came up when I was looking back on my student teaching experience, and some classes that I took last semester that used the smart board was a lot was surveying or polling of information. Surveying the class is a good activator and its interesting to see the different ideas in the classroom, and since its private there is no peer pressure so you kind of get an honest answer. I know there are some good polling applications on the smart board that involve a "clicker" but a cool one I saw on a fellow Internet for Educators blog was one that was online and the class could use their smart phones and text in their reply. Very Cool.
The website is: http://www.polleverywhere.com/. Give it a look if you can.
Another interesting tool is called DropBox, anyone heard of it?
Well you send out an invitation to receive a certain folder and you download the program or "Box" to your computer or smartphone and whenever someone adds something to that folder in their box, whether it be an assignment or music or something everyone that got the invite for that folder will also receive the same information. It is also an easy way to share large files. I was introduced to it a couple of months ago, and I use it to share new music with friends!
I am sure you could apply it to a classroom setting as well!
That's all for my show and tell technology style!
-LB
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)