UEN Reflection

I was impressed by all that is available to both teachers and students for free on UEN.

The pioneer library will provide great tools for lesson plans with the images, videos and articles available. If I have media time in my classes or take trips to the media library, I will have them search SIRS for content for essays or culturegram for ideas for papers. I'm glad that it provides a safe and relevant atmosphere for kids and gets them really using the technology without just consuming it.

The lesson plans are a HUGE blessing because other teachers have a lot of good ideas and I will definitely be utilizing those by tailoring them to my students. What will be even more helpful are the rubrics for activities, because why spend forever trying to create a rubric if it's already made for you?

The Core curriculum will obviously help keep my lessons centered on the core so that I know what needs to be taught. Of course I will be referring to it often, especially in my first few years as a teacher in writing my lesson plans.

Finally, The Interactive activities are a brilliant way to provide game-based learning, especially with subjects that can easily be boring like spelling, grammar, and vocab. I would try and get media time during the week in my school so my students could utilize these.

Here is the Link to my UEN Page

Internet Saftey Reflection

I think it's important as educators to help kids know about internet safety and cyber ethics, especially as an English teacher where I'm going to be requiring my kids to do research on the internet for papers and things. There seems to be this attitude of "anything goes" on the internet, and although I believe in free speech and the internet being open and free, I think kids need to know that just because people can do things on the internet, doesn't mean they always should. One thing I'm going to really stress is that the despite the appearance of privacy, much of what you do or post on the internet is open to the public, it's not a "what happens on line stays online" policy. I want them to know that by posting inappropriate pictures, saying hurtful things, or engaging in inapropriate relationships online, it can very easily be tracable or come back to haunt them in some way. Cyber bullying is especially dangerous because it creates the illusion of being able to be a sideline critic of people without facing them, but kids need to remember that what they say still reaches a person and can have lasting effects.

I think I could address it in my class by talking about it before we did research for a paper. I would direct them to sites I knew would be safe and take about safe search practices. I would also careful detail the meaning of plagerism now with wikipedia and sparknotes and papers online.

I think in an english class, when discussing the writing of informational texts, it would be a great opportunity to have the students create a flyer or broschure as a concrete oporational way of really getting the importance of internet safety.

Volunteer Reflection

- I spent a total of seven hours at Lindon Elementary helping the students with creating digital stories.

- I learned that many of the students were very comfortable using the technology. A few times when I couldn't figure out a problem, particularly with the audio, the student would say, "Maybe try this.." and it would work. They were all highly motivated because each story was their own idea and they had free rein on how to present it. It wasn't like it was work, more like they were having fun.

- I learned that with my own tech skills, I know enough generally that if something doesn't work exactly how the instructions indicate it should, I can usually find my way around it. I also learned that I have been so conditioned by interactive technology that I get frustrated if I can't drag and click something or if a program is not as intuitive as I feel it should be.

-2 tech related goals: put all of my important files on drop box, and design my own professional website for my art.

TOOLS

Here are some of the ways I want to implement Google tools into my teaching-

Google Images, Google Video, You Tube:
I would use Google images in descriptive writing lessons by pulling up an image and having the students describe them in writing, like the following:I would also use image and google video to help illustrate lessons like helping kids get a better understanding of Shakespeare. I'll be careful about you tube, because I know several districts don't allow it.

Google Maps and Google Earth:
I think I will actually use these a lot in pointing out where a story takes place. Often times this is very helpful in understanding a story. For example, when reading a slave narrative, I could show students where ocean slave routes were, or getting a picture of the distance escaped slaves would travel to have to get north would be helpful. Also they would be helpful in getting a more clear picture of a different culture in a story.

Google News:
For my students, I can use google news to look up current events. I want to have a class discussion every week about current events and google news can provide a quick reference if I said I wanted students to look up information about the middle eastern revolutions, they could easily look up the content without having to wade through a bunch of irrelevant other stories. I could use it personally to keep abreast of things happening in education, especially legislation.

Google Translate:
I would use it as I prepared lessons so I could look up some words in Spanish (or whatever other language my ESL students spoke). I think it would be most beneficial for my students though, as we would be reading literature that would be new to most all of my students, especially those ESL students, in understanding the vocabulary and the context of the stories. For my ESL students I would give them vocabulary words to take home and look at using google translate.

Google Books and Google Scholar:
As an English major, I already use google Books and Google scholar quite frequently to find references and articles for papers. I would help my students do the same, especially when teaching about essay writing. I love google books because you can search directly for words or phrases to use for sources and Google scholar will be important for my students in learning the difference between an academic source and one from Wikipedia.

Blogger, Google Reader, Etc:
I will honestly probably use blogger the most to keep in contact and post things for my class, even more than a class website, just because it's so simple and straight forward and gives students a forum to be able to easily post ideas and assignments. Checking out peoples blogs is one of my favorite hobby's, especially art blogs because you get to see what creative people are doing all over the world. I'm always checking the personal blogs of artists like Pixar animators, because it gives an intimate look at the process behind their craft. I'm excited to show my students how to search for blogs that interest them and how to keep track of their favorite blogs with google reader. Their are so many cool things available to students on blogs, from career information to crafts to fan-fiction, etc.

Google Calender:
I've used iCal before and I like that google is pretty much the same only you can access it from anywhere, and I like how detailed you can make it with all the little separate calenders and to-do's and reminders. To be honest though, I probably won't really use this accept on my class website for my students. I think it will be great for my students to be able to see what the schedule looks like and important reminders from home. Until I get an iPhone though, it takes too long for me to type all my to-do's and appointments, and I can only check it when I'm at a computer. Right now I'm more of a day timer pen-and-paper kind of guy, as it just seems a little more practical for my lifestyle right now.

Google Docs:
This is by far one of the coolest things I have found in a long time, being able to create documents and access them anywhere. I wish I had learned about it a long time ago because it would have saved me many hours emailing and going back and forth between computers! I am very excited to teach my students about this if they don't know about it already and will probably suggest that they do their papers on google docs so that they're always available. The presentation option is awesome and I will definitely have my students use that for book presentations rather than the old book report.

Google Groups:
For my other tool I would like to try and get my students into Google groups so they could collaborate on group projects at home and easily communicate and share all their information.

Picasa Slideshow

These are pictures of the 5 things I am most afraid of. Actually, I left out #1, Japanese ghost girls, because they are just to scary to post.

This is the first post on the blog! Woot! (the word "blog" sounds kinda gross to me. Doesn't it come from web-log?) Anyways, here's a picture of me painting my baby's room!