Final Blog Post

Project Book Trailer

PLN Final Report

The course has come to an end but my blog and PLN will continue to grow and rise ultimately making me a better teacher. My PLN is very important and has grown so much since I first found out what it is. I heard the term used often but did not know what it was. Honestly I thought it involved paper (lol). It sounded like something important like lesson plans or something. However to me it is far more exciting and helpful than that because it allows individual teachers to help themselves learn through its use. I continue to use SI heard the term used often but did not know what it was. Honestly I thought it involved paper (lol). It sounded like something important like lesson plans or something. However to me it is far more exciting and helpful than that because it allows individual teachers to help themselves learn through its use.

I continue to use Symbaloo to control my PLN. C4T and C4K have definitely helped mine to grow. I added students as well as teachers I found interesting and educating. I learn how fun and easy it is to involve blogs in the classroom for the students learning experience. Things since I have been in school have changed drastically, and I do not consider myself to be old. This says that things are changing fast, and it is due to technology. My PLN not only contains sites that allow me to interact with others but sites that involve me completing homework, checking my grades, and my degree plan. Then I have added favorites like online shopping sites, a site connected to my job, and banking. It is so easy to access and leaves room in my memory bank for other things! I do not have to remember URL’s and use my history browser. Instead I use my home page which is my PLN and go from there to anywhere in the world I want my mind to be. PLN’s are awesome for learning and connecting to others for the progress of an individual. 

C4T #4

For the month of November I had the pleasure of commenting on Royan Lee’s Blog. The name of his blog is The Spicy Learning Blog. Mr. Lee is an intermediate literacy teacher. From viewing his blog, and many different post it is simple to see that he is a good teacher. He cares about his students and their future. Through his blog he shows how he keeps his students interested in their assignment by allowing them to be exposed to technology.

The first post I made a comment on was Should We Ask People What They Want. This Post was inspired by DeanShareski post, Don't Ask People What They Want Dean Shareski discussed in his blog what the negatives were of asking and how ineffective it was. He was saying how people do not know what they want until someone shows them something. Royan Lee agreed with some ideas that Dean Shareski expressed. However, he realized how important it can be to give people choices and involve them in decisions, especially decisions involving education. I agreed with Mr. Lee. I feel that as educators we will want our parents to be involved in the students learning.  We should not deny them the opportunity to be included in the decision making process. They know their own children and should be included in every part. This way even if they only agree or disagree they will still have an opportunity to learn from the discussion.

The next post I commented on was the post Voltron as 21st Century LearningMetaphor. Voltron is a old cartoon about kids controlling lions to defend the Earth. The lions come together to create Voltron, an unbeatable robot. This remarkable blog was about using a metaphor  to relate technology and students as a collaboration. It let them see how they are good alone but when incorporating technology they are extraordinary. My comment was about how I found this to useful using what students can relate to.  It lets them know how technology can take them far and is how everything is operating in today’s generation.  I enjoyed the clip he showed of Voltron, the old cartoon, and I enjoy watching Transformer movies involving Voltron.

C4K November Summary Post

During the month of November I had the pleasure of viewing and commenting on two class blogs and one students blog. I found this very helpful in pushing me to learn how to upgrade my own blog. It is also exciting to see how students are having fun while they are learning different things about history, other cultures, and technology.

The first blog I viewed, Mr. McClung's World, beongs to the class of Mr. McClung. He is a 8th grade History middle school teacher in Fayetteville, Arkansas. McClung's class blog is very educational and fun. It makes learning about history so much more interesting because it contains so many different methods of presenting the information. The blog shows me that his History class is not the usual "read this chapter and answer the questions at the end" kind of class. His class even uses the laptops to take test on instead of wasting paper. I enjoyed learning from his blog and I am sure his students really enjoy it to. I was able to watch the slide show on Humanity and Renaissance. Some of his students created a presentation comparing the people and how they changed over time. Mr. McClung does a really good job of incorporating technology use in his classroom. I believe his History class is probably the most fun of all other class blogs I have viewed. 

The next blog that I viewed was the blog of Mrs. Yollis'  Classroom Blog. She is a 3rd grade teacher. Her blog is very amazing and has so much going on. You will definitely not go bored in a class like hers just by looking at her class blog. I view her blog and then I looked at a world project in which she and her students are involved in. It is called Our World, Our Stories. It is a blog that involves her class and five other classes from different countries. Students are able to connect with others through commenting on blogs each class post every week. It is one different class per week. After looking over the blog I commented on a blog posted by Mr. Salsich and his class from the Connecticut. The blog post was about traditional songs in each country. Being from the United States also his class choose the song "Take Me Out to the Ball Game". The class sings it and it is so adorable. I commented telling them how well they did. They made me want to attend a baseball game because I have not sang that song in a long long time. I mentioned a fun sport I like to watch, which is football, and how I cheer for Alabama. Roll Tide!

Last but not least I commented on Zion's blog. Zion is a 6th grade student from New Zealand. He wrote a story about blasting off to Saturn and meeting some aliens. The story was very descriptive and contained a lot of adjectives. In my comment I told him how he helped me see the story in my mind. He did a really good job and was able to express his creativity and typing skills through the blog. It is great how students are allowed so much access to computers and able to grow and broaden their education through. technology.  

Commenting on C4K has allowed me to see so many different things. It definitely broadened my outlook on technology and has totally helped me with my creativity. Thanks everyone!

Final Project #16

Hope you all enjoy it!

Blog #14

 Jose Picardo is the Head of Modern Foreign Languages at Nottingham High School and is the 2011 edublog winner! In his Top Ten Tips for using technology in the classroom Video he has introduced two things new to me that I feel my class can grow and progress from. The first is using interactive exercises. Using contentgenerator.net one can make their own excercises that cater to the students needs. The software may cost but will be worth the money because it will make class work much more interesting. Students will not grow as bored using e-learning and playing games to learn. It is also easy for first time users because it requires no coding. That is definitely a plus.
 Another tip I found useful is using internet tools such as a Voki or Animoto. Voki is a way to create an avatar and allow it to speak for you. One can post it to any blog or website and allow it to deliver what ever message one wants. This is fun and cool and attracts everyone. Especially being that one can add their own voice to it! Another thing is the Animoto which is a software that allows on to make videos out of slides and photos with music that is free and more interesting than the plain power point. I plan to learn about these and use them now to learn them so that I can use them in my future classroom!

Blog Post #13

Did You Know?

I did not know a lot of these interesting facts. Technology is amazing today because one can find out anything they want to know by just looking it up. Using WolframAlpha one can find out answers to any factual questions. It involves experts in all fields to bring the accurate information forth and put it together on an easy to use site for individuals to access. Looking up the United States population compared to China's population, the China's population is 338% larger than the United States. Wow!! The United States is .008% of China's population. China has 376 people per square mile. The United States has 87.3 people per square mile.  This makes China sound extremely crowded. Comparing the United States to India, India is 293.4 percent larger than the United States. The United States makes up .013% of India's population.
I believe all of the facts presented in the first blog assignment to be credible. With experts working on it and spending a lot of time on survey's and things the facts must be very close to actual numbers. Being that babies are being born and people are dying the number probably changes every second. Amazing!

Students will benefit from using the WolframAlpha for any research assignments versus wikipedia or any other sites because this sight involves more research being completed by professionals. Students can also put in math problems and get answers. This will help  them learn to correct their mistakes. With it being credible one will not have much trouble providing facts in any class assignments. However, students will have to be aware of what their teacher wants and not just rely on this sight to complete their work. Research is research and when it comes to a paper or anything similar one must use more than one source!

C4K #10 Mrs. Yollis Blog

Upon completion of reviewing Mrs. Yollis' Classroom Blog I found it very educational and interesting. She is very serious about blogging and makes it look so easy. All the links were extremely interesting. She involves the students, families, and friends from other countries.
 The home page of Mrs. Yollis blog contains her most recent blogs of what the class is doing. It involves videos and pictures of the class or students activities. She asks questions and posts very interesting facts. I find it very informing even as a college student. It definitely broadens ones thinking. Most of the material she presents is of things I know or have heard about at some time in my life. Although I may not remember all of it, it is helpful and refreshing.
 Mrs. Yollis has 10 tabs at the top of the blog including the home tab. The home tab as all of her blog posts and links on the side. The first link on the right side of her screen is the New Global Project of Our World, Our Stories. Our World, Our Stories is a blog created for second and third grade classes to connect across the globe. It includes a class from the United States, New Zealand, Ghana, Canada, Belize, and Australia. Students can learn of other cultures and experiences by sharing comments and stories. This is very beneficial and fun for these students to participate in. The next link is to the Yollis 365 Project of daily pictures posted. It also teaches individuals how to take photos. The following link is a photo of a cluster map of visitor's that visited  Yollis' class blog and where they are from. This is very exciting because it shows how students and teachers are connecting all over the world. The next link allows, individuals to subscribe to the class blog. Following are 2 nominations and 1 award for the blog itself. After this is the Digital Voice Award given to Yollis blog! Next are just labels to all blogs posted by Yollis which is useful when searching or just observing current or past blogs. Following are the links to three other blogs that are involved in the Our World, Our Stories blog. Open the door to B4, 2KM and 2KJ @Leopold Primary School, and Mr. Salsich's Class. All are interesting and most important they allow the students to connect across the world as well. The next links are of comments to view that family, friends, and students made on the blogs. The Brainpopjr.com  is the next link of the days best joke. Following this is BrainPOP.com for quizzes, activities, and movies. After this is the flag counter link blog showing flags from where people have viewed her blog. Following are links to her students blogs. Next is a Voki telling one how to comment it one does not know how to. Behind this is a link tweets from Mrs. Yollis and 16 more links of blogs, visitors, and how to follow are down the side of the home page.
 Overall Mrs. Yollis' class blog is very helpful showing one how important and interesting it is to collaborate with students in other parts of the world. I definitely need to learn more about how to incorporate more links and tabs onto my blog. My goal is to have a blog as interesting and active as Mrs. Yollis' blog!

Report on Final Project

Final Project!

My group and I met up to discuss what we would do for our final project. We all came up with an idea of showing how students and teachers can benefit from technology use. We will make a movie of a teacher faced with the decision of whether she will use technology in her classroom or not. An angel will try to convince her to use technology and a devil will discourage technology use. We will explain the benefits of skype, blogging, iMovie, podcasts, PLN's and more. Doing it this way will allow us to show what we learned in EDM 310. I still feel I have more progress to make and I will use technology everyday until I die. There is no real way to make it without it. One must have a backup plan however because things can easily go wrong using technology such as a power outage.  I look forward to recording our movie and I hope everyone will enjoy it!

Additional Assignment #1

1. Why did you miss the metaphor in Tom Johnson's post, or, if you "hit the nail on the head", why do you think you understood the metaphor and why do you think that others in the class missed the metaphor?
2. What metaphors have you encountered since I asked you to create a log of them?
3. What other things can we do as educators to help our students to understand and to use metaphors?
4. Why do we use metaphors?


 I "hit the nail on the head" in understanding the metaphor John Spencer presented in his blog post. (Although I was late in posting my response to his blog.) I was able to get this due to two reasons. The first is I clicked on the link under the title of his blog. It was Larry Ferlazzo's Latest Post which is based on a survey in which Ferlazzo had viewed and commented on. It basically explains Ferlazzo's view on usage of computer's affecting students test scores.  The second is that it just could not be about pencils and paper in with how much education has changed. The last thing one would be concerned about would be pencils and paper affecting test scores. No pencils? One might as well close schools down. 

Metaphors that I have encountered include all of the following:

• I'm dying I'm so hungry. 
• They are knocked out. 
• Faster than a cheetah. 
• Every blue moon.
• When people in hell ask for ice water. 
• I'm freezing.
• Sick as a dog.
• I'm hanging at the end of my rope. 
• I have a brain freeze.
• I would die if I met Chris Brown.

After explaining what a metaphor is to students, as educators we can give an extra bonus point assignment which consist of the students listing metaphors the teacher said all day. Make learning about metaphors. 

We use metaphors to describe what we are trying to say. When describing something using  a metaphor it gives what we are talking about more emphasis. It also allows us to think about what is said afterwards.