Blog Post 16

Final Part Blog Post #5

My personal learning network has grown so much! At the beginning of the semester, my PLN was not organized. After the first part of this assignment I created a Symbaloo account. I now have a lot of resources. I have started following more educational blogs. Also, I follow different school systems. My personal learning network has grown so much, and I would not have had any idea on how to organize it without Blog Post 5.

Blog Post #14

After reading Teaching Our Children Can be A Profession by Joel Klein, I realize that there are many problems with school systems. In the article, Mr. Klein lists several of these issues and some solutions to the problems.

Problem: Teachers need better training
Solutions:
Better academic training
Recruit from the top third of the graduates
Create a national teacher examination
Require a supervised internship for 1 to 3 years
Problem : Seniority should not exist in the school system and teachers be rewarded based on merit
Solution:
Create merit –based careers ladders and would be promoted based on specialty exams
Establish standards to remove incompetent teachers
Give teachers showing true mastery college graduates as teaching assistants

In my opinion, teachers are held to a higher standard than most professions but often are not respected. Many people think that teaching is an easy profession and that is probably where the problem starts. Mr. Klein makes several good points on how we can work to make teaching more professionalized.

He suggest that teachers get better academic training. I totally agree with him. I think that teaching is something that takes experience to become good at and that students should get more of training before they are set free in their own classroom.
Mr. Klein thinks that employers should recruit the top third of graduates. I agree with this because it would make students to strive better academically. I would not want a doctor advising me if he made C’s just to get through med school. I definitely would not want my children to be taught by someone who skimmed their way through school.

Albert Shanker thinks that we should create a national teacher exam. I disagree with this because anyone can pass a test but still not have the passion to teach. Creating more test does not prove anything. If anything I think more training would help and requiring supervised internship 1 to 3 years would be great.

In the school system, once you’re tenured usually it is impossible to fire you. Klein suggests that instead of rewarding teaches based on seniority, we should reward them based on performance. I do agree with this as well. Just because a teacher is new does not mean he/she cannot perform better than the teacher that has been there for several of year.
Shanker suggests that standards should be in place to remove incompetent teachers. I agree with this because if a teacher is not performing to a certain standard they should be removed. Also, he suggests that teachers who show true mastery should have college graduates serving as teaching assistants. I agree with having teacher assistants but not college graduates. I think that would cause some kind of controversy in the classroom between the two.

Joel Klein and Albert Shanker made great points that can improve teachers. I found this article very interesting especially reading the solutions .It would be wonderful if some of these things actually happens.

C4Ta#4

Idea #7: The Meaning of Life

In this blog Mr. Karl Fisch was asked at the end of the semester by his administrator “to think over the summer about some "big ideas" that would be worth discussing that could improve our school.” This is idea #7. Mr. .Fisch wrote a letter to the administrator. In the letter he stated that “we currently spend a lot of our time with curriculum that we claim is preparing our students to live well, but we don't devote much time to helping them figure out how they want to live or how they define living "well." He suggests an advisory class for each student for all four years at AHS. The advisors purpose will be helping students figure out where things are, how things work, who to ask for what, and how to be successful at AHS, how do they want to live, what does it mean to be successful, what's most important to them.

My Comment: I am a student in EDM 310 at The University of South Alabama. I enjoyed reading your blog. It is a great idea to have advisors helping the students from their freshman to senior year. I know when I was in school the only time I really remember talking to a guidance counselor was the end of my junior year and some of my senior year. I wish I had the opportunity to have an advisor for four years. I hope that the administrator approve your requests.

Idea #8: Community Service
In this blog Mr. Karl Fisch was asked at the end of the year by the an administrator “ to think over the summer about some "big ideas" that would be worth discussing that could improve our school.”This is idea #8 .Mr. Fisch states that community services is a component and he thinks that it is essential to their high school. He sees to main parts community and services. Community is focusing and serving the community and service is focusing on serving the wider community outside of AHS.
For serving the community of AHS, he envision a Link Crew. The Link Crew will have all AHS students on the "community crew," but with Senior leadership. The teachers would pair up two (or perhaps three) Seniors with a crew of 6-8 underclassmen who would work together, along with other teams, to keep Arapahoe clean and in good shape. The custodial committee would be a mentor to the crew. When crews aren't on duty for taking care of AHS, they would instead be serving the wider community.

My comment : I am a student in EDM 310 at the University of South Alabama. I enjoyed reading all nine ideas to improve AHS. All of the ideas are great. I think by having the Link Crew the students would take more pride in their school since they are the ones who are cleaning it. At my school it wasn’t required to do community service. I wish I did have the opportunity to help the community.

Blog #13

Find 5 websites that teachers can use to create blogs in the classroom. Give a brief description on other ways it will be useful in the classroom.

1.School Rack

On School Rack teachers can :
*Share information, documents, and files
*Hold discussions online, outside of class
*Report grades online to students or their parents
*Keep in touch with private messaging
*Create a free classroom website
or educational blog

2.KidBlog

Kidblog provides teachers with the tools to help students publish writing safely online. Students exercise digital citizenship within a secure classroom blogging space. Teachers moderate all content, so nothing goes live until you say so.

3.Weebly

*Easily create a classroom website & blog
*Manage your students' accounts
*Accept homework assignments online
*Keep your parents up to date

4.21 Classes

Teachers can run their personal blog and post stories and review comments. Using the classroom functionality, teachers can create accounts for their students to read and/or comment on those stories. With their comprehensive access control functionality, access to such an account can be completely restricted, so that only logged-in students can view the content. Also, students can be divided into multiple groups, where the teacher can allow specific groups to have read access to a particular story. Finally, any comments made by students can be moderated.

5.Classchatter

Classchatter.com permits a free blog to the teachers and the students with some useful features. It provide teachers with the tools that support online blended learning classroom management. Teachers can create journals, conduct discussions, assign assignments and even grade the assignments. The blog environment is secure and the teachers get good options to choose the tools that suit their requirements. However, the free version of classchatter does not support upload of audio or video files.

Project #12 B

Blog Post # 12

Blog Post # 11

What can we learn from these teachers?

In Brian Crosby’s video Back To the Future, I learned many things about teaching. I learned that teachers should empower students to become learners. Kids want to learn and we should expect high quality work from them. Students can connect to the world through blogs. Mr. Crosby is trying different technologies in his classroom to make learning exciting. Lastly, teaching is about making students go beyond expectations.


Blended Learning Cycle is a video about blended learning and the learning cycle. In blended learning you take online, mobile, and classroom learning and put them together as a way of teaching. Secondly, is the learning cycle. The learning cycle consist of the five E’s: engage, explore, explain, expand, and evaluate. The blended learning cycle started by a driving question or something to get the students engaged to what you are about to investigate. The teacher creates a video for the students to watch independently on a particular assignment. Then, he reviews with each student before they take a quiz on what they learned. If any students fail he gives them the opportunity to go back and elaborate on the assignment. I think this approach is a good way to make sure the students are learning what they are investigating. I love the way that the students do this assignment independently. It makes the student pay close attention because they need to know the information in order to pass the quiz.

Making Thinking Visible is discussing small groups and how they are a great way to learn .The students had to make a headline for an upcoming project. At the end the students were asked how the headline was going to change after working in the project .It is important to let the students know that their opinions can change after working towards something and that is okay.


Super Digital Citizen is a great video. Mr. Pane fifth grade classroom were learning how to be good digital citizens This video was cool because students were able to design a superhero who would become their super digital citizen .In this video I learned it’s important to discuss online safety with my students. Students need to know the difference between negative and positive information online.


In Project Based Learning three teachers worked together to collaborate three different subjects. The teachers took an idea that they thought would benefit their students to their administration and they agreed to it. This is my first time seeing three different subjects being put together. One main thing I learned from this video is that sometimes you need to think outside of the box to make learning effectively and that the sky is the limit when trying to approach different ways for the students to learn.

In Roosevelt Elementary School, students were doing projects that involved other subjects as well. I learned that using PBL gives students more ownership over the project. Technology is great but having the students collaborate and learn together is greater.

C4Ta#3

What About Snapchat?

Summary
In this blog Mr. Dean Shareski talks about his 15 year old daughter using Spapchat. Mr. Shareski talks about how parents tell their children to protect their privacy but as soon as Snapchat was invented parents did not want their children using it. He stated that when images are shared Snapchat sends an alert to the user. Mr. Shareski created a video that shows 5 different things for 5 seconds and posted it to Snapchat.

My Comment:
Hello! I am a student in EDM 310 at the University of South Alabama. I really enjoyed reading your post about Snapchat. I am very unfamiliar with Snapchat so I downloaded the app and my 7 year old neighbors are helping me use it. I thought the 5X5 videos were very creative.




What Educators Should Tweet About?

Summary
Mr. Shareski stated “I have no idea what educators should tweet about.”He created a list on the things that they can tweet about :
1. Post random song lyrics.
2. Get people to do challenges at live events.
3. 3. Play name that tune.
4. 4. Request sandwich drop offs at airports.
5. 5. Post your naps using #napchat.
6. Besides sandwiches, you can ask people to bring you food at conferences.
7. Play hashtag games.
8. Find people’s phones and take random photos with them.


My Comment

All the suggestions on this list is funny. I think this is a great way to bring out the inner kid in everyone especially getting people to do challenges at live events. I laughed the entire time while I was reading this post.

Interview Movie Project #10A

                  Teacher Interview With Ms.Dana Craig of Gulf Shores Elementary School

Special Blog Post Assisgnment

Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs provides a list of useful tools on her website Curriculum 21.

Rubistar

Rubistar offers many different rubric templates to help create your rubric. Rubistar has options where you can save your rubric for future use. As a teacher, I would use Rubistar as a guide to help create rubrics for different projects in my classroom.

Keyspace

Keyspace is a touch typing program that help students learn how to type without looking at the keyboard. Since we will be using a classroom blog, this program would be helpful in my classroom to help my students learn how to type.

Visual Thesaurus

Visual Thesaurus is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus that creates word maps that blossoms with meanings and branch to related words. I thought this would be useful to help expand my students vocabulary.I thought this websites was cool.

Storybird

Storybird is a free tool where you can create visual stories. There are millions of writers on storyboard. Storyboard is one of the largest storytelling communities .There are families, teachers and students who have created stories on Storybird.I would use it to improve my students writing skills and to let them use it to be creative with stories.

Popplet
Popplet is a tool for Ipads. This app helps to organize ideas. One of the testimonies on the websites stated “We are proud that Popplet is helping the new generations of digital natives to emerge skills in organizing.” I would use it to create graphic organizers and timelines.

Lightspeed

Lightspeed is designed to safely, easily managed school networks. This is great to use so that the schools can manage the internet use of students.

Blog Post #10

In the video Little Kids…Big Potential , students are discussing what type of technology is used in their first grade classroom. The students in this video are very engaged in technology. Mrs.Cassidy has a blog in her classroom. Another form of technology used in her classroom is Wiki. When the students need to learn about a certain topic they use Wiki.

In the skype video Part1 , Part 2 and Part 3 Dr. Strange interviewed Mrs. Cassidy. I really like the idea that they discussed about why they have class blogs. I would love to use a class blog in my classroom. Before EDM310, I did not know much about blogs. Mrs. Cassidy discusses how the classroom blog allows her students to be tuned in with technology. Having a classroom blog is very beneficial to the parents so they can see what their child is posting. I like how in the third video she mentioned online safety for elementary students. To deal with this issue, I would put emphasize that the classroom blog is for educational purposes only and no full name of their children will ever be posted on the blog. Some of the positives this could bring to my classroom is better writing skills, a way students can show their work to the community and a place to store memories from the classroom.