That's All Folks

Sadly, this will be my last blog entry for literacy and technology. On a positive note, that does mean that I finished with graduate school after 3 years - boy does time fly when you are learning! So, as a conclusion, I would like to take a minute and reflect on my overall blog performance. As blogging was not something that I was familiar or comfortable with, I am sure that there will be many areas that need improvement- so i will just keep trying!
As far as structure, design and titles go I think that I actually did fairly well. My design was fairly plain, but relfected my style and kept things colorful but not too loud. I find it is difficult to read a blog with too much color and pictures all of the place and feel that I kept a happy balance with pretty colors but readability. As far as titles go, some of mine are a little strange, but relate to the content of the entry in one way or another. I felt that by going with titles that were a little different, people may be more intrigued to actually read. After the title, my entries were nicely organized with an introduction and conclusion. I feel that my entries were easy to read and follow!
Although I feel that my blog entries were easy reads, I am not sure how anaylytical they are... As afore mentioned, blogging is not something that I was familiar or comfortable with up until this point (and I am still a little shaky!). I also was fairly unfamiliar with most topics that were addressed during my literacy and technology class. I have realized over the course of the semester that I am definitely behind on technology and need to get with it. Teaching students with severe disabilities really limits technology usage in my classroom (my student either don't know how to use a computer or would damage it if left to their own devices!) which has really allowed me to fall behind on all of the capabilities today. As a result of this, I really did not have knowledge of the various topics, previous assumptions, or even personal experiences to relate to throughout this course. I was like a student who has never taken a math course and barely knows what a number is taking algebra. I really learned as a I went along and developed opinions as I learned. I will say, I am pretty proud of myself and impressed at some of the things that I have learned to do. I am really proud that I know how to create a digital story and that I figured out how to create hyperlinks! I am not going to lie, i showed some of these skills off a little bit! Despite my lack of knowledge, I tried to reflect on each experience as much as possible. Each entry really allowed me to discuss my feelings about the various topics or assignments and how, I, as a novice felt throughout. This is definitely a great blog for anyone that is not computer saavy and is trying to learn!
Overall, this class has been a really good experience. I will admit that I became very frustrated at times and even felt a little bit stupid when I could not figure something out or did not understand what was being discussed, but I made it through. I definitely learned a lot of neat tricks and have a ton of new resources to add to my toolbox. Next step, get my students to be able to use technology so I can try out all of this fun stuff!!

What in the ISD?

Instructional Systems Design Models help teachers to create lessons that will faciliate their students learning in the most effective manner. These systems are helpful in allowing teachers to determine the needs of their students, to then determine their goal of instructions, and then creating the means of assisting to students in meeting this goal. These systems are based on theories of various individuals from different schools of thought. By utilizing an insstructional system, educators are able to not only analyze and better asssist their students, but they are able to better understand their own beliefs. In utilizing these systems and studying the various aspects and the theories behing them, educators can get closer to creating their own pedagogy. The most commonly used model for developing instruction is the ADDIE model. ADDIE is an actual acronym for the 5 phases of the model. These phases include Analyzing, Designing, Developing, IMplementing, and Evaluating. The analyzing phase requires educators to actually analyze their students and how the learn along with the actual information that they are to learn. During the design phase, educators devlop their learning objectives and choose how they are actually going to instruct. The developing phase is exactly how it sounds: create your actual lesson. During the implement phase, the educator actually delivers the instruction. And during the evaluation phase, the educator makes sure that the objectives were actually met. Although this model is seemingly basic, it can be extremely beneficial to teachers in creating and implementing their lessons. It also requires you to reflect and evaluate yourself and possibly enhance not only your actual teaching style but also your lesson.

You've got to assess yourself!

Assessment is something that is not only meaningful to the students we teach, but also to us as teacher's. As a student (both then and now) you sit and wait in anticipation to see how you have done on a test, a quiz, or on a paper. This simple letter or number is validating (or debilitating in some cases). This little number/letter tells us exactly what our writing or knowledge is worth - it tells us whether we know something or not and, in a way, gives us a peak into our future. If we cannot succeed in school, how will we succeed in a job, will we even get a job? What a lot of stress over something that is seemingly so simple! And what about the students who are legitimately just bad test takers. They may know the information, but because of their inherited bad testing skills, they do poorly.
Although grades are primarily looked at as a student thing, teachers should also be assessing themselves based on their students performance. If all of the students in a class do poorly on a test, whose fault is that? It cannot possibly be that all of the students are bad test takers or just simply did poorly because they didnt prepare. . . Either the test was poorly written or the material was poorly taught (or a combination of the two). I remember in highschool, i had Latin for two years straight with the same teacher (i still remember her name to this day) in those two years, one person (the same person) ever got above a 70 on a test or quiz. Clearly there was something wrong with her methods of teaching and testing. Thankfully, high scores on homework (and a lot of self teaching at home) enabled most of us to pass this class. but i remember how upsetting it was and how stupid i felt. I sat in class and never understood what she was talking about! As a teacher, we must decide first WHAT we want our students to learn from a lesson, and then develop the lesson. When creating our assessments, we should ensure that they are actually assessing what we intended to teach and what we actually taught - everything must line up. Scores of the students should be looked at after each assessment so we can evaluated the strength or our teaching, our assessment, and our students' understanding and make modifications from there.
When we talk about assessments, we immediately thing of informal observations and tests. As we all know, not everyone is a strong test taker. How do we get around this? Assessments must be done, but in today's world with technology, we have so many choices beyone pencil and paper tests. One of the coolest things that i have learned about as a graduate student overall in my time at the mount is about authentic assessments. My first real experience with authentic assessments was during my first semester and i had to read an article and write a paper about it. I learned so much! Authentic assessments actually enable students to utilize the skills we are teaching them and it gives are reason behind the teachings! I remember wondering as student, when am i ever going to need to know how many degrees and angle is. . . Let's make our students see when they are goign to need to know this today! Although authentic assessments are time consuming and sometimes difficult to make happen, the ever expanind world of technology can help us to bridge this gap. Our students are so comfortable with technology and jsut about anything can be done - simulations, web casts, etc. Let's not only teach to the various needs of our students, but also assess based on their needs!

Quiz Me

The Four Seasons » Quiz Maker

This software was extremely easy to use! I wrote down about 15 questions prior to starting and simply changed the wording so they would fit the format. You can utilize mutliple choice, fill in, or essay question format and all you have to do is provide the question and answer - the program does the rest! There are various choices for scoring and it can be as many or as few questions as you feel necessary. YOu are also able to have a time limit set for the quiz but you can also elect not to use this feature. I think that this is a fun way for students to take quizzes and would be interested in utilizing this tool within the classroom to see how students respond. It defintely would make quiz time a bit more fun for students!

Attending to the grade

Utilizing the engrade software was a great experience! I really liked how easy it was to use the software and that they provided pretty much step by step instructions. Even creating a username and password somehow seemed easier. I liked how as you created the password, entered your email, and came up with a username the software told you if each step was okay. Most sites that require you to create a username and password don't tell you that are taken until you go through all of the step! The software made it very easy to input the student and put them in any order that you wanted without you doing the leg work. Inputting the assignments and grades was also made easy with a drop down menu of multiple choices.
The only thing that i did not like about the software was the attendance tool. I thought that it took a very long time to move from student to student to input some kind of mark to identify who was there or who was absent. I think that it would be beneficial to create some sort of tool that enables you to simply double click on the day to indicate that all of the students were in attendance and simply make changes to the students that were absent. This part probably took me longer than the grade book for the same amount of days!
I think that this software would definitely be beneficial for teachers, however, i do not know how realistic it is. Unless teachers have constant access to a computer in the classroom, it would be difficult to rely solely on this gradebook. Oftentimes, teachers are able to input grades into their paper gradebook as the students are doing silent reading, taking a quiz, etc. The teacher would have to have this software accessible in her classroom in order to utilize classroom time. The attendance tools also has the same problem of accessibility and many schools have their own means of taking attendance that the teacher cannot deviat from. This may be a good school wide attendance policy, but there are also other online attendance tools that are much more user friendly. When i student taught, an online software was used for attendance and the teacher simply had to click on any students that were absent (it was assumed all students were there from the get go) and hit send and the attendance went straight to the main office. It was great!
I think that both students and parents would like this software as they would be able to see how they are doing in a concrete and up to date manner. It would also allow them to see if their are any trends in the students progress of lack of progress. (e.g. the student always performs poorly on the quizzes). Parents and students utilizing this software would also ensure that parents are kept up to date, so there are no "surprises" report card time.
Overall, i really liked this software and thought it was extremely easy to use. Aside from the user friendliness, this site is also a great way to go green! (this would cut down on a lot of paper usage!)





My easily created grade book:

http://www.engrade.com/teacher-gradebook.php?c=1

Telling Stories

This weeks topic of digital storytelling was really very intersting. I looked at the assignment prior to doing any of the reading and was definitely a bit scared. I am fairly comfortable on the computer and with technology but do not have a clue when it comes to making a "movie". I really thought that I was in for a long week trying to figure this out! So, I took a step back and decided to do the reading and look at various samples. The reading was very informative and looking at the various examples made me realize that i might actually be able to make a digital story! With this relief then came the pondering of ideas. What could i make a digital story about? The beter question was what pictures did i have access to or could i take and what kind of digital story would i be able to use with my students? After a lot of thought, i decided that a science related story would work well for my students and thought that i would have an easy time finding pictures of a butterfly and the various life cycles it goes through. Although it took me a few hours, i was pretty pleased that i was able to come up with an idea and start to create my story. Photo Story 3 proved very easy to use (so far) and i have already found and loaded all of the pictures for my story. After completing this portion of my story, i took a break to meet with my group and will continue with my story throughout this week with hope that the rest of the process is made easy with photo story!

Excel-lent

In college i took a software class in a computer lab. During this class, we utilized excel frequently in order to complete assignments utlizing a lot of numbers. By the end of the semester, i still did not completely understand excel. Through trial and error, i am now able to utilize excel for simple spreadsheets with some ease but that is the extent of my abilities. Creating a crossword puzzle really made me aware of some of the capabilities of excel and opened my eyes to the possiblities of what it can be used for (not just spreadsheets for wedding planning!). I definitely think that, rather then teaching excel as a stand alone software, it should be taught in context throughout the various content areas. This would enable students to see excel as something beyond a spreadsheet maker. By actually utilizing excel in order to create something meaningful to them, students would actually understand HOW to use this software.

By creating a crossword puzzle in excel, students would not only learn how to utilize excel but they would also learn the vocabulary. In order to create a crossword puzzle, the students would have to locate vocabulary relevant to the topic and they would then have to define each of this words. Defining these words would definitely help the students to further learn the vocabulary. In order to actually physically create the crossword, students would either already need to know how to do so on excel or they would need to follow the directions. This would help them to see what excel is capable of and how to actually utilize the available tools.
I thought that this was a well thought out activity. However, if i was using this with students, i would specify how many vocabulary words were to be used in the crossword. I would do this in order to avoid recieving a crossword with only three vocabulary words.

I created a science crossword puzzle utilizing both excel along with an online tool - what a differance! The excel system requires you to actually create all of the crossword boxes and determine where and how to place each word. This can be very time consuming and frustrating. It is very difficulty to discover how to intersect the words in order to create a puzzle. By utilizing an online tool, all of the work is done for you. You simply put in the words and the clues and the tool creates a crossword puzzle for you - all of the hard guesswork is eliminated!
**Assignment Submission – Submit A4 (HA4) to Moodle for grading and post it together with the reflection on the experience to your blog.