Standard Two is used in creating the introduction video, Design and Develop Digital Age Learning Experiences and Assessment. This was a learning experience that involved contemporary tools such as the video aspect of a mobile phone. It gives a persons background and story a creative and more formal touch when it is videoed for a blog. This assignment taught me numerous things. Some of those things including how to upload a video onto the internet, how to use creativity when doing boring introductions and how to speak on a camera (even though this is terrible). When I first did the assignment I could not get the video to play on my blog. It was showing the box but it did not show any media or sound. Dr. Beedle showed me how to fix this by selected a different format of the video and told me that it sometimes saves in different places. It will have "mp4" attached to the end of it, not weird letters. In my future classroom, I think I will use this a lot. I loved how Dr. Beedle sprung this on us and told us to upload it immediately. It kept me thinking on my feet and made me do my best the first time from there on out. This also gives students a new way to introduce themselves to me and other classmates. He also made us share this with the class which also added necessary pressure for us to do our best. Presenting everything in front of the class made everyone try their best and want to look good during their presentation.
2. Ted Videos (John Hunter and the World Peace Game)
Standard 2, Design and Develop Digital Age Learning Experiences and Assessments, is a standard that is met with John Hunter's the World Peace Game. In his teachings, he designs student learning to promote creativity, he customizes and personalizes diverse learning styles and he assesses the students based on how they play out the games. The only problem I saw while watching this was that it was probably really hard to incorporate that today with the Common Core State Standards. John Hunter makes it realistic. He takes a piece of learning and flips it around by making it real life for the students. He made it to where the students would feel as if they were apart of the life in the game. This idea of teaching would be really idealistic in a classroom, but I do not know how well I would do at making up a game like that. I would need lots of help to become that creative and educational all at once. The hands on games make the students think actively and on their toes. Writing pages of notes while listening to someone preach about problems in the world is really ineffective for most people; whereas, the hands on game that puts you inside the actual problem shows the reality of the issue. It shows the students that violence is existent and a bad thing in his case.
3. Concept Map
NETS-T Standard 3 Model Digital Age Work and Learning was aligned with the concept map because it was a way for us to format a weeks lesson plan with a structured form of digital technology that formats out each day and activity with a creative twist. After doing the concept map, I learned how to organize my information in not only in a creative way but also online. I have never been very tech savvy and this assignment pushed me to make it look good and actually be correct. I had many difficulties while completing this project, including not saving it correctly or text would paste in a weird format and I had to figure out how to change it. The thing that gave me the most problems in this assignment was formatting things to fit and look presentable. I fixed that by just playing around with the different texts and shapes to put the text in. It took me a good couple of days before I learned how to get my information formatted correctly. This will be a good use to me as a teacher by doing the lesson plans electronically and showing them to the class on a PDF or through email. That way the class will always have the outline and details of the assignment with them. It will also get the class more involved on the computer if that was the only way they could look at the assignment details.
4. Do Not Track Me Plus
Do Not Track Me Plus meets NETS Standard four, Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility. This website is a website that advocates for protection against potentially harmful websites and develops cultural understanding and global awareness of what is happening on the internet. This website is a place for the web to help you instead of hurt you. I learned that there are websites out there that are solely meant to harm and mess up your computer. This website is a place where they can track the people that try to get your information after you look at a certain website. I had no idea that people were looking at what I searched on google or my friend's facebooks. When trying to figure out this website, I accidentally downloaded the wrong one. It was spam and did just what this website is trying to prevent, computer crashes or information leaking to others. A friend helped me pick the right website and see what I did wrong/did not look for. A cool thing about this website is that is has its own app on the iPhone and it can show you who looked at your stuff and whether they were good or not. I will continue to use this for my future use of my computer. As for other students, the librarian will have to monitor the computers more and tell the students to stay quiet. This website might be a little bit older than your young children readers, because they cannot hear you when they are out in the woods hunting.
5. Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality in classrooms meets Standard three, Model Digital Age Work and Learning. It is a way to model and facilitate current digital tools for research. For instance, like the woman did in the article, she held up a tablet over an image of a cube and it showed students directly how to draw a cube without having to ask. I think that this way of technology can be effective if it is used the right way. I learned something new by just reading the article. I did not know that you could hold an iPad up to a painting and the app realize it and give you information on it. When reading the article, the only thing that I questioned was the age that the children should be in order to fully understand this and use if for productive things. The author cleared my confusion up when she said that all a student had to do was hold up the tablet and information would pop up. I could use this as a teacher in the future for research on paintings or sculptures or even history words. They could use this more creative way of researching to make their project more exciting and enjoyable. I do not think that I would personally use this for young children though because sometimes that might be more of a problem than it would be helping depending on the child's critical thinking level.
6. Voki
The Voki that I created was aligned with Standard 2, Design and Develop Digital Age Learning Experiences and Assessments. With this project we participated as active participants in setting our own educational goals. The Voki assignment allowed each of us to create a profile of said teacher and discuss how we would address parents and students in an introduction to the class. The actual person speaking can look like your appearance and even have your accent, if it is different from the normal. When doing the assignment I ran into the problem of not knowing what was important to the introduction to my classroom and what was not. The Voki only lets you put about thirty seconds of voice recording on it, so you have to be very to the point and specific. I fixed this by discussing a brief background on myself and then saying how excited I was for the upcoming year. I think that this will definitely be on my teacher page that parents look at when they go to find things for my class. Sometimes people do not read everything clearly and they might miss things if they do not read all of the way. I could post weekly announcements in text and on with Voki, in order to add a little variety for my teacher page.
Web 2.0 sites
The web 2.0 sites coorelate with NETS Standard three, Model Digital Age Work and Learning. It does this by demonstrating fluency in technology and the transfer of current knowledge to technology and situations. In class everyone got information on atleast two websites or apps that we could teach the class about. Each student standing up and talking about each different websites was very helpful for all of us because many of them were websites we see our teachers use often. One problem that the majority of the class had was being able to understand their website enough to explain it to others by using only a trial view. There is really no fix to this, other than the fact that we know now that those websites are not ones that we can trust to work in a classroom without downloading them first. A helpful suggestion that Dr. Beedle gave was that since we cannot use some of these websites due to money or contracts, then we can see other websites that are generally the same and are free and easy to use. I will definitely use some of these sites and I made notes on ones that I might use in my upcoming education classes in order to organize things and make more creative projects. I have already used Inspiration in order to set up creative maps for my sorority.
My two sites I looked up were Glogster and Audacity. Audacity was a site that was hard for me to understand because my computer would not allow me to get the full version of it. It is a voice recording site that can insert or delete certain affects and blend sounds together. Glogster was my other website and I have already planned on involving in with my future students. It is a website that has different ways to post things such as a poster board or sticky notes for reminders. It is just a cooler way to do projects and stay organized.
Website: cyber bullying
Creating this website met standard 5, Engaging in Professional growth and leadership. It met this standard because we were sharing research that is helpful to schools and others, it evaluated current research and gave facts and used the technology necessary to achieve the goal of this website. Creating this website made me realize how easy it is to get your information out there and involved in the community. It taught me how to create a website, and use the website in a educational manor. While making this website I had some problems with formatting and getting the page layout correct. Although I was not able to fix all of those problems given the time that we were there, Dr. Beedle showed us how to create tables so that would be prevented when we were presenting our website for the class. I think this project would be great for an upper level elementary student to do a project on. It is a more fun way to show information on research rather than just writing a standard research paper. The website gives the leeway to post videos and pictures and provide more creative titles for articles and pages.
My Movie: Home
My movie was coorelated with NETS standard one, to promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness. Making the movie involved critical thinking and creativity in order to come up with an idea and coorelate a song to go along with it. We had to gather pictures that all were the same type and create a story. The hardest part of this assignment was creating a story with pictures that I already had and making it interesting. Coorelating a song to the story was difficult at first, but I just had to dig deep and think hard about what story I wanted to tell before I picked a song. I chose Home by Phillip Philips and told the story about my family and move to college. One problem I had while making my movie was getting a song on the movie. Deanna helped me by telling me I could go to YouTube and look up the song, copy the link and post it into a YouTube mp3 mixer and it would save to my computer. I just thought that was the coolest thing and I was mad I did not know that before now. The movie was my favorite assignment we had to do. It gave me the chance to express my life through pictures of my loved ones and music. I will definitely use this movie maker in my future classroom. Although the project did not take long and just involved some creative thinking and application, it told a story about each person and truly showed their style through their movie.
Course Reflection-
This class started off slow for me but I soon made friends with my classmates and Dr. Beedle. The class was one that I will not forget because of the things I learned. Whether I want to admit it or not, I was not a computer or technology person at all before this class. I learned so many things from creating concept maps and movies all the way to making a website, which I did not think that I could ever do. Honestly, blogging was a big change for me. I have never blogged or even thought about blogging, but the truth is, we are so much better off by keeping up with people or activities through blogging. I had many weak points in this class, considering I was not tech savvy at all, but surprisingly I had some strong points. My weak points were blogging things that were important and not just summaries as well as doing some of the assignments at home on my computer. My strong points were the concept map, Voki and movie. I think I liked those more because I could do my own thing with it and was not restricted as to what I could or could not talk about so that is why those were strong points. My weak points were most likely because I have never blogged before and did not know what to say. Also, my computer is not up to date and I have some viruses ,that I am going to get worked out over the break, that do not allow my computer to do certain things. In the future, I realize now that it is important to keep up with the internet and I may start blogging to get my name out there more. Blogs, if in the right context, are something that could help tremendously with getting jobs in the future. There are many different aspects of this class that I want to take with me when I go to teach. For instance, I liked how we were always presenting and having to show the class our projects. That will make students want to work ten times as hard. Also, the movie maker will be one of my first projects for my kids. Seeing pictures along with a song that they like to tell a story will show me as well as the other classmates so much about that person. I think that blogs are something that should be started young. When I first entered the class I honestly thought blogging was stupid and I did not understand it. Now, I know I will look back to see how far I have come in the process of education and see some of the things we talked about without having to keep up with a binder. I think it would be even cooler to look back on things you learned in school as a child. Teachers especially, could benefit so much by looking back at their own thoughts as a child because as we grow up, we forget how things were and how things change. This class has taught me so much about things that I can use in everyday life with my sorority, my education classes and hopefully my future classroom. I enjoyed this class and I wish there were more application classes like this!
