BLOGGING 210-OVERVIEW OF COURSE

As many of you may or may not have figured out, I named my blogs with numbers at the end. I Started with 101 because blogging was something that I have never heard of, so I used 102 to give meaning to a basic college class. I continued with 102 and 103 and …, using them as the courses became more defined and presumably a little harder. Mid way through the semester I changed to the 200 numbers, almost like I have graduated to the next level of classes. My understanding of how to use blogs have increased at that time, or at least I thought. As I entered this class, with only the expectation of finishing the class to work towards my Master’s degree, I came to the realization that I will need to use this technology that I have learned to broaden the learning spectrum that my students will work towards in my classroom. By no means have I mastered all the tools that have been handed to me, but I no longer consider myself a beginner when it comes to this thing that we call “Technology.” I can work with a PowerPoint, or fiddle with web design. I can try to make a podcast, or design a lesson plan based on using a blog. These are terms that I, with the exception of PowerPoint, have never heard of. My understanding of these terms has grown and with a little more tinkering, I actually will feel comfortable teaching them to my students. Or at least feel comfortable telling my students what we are going to be doing and watch them fly through the assignment doing things that I have never seen before. At least when there is a conversation about podcasting with my students, I can enter the conversation and have a visible understanding of what they are talking about.

At the beginning of the semester I went home to my wife and son and said that I lost and way over my head. I said that I am not a tech person and never will be. They make this technology for certain people to use and I am not one of the people. After a few weeks, I started getting more interested, especially with blogging. I could put my feeling down on the keyboard and get feedback from other people on whether they agree or disagree. Still, for the latter, I could care less, it is a way to express myself. Lately I have gone home and told my wife what I have learned to do with more enthusiasm, I have even peaked her interest in learning how to do some of this stuff. Have I become a “Teckie,” is that even spelled right? I don’t think so, just someone learning another important part of how our society works. And more importantly, how to balance everything that is important to me in my life! As a teacher, a coach, a husband or a father one thing that this class helped me learn more than just computers and technology is that you don’t always need to be the one teaching, you can learn something from anyone. All you need is to have an open mind. Sometimes taking a step back to view the bigger picture helps you see where you are supposed to be headed.

BLOGGING 208

As we near the end of the semester, we realized that we didn’t have the opportunity to get to all the information necessary to complete the class syllabus.  As a teacher, I have also come to the realization that this might also happen in one of my classes that I teach.  While I didn’t learn everything that I wanted about designing a website last night, 5/1, I did learn a more important fact.  Sometimes the student needs to take it upon themselves to teach them a topic to further their knowledge.  I don’t mean give the student a topic and tell them to go learn it, but rather give them a rough draft of the topic and then let the student go explore many different outlooks of that particular topic.  Instead of website design, you could be teaching about rocks.  After you give the students a brief synapses of  what you are looking for , give them an extended homework assignment to make a brief PowerPoint of what kinds of rocks there are, where they are found and how long they have been there, for example.  It’s not always the best thing to do, but it is probably better than doing a sub par job on the next 4 topics.  Picking and choosing, thou it may be difficult, is often a necessary strategy that teachers have to use to get through their content at any point during the school year, especially new teachers like us.  I can’t wait to have some “FREE TIME” to actually sit down and dabble with website design.  I would love to design one for my wife’s Chiropractic office. I think that I got enough information to atleast get me through the beginning stages of a website.

BLOGGING 207- Relevance and Balance

Currently I am taking two classes, EDTS 523 and LITERACY 601, while I am a full time teacher and a full time parent.  This past week, I reached a point where I tried to find relevance and balance with school work, parenting and relaxation due to having a week off of teaching.  For the most part I finished all of my grad work weeks before, so I didn’t need to work on anything during my week off and I could enjoy it with my son.  My problem is that I continue to look at something and change it while it is still in my hands.  I reached a point where I couldn’t think anymore.  This is the reason why this blog is late.  I did think about it, but didn’t know how to put my thoughts down on the keyboard.  All week I told my son that I needed to do a paper or a project as he wanted to go outside and play catch.  When he asked me Saturday, while I sat at the computer, I finally realized what “balance” is.  People need to first, be honest with themselves.  If you can not be honest with yourself, you will be unable to be honest with people that you come in contact with.  Many people think that they have balance, but if you ask someone around you, their opinions may be different.  Don’t get me wrong, I put a lot of effort towards everything I do; but if you don’t take time to enjoy life with people you love, your life won’t be long and definitely won’t be fulfilling.  My advice is make a list of what you need to do every day.  On this list you must have individual time and family time on it, then list the other events in order of importance.  This isn’t a way to procrastinate, but rather to see if you are spending too much time in one area.  This is just my advice.

So as for Saturday, I stopped looking at my PowerPoint for the 15th time and put my son in his car seat and drove to St. John Fisher to watch to watch my alma mater play baseball against Ithaca.  For those of you who don’t know, I played there for 4 years.  Since then I have been a high school baseball coach for the past 10 years as well as a summer tryout scout for the Minnesota Twins.  I also help run a baseball camp for kids 3 separate weeks in Penfield during the summer.  While teaching is my job, baseball and kids are my passion.  So as I took my son to a baseball game, I got to go enjoy a day with my son and show him a little bit of my past and answer many questions that he had for me.  As we did this my headache and stress level decreased.  But most important, I saw a smile on my son’s face that will last forever, or at least until the next time he walks though the dining room with mudding sneakers on.  In this fast-paced technological world you must have balance.  Enjoy life!!

BLOGGING 206

In today’s school, many students are having difficulty sitting through class listening to a teacher discuss a particular topic; and have to take notes on this lesson. All I picture is the teacher in the Charlie Brown TV shows, going waa whan waah. What exactly are the the teachers teaching? And more importantly what are the students learning? Is that what our students are hearing? And if so, we need to incorporate different teaching strategies for our curriculum and our classrooms. One way that I have seen to improve this situation is through PowerPoint, both used by the teacher and made by the students. I think that many of today’s students are visual learners and remember more if they see something and can view pictures as opposed to note taking and lecturing. It gives more opportunity for the class and the topic to come alive. With more student excitement, interaction will increase and class boredom will hopefully decrease. Through the last two classes, I didn’t realize all of the different things that PowerPoint had to offer. I didn’t know that you could add sound or music to it, or change individual cells in it. I have used Jeopardy to help with class review, but didn’t realize that you could put it on PowerPoint, what a great idea! For our project, Peter and I, are going to build a PowerPoint for 1st Grade Math review that will also allow us to interchange different subject and topics into at a later date, depending on what we are going to teach. Here is a suggestion to whoever reads this from class, we should set something up to get each groups PowerPoint so we may be able to draw different ideas for later use. Just a suggestion. We live in a visual world and we, as teachers, must adapt our classrooms to help students learn visually. PowerPoint is just one facet that helps us make this possible.

BLOGGING 205-A Balanced Life

After reading the blog from coolcatteacher and your response, it allowed me to put things into prospective. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that one persons balance of technology might be completely different than another person’s balance. Another thing that I realized, with no disrespect, is that you still have questions about technology and how to incorporate it into your life’s many different avenues. Some of your questions about forests, ponds, camping and walks were based around many of the questions that I had. I just thought, based on your role as a technology guru, that you knew how to balance everything with technology because you have been involved with cutting edge technology for so long. As I look at this issue, many people build the technology that we use every day; and they are OK with that. Many people use the technology that these people develop on a normal basis, but it doesn’t run their lives; and I am OK with that. And there are many people out there that are not interested in new technology, i.e. the people that still use the phone that has the rotary telephone; and they are OK with that. We aren’t asking them to become part of the digital and electronic age. I guess, each individual has to be secure in their own connection with technology and set their own balance to what they feel safe with. As a parent and a teacher we must realize that our children and the students that we teach want to do exactly what we are doing. So if we are on a cell phone in school or while flying a kite, we can’t reprimand our kids if they want to do the same thing. We need to remember that our kids learn what to do by imitating us. So this goes for the use of technology as well. If you live your live through technology, don’t be surprised if your child does to. Life is to short, so we need to make connections that are lasting and memorable and live in the moment. Even though the invention of the cell phone was great and allows us to be in multiple places at once, we lose many memories of what is going on because we aren’t actually in the “it” spot. Don’t allow technology to take over our lives. Don’t allow it to control you. Live your life and enjoy your life. What is a good balance for one person may not be a good balance for another person. Learn, love and enjoy!!!

BLOGGING 204

After working with Web 2.0 and seeing all the interesting things that you can do on it and with it.  Here is another thing you can add. At school today, I received an email from out technology guru about Timelines 2.0.  Timelines 2.0 is a fun, free and easy tool that can be used in the classroom.  This tool can be used in any classroom for any content area and grade level.  This tool allows someone to be as creative as they want to be while sharing and communicating information to whoever is out there watching.  This tool also has the ability to link photos and videos to a timeline about history or scientific breakthroughs in culture.  You can also view how something or someone has changed over a period of time.  The possibilities are endless.  A student or a teacher can find timelines based on categories, tags or even groups.  They also have the ability to create a timeline by just entering basic information and then be able to add events as they pop up.  There is also a way to do this as a group project.  Students can have group discussions about the timeline with group individuals created by the teacher.  Teachers can have the ability to set groups up, even share goals and interests with other people about the group projects.  Students and teacher also have the capabilities to share the timelines with other people.  You simply create a badge to share it with online communities.  Finally there is even a section to discuss timelines, rate timelines and even invite people to check out your timeline.

As we begin our introduction into powerpoints, or a continuation of what we already know, I felt that this might be a great tool to possibly use in a Social Studies class.  It just gives the student another visual that they could see about seeing when certain events in our history took place.  Or in Science, being a forecaster for a week, being able to make a timeline of all the weather events that happened during a day or a week.  On in PE, you could check out improvements when it came to push ups or running time over a period of time. What a great classroom friendly idea that allows classroom discussions to continue and flourish, rather than become boring and monotonous.  Enjoy!!!

BLOGGING-RESEARCH PAPER-WHAT IS THE USE OF TECHNOLOGY IN THE MATH CLASSROOM

As I started doing research on my topic, technology in the math classroom, I began to notice that many of the different strands of technology all dealt with the same thing. So instead of doing research on what software, computers and calculators have helped with the math classroom enter the 21st century, I decided to do the majority of the research on what this technology is actually doing instead of what the technology is. Students needed help with mathematical literacy and competence when it comes to declarative, procedural and conceptual development. Technological literacy tells us whether or not a student has the ability to use, manage, assess and recall the information that they were able to process with the help of technology. In the math classroom, the technology must help our students build and support the three aspects of developing knowledge. Declarative knowledge is any knowledge that is factual. An example of this is 4+4= 8 or the definition of a square is a four sided shape with all equal sides and meet at right angles. Procedural knowledge is explained as how you get from point A to point B. Orders of operations is a procedure that falls into this category. Finally conceptual knowledge deals with the understanding of why the student used certain operations to get a particular answer. As a teacher we need to remember that a student + a computer does not = learning. A student + a computer + an engaged teacher = learning. We need to remember that the teacher is the key, not the computer.

Throughout the research, I found that there are six purposes to support mathematical learning. The most important one is building computational fluency. One must be able to recall answers to basic math facts in order to achieve higher math skills. The FASTT Math program helps developing factual knowledge by helping the student link basic math facts to long term memory. So of a situation that states you need to know where you came from to find out where you are going. Computers that help you find facts are just that, if you don’t know how to use the facts that you found, you won’t be able to process the knowledge and continue the path that you are trying to reach. Development of one knowledge is directly supportive of the next level of knowledge. The framework of mathematics is much sturdier and easy build upon when fluency, literacy and competence are in order.  We need to remember that the person teaching or inputing the technology is more important than the technology itself.  If the teacher is inputing proper material then and only then will a class or a student get the most out of what they are doing.  The other important part of this equation is that the student needs to be motivated to learn, if they are not you will be talking to a blank screen.

BLOGGING 203

Since it is March Madness, arguably the best month for college sports, I figured that I would throw a basketball flare into my blog this week since we didn’t have class this week for a possible topic to discuss.  What I have noticed while watching these games online is something called “Glogging.” One site that I go to quite often is CBSsportsline.com to check all the current scores of all the games that I missed. Recently I noticed that there was section at the bottom of the screen for Glogs. Glogs is short for game logs, which is the latest way for fans to follow games online without having the actual visualization of seeing the game on TV or on the computer. Glogs are available in other sports besides just basketball. Yesterday’s schedule included 3 NBA games, 2 NHL games and all 16 NCAA Tournament games. It is a great way to get the color commentary of the game going on of what just happened and why it will affect the rest of the game. Just like other blogs, there is a bias written by a fan or fans of the two teams playing. It allows fans to banter back and forth about why their team is going to win the game. Glogs are a little different the blogs, in my opinion, Glogs allow you the option of going back and forth quickly with an individual or jump in and join someone’s side in an argument; where a blog is more defining with broader opinions.  It is also used by media people that work for CBS that have extensive knowledge about the two teams playing.  It is a great way to see what happened during the game when you weren’t able to see any of it.  The site allows you to view all the Gloggers or just individuals that you are interested in reading. It also tells you how much time is left in the game when the Glog was left. You can also check out archived Glogs of games that have happened earlier in the year. If you are interested in Glogging, CBSsportsline.com has a Glogging schedule of what game are being Glogged.

Other great possibilities on this site are podcasting and widgets. There is even an advertisement for creating a blog for squarespace.  This was just a little bit something different, that I found that had to deal with new technology for the sports fan out there.  Almost like a public email that allows anyone to comment on your thoughts.  Go Tar Heels.

BLOGGING 202

Evolving uses and expectations when it comes to technology and learning for young students or children is a topic that can change from one instance to another. The value and the impact that technology can have on a child’s development both socially and mentally  can lead to possible connections throughout their early years of their lives.  As I stated before, my son will probably be teaching me different practices and innovations by the time he graduates from 6th grade. Technology will offer him opportunities and connections to the real world that we did not have while we were growing up. At this present time, he plays card games, draws and colors pictures works on his sight words and even works on some addition and subtraction problems. For his fifth birthday a month ago, he received a Webkinz. At first I was extremely cautious to allow him to get online on a sight that I wasn’t familiar with, but after checking it out, we found that it teaches him many valuable lessons. Even more it allows him to interact with his cousins that live 3 hours away. Cooper, his Webkinz, helps teach him responsibility beyond his years, as well as it allows link technology to a topic that he is more familiar with. I can only imagine next year when he goes to kindergarten for the first time that he will have a class project dealing with the Webkinz website or something relative to that situation. We need to remember and realize that technology isn’t going to go away and we need to adapt to it; and if it deals with kids having fun on the computer while playing with a stuffed animal, then that is where technology is taking us. We need to remember they could always be doing something worse.  If you become a victim on the internet you also must remember that you were a participant.  So as a parent or a teacher take your time to become involved and familiar with what you child is doing online.  You never know it may save you a headache or two down the road.  Be active!!!

BLOGGING 201

    After watching Will Richardson’s blogging video and the Frontline video from PBS, Richardson’s video is saying where we can go with the internet.  While the Frontline video is warning us about who is out there watching we we are doing and more importantly what our children and students are doing.  As a parent, I was much more interested in the Frontline video because I would not be able to forgive myself if something happened to one of my students or my child if something happened to them because of the internet.  The one thing that I learned and couldn’t agree with more is the fact that these people that bad things happen to aren’t just victims, but they are participants as well.  The worst thing that people can think is that it won’t happen to me.  These people are just naive.  So as a parent and teacher if you don’t warn kids and parents about what is out there, then you are part of the problem; instead of part of the solution.  In the health class that I teach we watched a video, A Rose for Livy, that dealt with internet predators.  This video was done in Rochester and while it was kind of corny for 10th graders, at least it is getting the word out there about problems on the internet.  Next year I will try to incorporate the Frontline video into the mainstream of the lesson plan.

While I have opened up to new ideas and designs based around the internet, Will Richardson’s video still scares me a bit.  You need to learn about drowning before you get in the pool to learn to swim.  I’m sure he points out some disasters in previous lectures, but I this one everything was full stream ahead.  If you don’t catch up with the internet, it will pass you by “attitude” may work for people that work with the internet all the time, but for student, children and individuals that like “hard copies” of things I think the Will Richardson’s video is a false sense of security.  We need to do this, we need to do that are comments that if we aren’t careful as a society or a community we will be sorry in the long run.

As a parent and a teacher, I guess I am just concerned.  Kids are growing up so fast and with the use of the internet and other growing technology, they are growing exponentially.  How many kids are now bringing cell phones and iPods into the classroom for personal use?  Where are some of these kids learning how to build bombs?  Google earth has even been asked to get rid of the street view because certain people are using this to get valuable information on how to attack our naval bases.  As a teacher, I find too many teachers walking through the hallways with blinders on.  I don’t want the students not to like me or I have to hurry and get to my next class are comments that shouldn’t be heard in schools.  However, they are heard way to often by both teachers, administration and parents.  So if this is reality, what are our children and students going to find or do next.  Fifteen years ago, hats were not supposed to be worn, now it is more common to have one on than not.  Cell phones were a rarity to even have one.  Now it is rare for a student not to text another student during a class.  What will the next fifteen years bring…?  And what will our students be bringing into class or school then…?