My CyberSafety Collaborative Site

Working collaboratively my group and me created a cyber saftey website using the program Google sites. We addressed many online issues and offered tips to both students and educators. (NETS-T 4 & 5)

Crossword

Using Microsoft Excel I created a crossword puzzle about math. (NETS-T 1,2,3)

Journal 7: My Personal Learning Network NETS-T 4,5

My Personal Learning Network or PLN is important because it allows me to collaborate with other educators and continue learning about emerging theories in education. A PLN is a collection of social media networks in which you can connect with people who share similar interests and collaborate with one another about ideas, educational resources, and helpful on line links. It is therefore very important as a classroom teacher to establish a PLN as it connects you to others around the world and allows you to stay up to date with emerging technological advances and educational practices.

Twitter is a great addition to a professional PLN. Many people see this site as a gossip and social media site but many people use this site for educational purposes. Twitter offers insight to new teachers and gives advice and feedback to educators worldwide. This site can be used as a collaborative tool. On my twitter page, I only follow my fellow classmates and use their posts in order to fulfill requirements for my education classes. Classmates can collaborate on shared interests. I have used this site to listen in on educational chats that have to do with math since I am planning on being a math teacher. These online chat sessions in which educators world wide meet to communicate about a specific topic during a specific time period in this virtual reality. I participated in @mathchat on twitter on May 2nd. The topic of this chat was “how do we get students to dig deeper?”  During this chat I witnessed educators come up with ways to keep kids from saying “I’m finished.” Educators believe that all people including students have more math intuition then they realize. I got a couple great ideas from the chat that is similar to what we have done in class. Blogs with top tips for teaching math is a great idea to getting students to dig deeper. The chat was hard to follow. There were so many tweets at such a rapid pace however, I did come out of the chat feeling inspired and motivated to push social media on educators and proving its benefits as an educational tool.

Derogative

Diigo is another great tool for educators! It organizes your online material and resources and saves you from having to search creditable information. The site allows you to bookmark pages and sites and then uses key words to tag specific information or topics of discussion. Through these tags, educators are able to find other sites and sources that pertain to information that other educators have already tagged as useful and valuable. In my Diigo account I selected my online material by looking for fellow ed422 tags. From there I was able to explore other Diigo pages of my fellow classmates and use their information to build my own account. I was even able to use Diigo to research my chat for my PLN!

By becoming a member of Classroom 2.0 I was able to link up with educators that were interested in my same depth of study. Classroom 2.0 is a social media site for educators that are interested in web 2.0. The site provides articles; videos, live chats and blogs that pertain to the subject you wish to teach. This site allows you to create your own blog and follow fellow educators. I found the shared experiences were very beneficial to me as I used them to experience first hand what I need to do in order to successfully incorporate technology in my classroom.

iMovie PSA (Software Proficiency)

Using iMovie I created a public service announcement for California State University San Marcos. To do this I had to use the software to edit video clips, add music and add researched information about the school. (NETS-T 1-5)

Standards for Teachers

 

 I used the digital tool Inspiration 9.0 to structure and outline the artifacts that I have created that support the NETS Standards for Teachers. Inspiration 9.0 is great tool for mapping, outlining, writing, and brainstorming ideas and concepts. It effectively communicates ideas clearly and demonstrates understanding and knowledge.This artifact is a graphic organizer that I used to demonstrate how the projects in this class meet the NETS-T standards for teachers.

Journal 10

Journal 10: Helping Students Express Their Passion

Mann, Michelle. "Helping Students Express Their Passion." Learning and Leading. N.p., March/April 2011. Web. 13 Apr 2011. http://www.learningandleading-digital.com/.

This article focuses on AYV, Adobe Youth Voices which is a global education program sponsored by the Adobe Foundation. The main focus of this site is to teach teeenagers how to properly use digital media through sharing ideas on social issues that they are interested in. the goal of this educational program is to spark dialouge for change around the world by attracting the energy and interests of the younger minds in todays world. by doing this, the foundation is able to influence and mold the young minds in a positive way. Educators and policy makers are finding a similar problem throughout the world when trying to fufill these goals. Figuring out how to improve the quality of secondary education has been Adobe Youth Voices main issue that they seek to improve. A lot of public discussion focuses on student and teacher importance, as AYV has come to the conclusion that young adults are driven by technology. This is the foundations key to attracting youth. By basing their global education program off new digital age technology, Adobe is able to work closely with educators and their community to come up with ways to empower and motivate students using technology. One of the ways Adobe Youth Voices is trying to achieve this is by assisting educators in using this new digital world in their teachings. This shows educators how to teach kids in ways they want to learn.

Do you think that certain methods of technology can help motivate and inspire student learning?

Yes! By giving students options and letting them dive into subjects they like, then they actually want to learn and they will want to become actively engaged inside the classroom and in their own communities.

Do you feel that the right applications of technology can help inspire students?

Who else benefits from AYV? Educators, parents and those interested in their surrounding communites. By encouraging these types of media based collaborative learning, AYV is helping all parties interested develop lesson plans and unique methods of instruction to get people involved and better understand the world.

Journal 9

Journal 9 "Teaching Green” Waters, J. (2011). Teaching green. THE Journal , Retrieved from http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/1105/journal_201104/#/12

John J. Water is a freelance writer who focuses on teaching green through the wealth of online resources. Classroom earth is a site that was created by the National Education Foundation in partnership with The Weather Channel. The sites purpose is to push environmental awareness and education in high school classrooms across the nation. A walk in the woods is the second site and is aimed at a younger grade level(grades3-5) and at schools in more urban areas such as San Francisco. Students in large cities rarely have the chance to experience the outdoors. This site gives these students a chance to do so, through virtual walks in the woods. The next site is Environmental Education for Kids(EEK!). This site is an electronic magazine for students in grades 4 to 8. It is also directed towards teachers and can have lots of useful information and tools that can be used inside and out of the classroom. The fourth site is called Ecological Footprint Quiz and is an online quiz that gets kids thinking about their ecological and carbon footprint. This is a great way to have kids understand how nature is affected by what they do on a day to day basis. The fifth site called PowerUp is for both parents and teachers and provides lesson plans and different tools to promote environmental education. The US Environmental Protection Agency Teaching Center site is the final site Waters talks about. This site is aimed towards teachers, as it offers a wide variety of lesson plans and classroom activities that are based on the environment.

Which site do you see most beneficial in the classroom and why?

I believe that the Ecological Footprint Quiz is very beneficial because it gives students a chance to better understand the big picture of global warming and how their day to day ways of life impact our earth.

Do you think environmental issues will become a largely incorporated topic of discussion inside the classroom as time goes on? I personally haven’t been environmentally educated up until recently. We were never taught about the environment and ones footprint. All I knew was throw away your trash and that was about it! Now a day’s websites such as the ones Waters discussed educate students in a simple, understandable way. With the constant increase in internet ability, I can see Environmental studies becoming a subject just like math or science!