ILP #2 - Lynda Course

For my second independent learning project, I decided to complete a Lynda course.
I chose a course entitled "Blended Learning Fundamentals."
The course talked about how to effectively mix a face-to-face classroom with an online classroom
in order to increase student engagement and ownership in their learning. 

It talked about the 4 Ps of pedagogical framework as a way to integrate collaboration, flexibility, creativity, and motivation into the classroom.
Here are my notes on the 4 Ps. I really loved the idea of creating a community of inquiry in your classroom.

Another thing that I loved from this course, was an analogy the leader used comparing a student's investment in learning to renting a home vs. owning a home. When one is renting something, it is only a short term commitment, but when they own something they are deeply invested in it for the long term. He compared this to a writing assignment where you can ask a student to give you a 500 word paper (this is renting. students are only invested in the content for a short period of time. they write the paper for their teacher to get a grade and be done with it.), or you can ask them to create a blog post about what they've learned (this is owning. the students are now more invested in the assignment because it will be displayed publicly on a blog that is theirs, rather than just being turned in to a teacher. they have more flexibility in the format of their writing, so they will be more creative and enjoy it more. 

The Lynda course discussed ways to implement all of the Google Apps into the classroom (Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Forms). This is something I've become familiar with through using them in our class throughout the semester. It was nice to get even more information and ideas on how they can be implemented into work and instruction for a class. He brought up an example of using Google Forms to create a way that students can add data to a collective spreadsheet without having the ability to change other peoples' data. Using the survey format of Google Forms, create questions that prompt students to add their data, then automatically export those results to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. 

How to blend the classroom using mobile devices was also discussed. This is something that applies much more to high school, and especially college classrooms and not something I think I'll use much with elementary students. It was very interesting to think about nonetheless. He talked a lot about screen sharing, and one very cool thing that he brought up was using a tablet as a digital whiteboard; there are apps that will record what you are writing/drawing on the screen as well as what you're saying and then save it as a video. I think this would be especially helpful for math classes because the teacher could then upload lessons to their class sites so students could return to specific examples from class fro help. He also gave some tips on how to record audio/video and then share those videos so a teacher could implement video lectures into their blended classroom. 

Twitter Survey

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Blog9 - Flipped Classroom, Professional Development, and Interactive PowerPoint

The Flipped Classroom
The concept of a "flipped classroom" is very interesting. It is bred out of the blended delivery system for learning, which is a blend of face-to-face learning between teacher and student and online learning between student and technology. A flipped concept takes the elements of the blended delivery system and uses them to set up a classroom environment that is basically the opposite of what would be a "normal" classroom. That being said, a student in a flipped classroom would watch prerecorded lectures at home to familiarize themselves with the lesson content and then go to school the next day and work on practice assignments with the teacher there to guide them through the actual work. The textbook describes this as "The students’ role during their classroom time changes from passive receivers of content to active learners engaged in exploration and discovery..." I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this idea. I do think it sounds good on paper, but I wonder how it would play out in real life. The biggest variable I think would be whether or not the students actually do the homework portion, but I suppose that's something that teachers already deal with in traditional classrooms anyway. I also think that this method would only be affective for later middle school and high school students. I can't see it working very well with elementary students, which the age group I plan on teaching. 
Here's an example of a video lesson for a science class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I95NwUlaHck

Web-Based Professional Development
I started out by google searching "professional development for teachers online" which brought me a lot of results that seemed really good...except for the fact that they were at least $50 and/or required preregistration for a scheduled webinar. Though I couldn't try out the actual professional development modules right now (because of the $$), I found that PBS TeacherLine had a large library of self-paced courses that seem very useful! This resource is something I will definitely keep on the back burner for when I am an actual teacher and can justify spending $50 for a 3-hour online course. The PBS TeacherLine catalog can be accessed here: http://www.pbs.org/teacherline/catalog/

Interactive PowerPoint
I worked on this assignment with Savanah. We decided to use a template for the game Family Feud because it was a game that neither of us had seen translated into a PowerPoint before. My only exposure to interactive PowerPoint games has been Jeopardy. The template we found was so well designed. I was very impressed! I think Family Feud would be really fun to play in the classroom, but maybe I'm just biased because that game show is a personal guilty pleasure. I don't think that it's something you could use in any lesson, though, because it was kind of hard to think of a lot of questions with multi-part answers. So I think it'd just be up to the teacher to wait for the right lesson to come along to use this particular game format.

Blog8 - Technology Advancements, Digital Divide, and PowerPoint

Technology Advancements 
There were two technologies in Chapter 12 that sound really exciting to me. The first was the Handheld Augmented Reality Project (HARP), because I'm familiar with a couple of augmented reality video games that are coming out, but I had no idea about games being developed for educational purposes. I've seen a trailer for an augmented reality horror survival game called Night Terrors, which analyzes the surroundings of your home and then makes crazy/terrifying things happen as you look at your surroundings through your smart phone while trying to survive while there's some sort of paranormal thing coming after you in your house. Obviously this is not appropriate for schools, but seeing the possibilities of handheld augmented reality games is so cool! It's completely immersive and looks so real. I think the possibility of combining math, language, and critical thinking skills into an augmented reality game would be so cool for a classroom. It allows the students to be up and moving and interacting with something, which is a great break from sitting at a desk all day, and it allows them to truly immerse themselves in a lesson. Incorporating this kind of game into a school day will further a child's comprehension of different concepts because they're practicing the lesson in something that feels like real life. The other piece of technology that I loved was the electronic paper. I had no idea this was being developed and when I first saw it, my jaw dropped. It's another eco-friendly alternative to books and printed handouts, just like e-books on tablets, but it can be folded, rolled, etc. and is apparently unbreakable. This sounds great for elementary students who are prone to playing with and dropping things. Electronic paper is cloud based, so you can just change what handout is appearing on each students piece of electronic paper instead of printing hundreds of different pieces of paper throughout the year. I was also blown away by the fact that the price is set to be under $100 once electronic paper hits the market. I hope that doesn't mean its $99.99, because I think this would be awesome technology to have available for each student in a classroom.

Digital Divide
[I was unable to listen to the podcast because CAS was down when I was working on my blog post.]

PowerPoint for Information Dissemination 
I've been working with PowerPoint since I was in third grade, so I consider myself pretty well-acquainted with it. One thing I learned through this assignment and that I'm very glad to know, is how to edit the template within the Slide Master. That was something I'd never done before and it's so helpful to know now. I'm sure that I'll use PowerPoint countless times throughout my career as a teacher. I'm very excited to work on the PowerPoint for interaction assignment that's coming up because that's something I haven't learned how to do with PowerPoint so far.

Blog7 - Bloom's Taxonomy, Adaptive Technologies, Teacher Web Page

Bloom's Taxonomy 
Bloom's Taxonomy is something that has been discussed in many of my classes throughout my time in school. It's a ladder of educational goals with six levels. The first level is "remember," and it climbs to "understand," "apply," "analyze," "evaluate," and finally "create" at the top of the ladder. PowerPoint can be a useful tool to help students excel at each step of the ladder. For the first step (remember), you could create a power point with key terms from a lesson. Each term could have its own slide so that you can focus on the terms one by one and have the students repeat the term back to you a couple times/write it down the term & definition for themselves to memorize each one. For the second step (understand), you can use PowerPoint to display how the key terms fit into the lesson material (i.e. if your key terms are egg, larva, chrysalis, and butterfly, you can show where they all fit into the life cycle of a butterfly). I'll go ahead and continue with this butterfly life cycle example. The next step (apply), can benefit from using PowerPoint by embedding a video of a butterfly life cycle being carried out so students can observe a real life application of the lesson material; a time lapse video would be great because all the steps will be shown and the video will be short enough for students to watch the whole thing without drifting off. Then you could have the students relay the order of the life cycle to you, revealing the steps on your presentation once a student gives the correct answer. For the fourth step (analyze), you could implement a compare/contrast chart into your presentation and fill it in as students describe what they saw in the video as each step was happening, explaining the similarities and differences between what each part of the life cycle looks like. For the next step (evaluate), you could create a series of slides with statements/photos about each step of the life cycle with information mixed up in some of them, so students will then have to analyze each statement to tell you if it's true or false, then use their knowledge to correct the statement if it is false. For the final step (create), you could break the students into teams and assign each team a step of the butterfly cycle. The students would collaborate to design a slide about their step, including pictures and a bulleted list of facts they know about that part of the life cycle. Then put all the slides together into one presentation and have each group present their slide to the class as a review session at the end of the lesson.

Adaptive Technologies 
The world of adaptive technologies to help students with exceptionalities is extensive, and grows as improvements are made to existing technologies and new technologies are created. The podcast mentioned using joysticks for those students whose motor skills prevent them from navigating a computer using a standard mouse. This was something I'd never considered before and I think it's a very interesting solution! Another thing that came up in this lesson that I never considered before was having a braille printer on hand at the school. I've always thought that creating braille was a much more difficult process than just printing it out, so I think it's very cool that creating braille prints for students is something that could happen within the school. The only adaptive technology that I've ever really dealt with first-hand is voice recognition technology. I sometimes use it to text when I don't feel like typing on my phone, so I guess I'm kind of taking something fro granted since it's just a convenience for me, but a necessity for others. One problem that I anticipate with using adaptive technologies in the classroom is having to separate the students who need to use voice recognition in place of typing or text-to-speech instead of reading from the students who are not using those technologies. I worry that it would make the students feel isolated, but they would need somewhere quiet to have the most accurate results from the voice recognition software, and them talking out loud would probably be distracting to other students.

Web Page Design w/ Weebly
I really enjoyed this assignment! Customizing a webpage template is something that I've been doing since the days of MySpace (hahaha) so I felt pretty comfortable with that aspect of this assignment. A couple parts of it were difficult, though. First, having to find decent looking pictures that had the proper licensing for us to use on a public webpage was really frustrating for me. Since this is something I was never really aware of previous to this class, I never knew how limited my options would be for trying to find images that were not privately owned/copyrighted. The other difficult part about this assignment is something that I've run into across most assignments for this course -- coming up with content about a classroom that doesn't really exist! Hopefully having to be creative with that in this course will help me to write amazing blurbs about my classroom once it's real. I also believe that the skills I practiced with this assignment will be very beneficial in my career because I will always need to have a place to keep information for my students' parents, and of course I'll want it to look pretty. I think the aesthetics of a teacher website are becoming increasingly more important as teachers are expected to be more and more computer literate, so I want my parents to look at my website and think I'm a real 21st century teacher!

My site: novaleneb.weebly.com

ILP #1 - Edmodo

My original idea for this ILP was to use Blabberize to make a fun video about Abraham Lincoln. Unfortunately, the website stopped working for me when I was in the middle of saving what I had recorded and it would not reload. So instead of trying to fight with the website, I decided to scrap that idea and give Edmodo a shot. I added a chunk of information that was also on the Weebly I created so I could compare the formats of these two options for class websites. I think I prefer Weebly in a lot of ways, mostly in that it's more customizable so I can create my own look and feel for my class site. A feature I do really enjoy about Edmodo, though, is the ability to post a poll. I think that can be useful in a lot of different applications! I also like that it is a more interactive place, which would be better demonstrated if I actually had parents signed up as a part of my group. I think the ability to comment back and forth on announcements about events, homework, etc. would be really beneficial. I also think that I would like Edmodo a lot more having the opportunity to use it consistently over the course of a school year, rather than trying to fill it with posts in a short period of time.

https://www.edmodo.com/home#/group?id=20071925

group code: rycvm2

Slide Share!

Creative Presentation Slides Design Making from Peter Zvirinsky


I loved the tips in this slide show because it shares some good ideas for getting away from making a run of the mill PowerPoint presentations. One of the very first points it makes is to not use cliche images! I think this is something that might seem obvious once someone tells it to you, but many people don't think about it when they're searching for photos or clip art to put in their presentations! Don't use something that's one of the first five results because more than enough people have used that image already. I also really loved that it said to use a non-traditional background for your slides. I think a lot of people (myself included) never think about this because it sounds like a kind of risky thing to do. I loved the suggested of using an image of a blackboard as your slide background; I thought that was very cute!