Thursday, March 31, 2016

#9: "The Flipped Classroom," Web Resource, and PowerPoint Interaction!!

A flipped classroom is an instructional teaching design that differs from a traditional one in a variety of ways. A flipped classroom delivers learning material by utilizing technology in an engaging and productive way for students. Students will typically engage in watching online lectures, collaborate in online chat rooms, or research material at home and engage with a mentor in the classroom. It provides students with a more learner based in depth learning style. Typically, teachers will create or play third party videos from the web instead of lecturing. Here are some links teachers might use for their flipped classroom:




I found a really cool web based resource for teachers to use with their students to learn about women's suffrage for Women's History Month!! I found it under teacher resources on Scholastic's site. I love that when a teacher clicks on the activity it gives them the learning objectives with an outline of what is in the activity!! The activity is an interactive website that gives students credible information on the history of women's suffrage and the story of an amazing woman from that time.



Here are the links:




For the PowerPoint Interaction project I found an online template for the popular game "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" I absolutely love the template I found!! The creator made it really easy to use and fun and interactive for kids who would be playing the game. It was really simple to go add in any information for the type of questions I wanted to put in and it was easy to make changes to the layout. The only thing was I would have liked was for some of the transitions to have been smoother and for there to have been more audio and music already in the presentation template.




Tuesday, March 22, 2016

#8: Gamification, Digital Divide, and PowerPoint for Information Dissemination Project!!

For elementary education, I believe gamification is the technological advancement that holds the biggest promise for education. With gamification, game elements can be added to instructional material to "increase motivation and interactivity, encourage creativity, and deepen understanding of content" (Teaching and Learning with Technology 288). I think those three things are key to getting an enriching education and gamification is the best way to go about that, especially with elementary students. Kids love games and to tie that to education makes learning fun and more interactive for them. My favorite game the book mentioned that I may want to use in my classroom is called the World Peace Game. "This multilevel board game creates an environment in which students representing different countries must achieve world peace despite conflicting views with minimum military intervention" (Teaching and Learning with Technology 288). The book further states this allows students to gain "critical thinking skills" along with "a global political perspective" which are key elements for anyone living in the modern world today.

I stand with being really sensitive to the digital divide. Especially as a teacher, I want to treat all my students fairly and give them all equal opportunity and access to a high quality education. Even if only a few of my students are on the less fortunate side of the divide, where they have poorer access to computers, internet access, etc. I want to implement most of the technology we use together in class, that way students can learn how to properly and effectively use it. As far as homework goes, I would rather assign hard copies of assignments, unless I know all of my students have equal access to the technology they need for it.

I honestly had a lot of fun making my PowerPoint for the PowerPoint for Information Dissemination Assignment. I did my PowerPoint on Marine Life and I loved adding in all the cool pictures of animals and editing them with animations. Before this assignment, I had no clue all of the features PowerPoint has to offer!! I loved learning how to crop out the background of pictures; I learned how to keep the pieces I wanted in it and crop the pieces I didn't want out of the picture completely. I want to use PowerPoint as a photo editor from now on!!


Tuesday, March 15, 2016

#7: PowerPoint to Support Learning, Adaptive Technology, and My Weebly Page!!

As a teacher, I would use PowerPoint to support my students' learning at each level of Bloom's Taxonomy in specific lessons. Let's imagine I'm creating a PowerPoint on a lesson in music theory. For "Remembering", I would create a slide that presents a diagram or picture of notes on a scale, then I would ask my students to recall the note names as they previously learned them. I could also present this in the form of multiple choice questions on a slide and have the students submit their answers on iClickers. For "Understanding," I would need my students to make connections to "real world" situations, so to do this I would attach and play a YouTube video of a popular song, one that my students would be familiar with, and have them identify the key signature and time signature the song is in. For "Applying," students should be able to apply what they learned, so I would have an interactive slide, with a picture of a treble staff, where students could come up to the SmartBoard, and when I ask them to write a short melody in a certain key signature, they should be able to do it correctly. For "Analyzing," students should be able to analyze a work and connect it to what they learned, so for my music theory lesson, I would have a slide with multiple songs attached on one side, labeled with numbers, and multiple choice answers of key signatures, labeled with letters. I would then have my students anazlyze each song and then have them match the song to the correct key signature. For "Evaluating," I would have a slide for students to use their iClickers to vote on which song, out of the ones they listened to, was their favorite, and then have a class discussion on why they think their favorite was their favorite based on music theory terms. Lastly, for "Creating," I would make a slide with clear instructions for the students, together in groups, to write their own song. Then I would have them play it for the class and record them on my computer.

Adaptive technology is pretty literally what it sounds like. It is technology modified to meet and assist the needs of those with special needs. Some prime examples include word processing (to assist those with trouble holding a pencil or writing on paper), concept mapping (to assist those who need a visual presentation of how concepts connect to each other), word prediction (to assist those physically impaired who may have difficulty with typing keystrokes), recorded books (to help auditory learners or possibly people who are blind), high interest low level books (to assist those with lower than average reading levels), and many more!! Teaching and Learning with Technology also mentions Apple's iBook app, which I love because it has so many amazing features like the speak selection feature, the define option, multitouch textbooks,  and iBook Author for teachers. I think all adaptive technology is amazing and completely necessary in today's education system. The only two challenges with it for us as teachers is learning how to use it correctly ourselves to better benefit our students and having multiple forms of technology in our classrooms at once, which could get a little hectic at times.

In the Web Design Assignment I learned a lot about how to better design a classroom webpage! I learned how to create a page format, how to insert pictures as page backgrounds, how to insert calendars, and much more! I think I want to create more websites using Weebly in my future career.

Link to my Weebly site: http://kaitsclassroom.weebly.com/


Sunday, March 13, 2016

Learning Project 1: Option (2): "Design": Prezi: "Charlotte's Web"

For my learning project, I created a Prezi based on the 2nd grade CPALMS standard: 

"Describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges."

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Slide Share: Presentations We Love!!

I really love the message behind this presentation. The slides really capture your attention and are to the point with information. I like that they focus on a critical issue and include questions about it. For presentations you really want use a lot of pictures, diagrams, and videos with only a few words that are colorful and bold to capture attention.