This is the link to my Wiki: https://sites.google.com/site/engaginamericanhistorysources/
I should say that I have had experience creating wikis and I actually used the one I created a few weeks ago as the major source in creating this one. It gearing up to look almost like the same websites, with one major exception; I created the first website as a resource for teachers, specifically me, and this website is laid out for the students.
The original website can be viewed here: http://engagingamhsources.wikispaces.com/
This website is organized by the common core standards for social studies in the State of Ohio. It is designed as a place for teachers to go to to grab primary sources and lesson plans for their classroom. I imagined using it significantly myself as a place to hold resources that are conveniently organized by the content statement that I will be teaching with more intentionality.
The wiki that I created for this assignment was created more for students. Instead of things being labeled as "Content Statement One or two," the information is labeled as "Big Idea One or Two." This website would also include much more commentary and help for the users and would have assignments to complete within the wiki. For example, I was thinking it would be great to have an assignment where the students must comment on the primary sources page, or follow through one of the lesson guides provided by external links.
I want to add something about the differences between Wiki Spaces and Google Sites. As far as how they function, there is very little difference. I was easily able to jump right into sites and even felt like I had been there before just from my experience with Wiki Spaces. I will say though, that I like the fact that Sites is connected to the Gmail account, which makes the Sites app integrate well with the other apps that will be used in the classroom. So for that simple reason, I think I will use Google Sites in my future classroom.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
Monday, May 18, 2015
Gain: 5/18
Self Grading Quiz
1&2: I looked at the tutorials and our notes on building a self grading quiz and ended up attempting to just follow our notes from class. I was not successful as you will see in this link- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1teTceZEhOodMe6KB5Dl4n_gEFSg0mP-fED2E3HaDYs0/edit#gid=1524502434
I must have missed something in my notes. But I also tried briefly to follow the written tutorials and those did not seem to work for me either. I am going to have to figure this out in class later today because I can't be a very good teacher in the future if I can't correctly administer quizzes!
3: There were two major takeaways that the Graham book offered that I had not considered before the reading. The first was in the area of classroom management and the second was in providing tools for students in research assignments.
First: I had not considered the benefit of having so much flexibility in creating a form. The forms created can serve a number of purposes, but one of those purposes are very unique: using the form to track student conduct. I have been working for Boys and Girls Club for a while now and it would be great to have a form for parents to access to see how their child is doing. We have write ups and gold stars but a form would add a big picture understanding of their child. When this is paired with the grades of the child I believe forms can offer a very unique contribution to the child's education.
Second: Forms can be used to help students gather data for a research assignment. This fulfills Common Core Standards as listed on page 117 of Graham. A student may create their own form and conduct research from it or access another form with data already available. In any case, analyzing data is an essential step to college readiness and a standard that is rightfully enforced.
1&2: I looked at the tutorials and our notes on building a self grading quiz and ended up attempting to just follow our notes from class. I was not successful as you will see in this link- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1teTceZEhOodMe6KB5Dl4n_gEFSg0mP-fED2E3HaDYs0/edit#gid=1524502434
I must have missed something in my notes. But I also tried briefly to follow the written tutorials and those did not seem to work for me either. I am going to have to figure this out in class later today because I can't be a very good teacher in the future if I can't correctly administer quizzes!
3: There were two major takeaways that the Graham book offered that I had not considered before the reading. The first was in the area of classroom management and the second was in providing tools for students in research assignments.
First: I had not considered the benefit of having so much flexibility in creating a form. The forms created can serve a number of purposes, but one of those purposes are very unique: using the form to track student conduct. I have been working for Boys and Girls Club for a while now and it would be great to have a form for parents to access to see how their child is doing. We have write ups and gold stars but a form would add a big picture understanding of their child. When this is paired with the grades of the child I believe forms can offer a very unique contribution to the child's education.
Second: Forms can be used to help students gather data for a research assignment. This fulfills Common Core Standards as listed on page 117 of Graham. A student may create their own form and conduct research from it or access another form with data already available. In any case, analyzing data is an essential step to college readiness and a standard that is rightfully enforced.
Sunday, May 17, 2015
Tech: 5/18, Literacy and Disciplines
Literacy
- My Spelling Test: This app provides help to teachers and students in an elementary school. Generally, it is hard for a student to really test themselves on spelling. Once a student reads the word they need to spell, they are missing out on that push to put a word in their long-term memory. So students need to have someone read aloud the words they are to be tested on. This is the best way for a student to learn how to spell, but it means that the student is not really able to have their own independent learning experience. They are tied down by needing another person to read the words to them. My Spelling Test frees students from that by providing an app that allows the user to create their own unique tests according to what they are learning in class. Either the student or the teacher can simply go into the app, create a new test, voice over the words, and enter in the correct spelling of those words. Having this kind of study aid at hand for a student could be a big step for him or her and not only the area of spelling. Teaching diligence and individual work ethic and study strategies could mean a lot for the student in multiple subjects as well as in their every day life decisions.
- Merriam-Webster: This dictionary app does everything you would want it to do and more. Of course it provides definitions from an uncountable number of words but it also has features like voice recognition if you are trying to figure out how to spell the word, and interesting articles based on the word. For example I checked out the entry for terrestrial and learned that the words terrier and terrace find their meaning in the Latin word, terra meaning "earth." The app also uses the word in various sentences, provides the pronunciation in a playback, and has a "word of the day" feature.
- Educreations: This app gives the teacher an opportunity to create small miniature lessons that can be sent to their students online. You are given a whiteboard with drawing capabilities and the ability to voice over the lesson. A math teacher may simply explain the unit in a terse style with a quick couple of examples. Or a history teacher may use the app by importing an image of a map into the whiteboard and drawing on that to show the lesson There are many ways the app can be used by various teachers but what is so great about it is that the teacher can condense some of the most vital information into a form that can be viewed multiple times by the students and studied outside of class.
- Comic Life: In this app, a student can create their own comic book using the templates and tools that are provided. This app could provide an interesting learning opportunity for the students, especially those who are more visually wired. Instead of writing out a story with only words, the students can create lively comics. The downside is that the app doesn't seem to provide an opportunity for the students to draw, which means all of the images in the comic are going to need to be saved and uploaded onto the comic book. I thin it would be an excellent resource if it just had that capability. But until it has that ability I am not sure what the point is exactly.
Disciplines
Epic Citadel: This app was originally just a level on a potential video game created by Unreal Games. But the game was never created and so now it serves as an aid in a creative writing class. A student can walk through the digital hallways of this epic citadel and use their imagination to create stories in that setting. A useful exercise might be to have each of the students walk through the citadel and quietly jot down some story ideas, emphasizing the details of their story. Then the students could come together and see how their stories all differed from one another even though they were all writing on the same setting. Then the students will have the start of a new story for creative writing and they will have learned something about settings. I believe this app would be fun and useful for students in a creative writing class but I do wish they had more settings.
Shakespeare: I remember reading Shakespeare in high school and really just being lost a lot of the time. It felt like it was difficult to understand what was happening and at times it even felt like I was studying a foreign language. But this app provides a number of aids for the student of Shakespeare. There are an enormous amount of resources in the pro version, but even in the free version of the app, the student has access to all of the works of Shakespeare which is significant in itself. But I really think for this app to make a big difference in the education of the students, the paid version is the best way to go. The paid version lets students highlight any word and get a definition of it. It also provides plenty of studying material for students on Shakespeare's life and the theater environment.
Lincoln Telegrams: This app has a great idea. It provides a list of the telegrams that Lincoln sent in his presidency. It also provides helpful summaries and context analysis of the telegrams. This would be a great app to utilize in a classroom to get the kids to have hands on work with primary sources. The teacher could ask the students to do a short primary source analysis in which they might string a few of the telegrams together and write about what the telegrams reveal. However, the app seemed to malfunction on me, and I was unable to get out of loop of telegrams and there was no way to simply go back accept to go back to the previous telegram. So the app could use some simple programming work but I think it presents a lot of good opportunities for a teacher to use primary sources in the classroom.
Maps of the World: This app provides a series of historical maps that can be studied in the classroom. The maps seem to be taken straight out of old atlases which is a positive and a negative. The positive is that the maps are almost a primary source in that they are made around the time of the events that are being taught. The negative is that there are more interesting ways of presenting the information. But then the creators have also provided a link to the Google Earth locations of the maps as well as a link to the wikipedia entries of the maps. So it really does have other ways of presenting the info, I just think it would be better if the map that had graphics on it was created with more interactive technology.
Your World: This is actually a very addictive learning app. The challenge of this app is to place the countries in their correct location on a globe without using map lines. There is a timer and so even when a student has put all of the countries in place, they can still improve their score so the desire to play again is high. I found that I began placing countries based on their shape relative to other countries like a jigsaw puzzle. This is great because I began to understand even the smallest geographic features of the countries and was even surprised that some countries were so big or were neighbors to countries I did not expect. I believe that an app like this will provide growth for the students not only in their ability to read a map but also in their understanding that the world is much bigger than just the United States.
- My Spelling Test: This app provides help to teachers and students in an elementary school. Generally, it is hard for a student to really test themselves on spelling. Once a student reads the word they need to spell, they are missing out on that push to put a word in their long-term memory. So students need to have someone read aloud the words they are to be tested on. This is the best way for a student to learn how to spell, but it means that the student is not really able to have their own independent learning experience. They are tied down by needing another person to read the words to them. My Spelling Test frees students from that by providing an app that allows the user to create their own unique tests according to what they are learning in class. Either the student or the teacher can simply go into the app, create a new test, voice over the words, and enter in the correct spelling of those words. Having this kind of study aid at hand for a student could be a big step for him or her and not only the area of spelling. Teaching diligence and individual work ethic and study strategies could mean a lot for the student in multiple subjects as well as in their every day life decisions.
- Merriam-Webster: This dictionary app does everything you would want it to do and more. Of course it provides definitions from an uncountable number of words but it also has features like voice recognition if you are trying to figure out how to spell the word, and interesting articles based on the word. For example I checked out the entry for terrestrial and learned that the words terrier and terrace find their meaning in the Latin word, terra meaning "earth." The app also uses the word in various sentences, provides the pronunciation in a playback, and has a "word of the day" feature.
- Educreations: This app gives the teacher an opportunity to create small miniature lessons that can be sent to their students online. You are given a whiteboard with drawing capabilities and the ability to voice over the lesson. A math teacher may simply explain the unit in a terse style with a quick couple of examples. Or a history teacher may use the app by importing an image of a map into the whiteboard and drawing on that to show the lesson There are many ways the app can be used by various teachers but what is so great about it is that the teacher can condense some of the most vital information into a form that can be viewed multiple times by the students and studied outside of class.
- Comic Life: In this app, a student can create their own comic book using the templates and tools that are provided. This app could provide an interesting learning opportunity for the students, especially those who are more visually wired. Instead of writing out a story with only words, the students can create lively comics. The downside is that the app doesn't seem to provide an opportunity for the students to draw, which means all of the images in the comic are going to need to be saved and uploaded onto the comic book. I thin it would be an excellent resource if it just had that capability. But until it has that ability I am not sure what the point is exactly.
Disciplines
Epic Citadel: This app was originally just a level on a potential video game created by Unreal Games. But the game was never created and so now it serves as an aid in a creative writing class. A student can walk through the digital hallways of this epic citadel and use their imagination to create stories in that setting. A useful exercise might be to have each of the students walk through the citadel and quietly jot down some story ideas, emphasizing the details of their story. Then the students could come together and see how their stories all differed from one another even though they were all writing on the same setting. Then the students will have the start of a new story for creative writing and they will have learned something about settings. I believe this app would be fun and useful for students in a creative writing class but I do wish they had more settings.
Shakespeare: I remember reading Shakespeare in high school and really just being lost a lot of the time. It felt like it was difficult to understand what was happening and at times it even felt like I was studying a foreign language. But this app provides a number of aids for the student of Shakespeare. There are an enormous amount of resources in the pro version, but even in the free version of the app, the student has access to all of the works of Shakespeare which is significant in itself. But I really think for this app to make a big difference in the education of the students, the paid version is the best way to go. The paid version lets students highlight any word and get a definition of it. It also provides plenty of studying material for students on Shakespeare's life and the theater environment.
Lincoln Telegrams: This app has a great idea. It provides a list of the telegrams that Lincoln sent in his presidency. It also provides helpful summaries and context analysis of the telegrams. This would be a great app to utilize in a classroom to get the kids to have hands on work with primary sources. The teacher could ask the students to do a short primary source analysis in which they might string a few of the telegrams together and write about what the telegrams reveal. However, the app seemed to malfunction on me, and I was unable to get out of loop of telegrams and there was no way to simply go back accept to go back to the previous telegram. So the app could use some simple programming work but I think it presents a lot of good opportunities for a teacher to use primary sources in the classroom.
Maps of the World: This app provides a series of historical maps that can be studied in the classroom. The maps seem to be taken straight out of old atlases which is a positive and a negative. The positive is that the maps are almost a primary source in that they are made around the time of the events that are being taught. The negative is that there are more interesting ways of presenting the information. But then the creators have also provided a link to the Google Earth locations of the maps as well as a link to the wikipedia entries of the maps. So it really does have other ways of presenting the info, I just think it would be better if the map that had graphics on it was created with more interactive technology.
Your World: This is actually a very addictive learning app. The challenge of this app is to place the countries in their correct location on a globe without using map lines. There is a timer and so even when a student has put all of the countries in place, they can still improve their score so the desire to play again is high. I found that I began placing countries based on their shape relative to other countries like a jigsaw puzzle. This is great because I began to understand even the smallest geographic features of the countries and was even surprised that some countries were so big or were neighbors to countries I did not expect. I believe that an app like this will provide growth for the students not only in their ability to read a map but also in their understanding that the world is much bigger than just the United States.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Tech 5/14
Tech 5/14
1. I worked with the Keynote app and I was very impressed with how user friendly and accessible it was. I am familiar with PowerPoint as I have used it for pretty much all of my presentations and I believe the Keynote app on the iPad may be better in some ways. However I have to say that I am not really able to compare apples to apples here because the version of PowerPoint that I have used is fairly old and I do not know how PowerPoint works on MicroSoft tablets such as the Surface, which I believe would provide a fairer comparison. Nevertheless I was very impressed with Keynote.
To begin with, Keynote was similar to PowerPoint in at least three ways. First, just like PowerPoint, Keynote provides a way of creating presentations that appear on a series of slides. Second, just like PowerPoint, Keynote provides templates that the user can use as a starting point for their presentation. Third, Keynote has the same general layout as PowerPoint, with the slides appearing in on the left of the screen and the slide being edited appearing in the middle.
There are two major ways that Keynote is different from PowerPoint. These two differences are that Keynote is much simpler and more accessible than PowerPoint. Keynote is made to be on a tablet and PowerPoint is generally accessed from a desktop so simplicity and accessibility are certainly points of divergence for these two apps.
Simplicity: There is not a large toolbar or a bunch of lists of themes in Keynote, just a simple list of templates from which to choose. This makes it easy to operate even for someone who is new to this kind of technology. The flip-side of this though, is that there are not as many options available as there are in PowerPoint.
Accessibility: Apple offers an app that can be put on the iPhone for Keynote. Once the app is downloaded, the presentation can be edited and controlled through the phone. There is no need to have a person sitting at the computer clicking the mouse at a signal, just the presenter with their phone or iPad is enough.
I believe the existence of the iPad is the major reason for these differences. Without it Apple would have not had the need to make the layout as simple or as accessible.
2. I don't see a prompt on this activity to reflect on Box.net but I want to say that I like this cloud service. The free version holds plenty of data for documents and it is very easy to organize the folders. My favorite part is how easy it is to make something available offline. There is now need to download a whole extra app to do this, it is a part of the app already.
3. There are a ton of ways that iThoughts might be used in the classroom. I will name three uses for iThoughts. First, it could be used as a lecture guide. If the teacher made one of these for each of their lectures they would have a very logical and flowing presentation where all of their points are tied together. Second, it could be used to help students decide on a research topic by asking a question that leads to another question and so on until there is a web of ideas and topics to choose researching. Lastly, as a history graduate, I can see the potential to use Thoughts in showing the cause and effect nature of history. The teacher might make a mind map per unit that shows the course of events or they could have the students make one for a graded assignment. That would be a much more engaging way of looking at history rather than just thinking of it as a static set of statistics.
4. Safari and Rover
It is hard to compare these two apps because Safari is head and shoulders above Rover as far as being a browser. Safari gives the user a satisfying level of control over their browsing experience, offering a search bar and offline viewing among its assortment of features. Rover is an attempt by apple to provide Flash services through a proxy server that streams live footage from a computer that has Flash. So it is not an alternative to Flash, it is not a true browser, it is Flash through a middleman that is slower and uses loads of data. What makes it worse is that Rover is marketed to schools. If a school used Rover, they would eat through their data plan and use all of their bandwidth on a couple of devices using wikipedia. The only thing that Rover does that Safari cannot do is show Flash content, but I could just never justify that use of data for a school that has budget obligations. There is really no way I can see a school choosing to use Rover if they understand the implications of it.
Safari on the other hand is a very useful and efficient. I can imagine a teacher in a 1:1 system using it very handily by giving students assignments on the internet that they can access offline through the Safari offline viewing function.
So to summarize, Rover is an inefficient and slow app that will eat bandwidth and data. Safari is a clean and efficient browser that offers features relevant to teachers.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Gain: Spreadsheet
Spreadsheets
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MOFTx7FB838rp0bMD_3qYgr9RY6Da4HpTdqbsocAozQ/edit#gid=0
1. So I came into this with pretty much zero experience with spreadsheets. I may have interacted with one in a middle school computer class or something in the past, but I definitely came in pretty lost with a lot to learn. From the material given to us I understood that one could use Google Sheets to find percentages by programming individual cells. That sounded interesting to me but honestly I was still lost after going through the reading. This is really something that needs to be played around with before it can really be understood. So that is how I spent my most productive time in Sheets- playing around with the columns and watching videos to try and understand how it all works.
I was tempted to just give all of the grades a possible total equal to that of its weight so that I could simply add up the scores and have the final grades, but that is really impractical of course (how many quizzes are out of one point?) and this is technology that I think I will definitely have to come back to so I wanted to make some sort of dent in it. So my goal was to get the totals using functions so that I would have the software working for me in some way. I did it by creating extra columns that hold the total for each grading area (assignments, quizzes, etc.) out of one. So that way the total would be a decimal that could be multiplied by its weight and when they are all added up they make the final grade out of one hundred. For example, V2 (Final Grade) had this function in it: =(U2*20)+(R2*45)+(N2*15)+(C2*10)+(B2*10).
So I was able to make it work for me to a certain extent, but I still feel like I am missing a world of information on this. None of it was really easy until I found a method and stuck with it. If I have a question it would be, "what am I missing?" I know I am missing something that would make all of this easier and more practical but I do not know what that is right now. But like I said, this was an initial stab at making a spreadsheet and if nothing else I at least produced what I think are accurate results.
2. This subject was a difficult one to learn about through reading. I learned a little bit of vocabulary and had a little bit more of an idea of what I would be doing but I really didn't start learning about Sheets until I started looking at videos and especially when I started playing with the functions myself. However, I believe the use of Sheets in the classroom was well described and even though when I read the chapter I was very ignorant of Sheets, I still gained an understanding of how Sheets can fulfill Common Core Standards from the reading. Again, Google Drive comes out strong for this app in the classroom. A teacher can create a Spreadsheet and post the link, the students can copy that Sheet and use it for an array of assignments that fulfill technological and mathematical standards. For example, the standards that says, "Show data by making a line plot..." can be fulfilled in Sheets because charts can be inserted into them according to the data that has been entered into the cells.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MOFTx7FB838rp0bMD_3qYgr9RY6Da4HpTdqbsocAozQ/edit#gid=0
1. So I came into this with pretty much zero experience with spreadsheets. I may have interacted with one in a middle school computer class or something in the past, but I definitely came in pretty lost with a lot to learn. From the material given to us I understood that one could use Google Sheets to find percentages by programming individual cells. That sounded interesting to me but honestly I was still lost after going through the reading. This is really something that needs to be played around with before it can really be understood. So that is how I spent my most productive time in Sheets- playing around with the columns and watching videos to try and understand how it all works.
I was tempted to just give all of the grades a possible total equal to that of its weight so that I could simply add up the scores and have the final grades, but that is really impractical of course (how many quizzes are out of one point?) and this is technology that I think I will definitely have to come back to so I wanted to make some sort of dent in it. So my goal was to get the totals using functions so that I would have the software working for me in some way. I did it by creating extra columns that hold the total for each grading area (assignments, quizzes, etc.) out of one. So that way the total would be a decimal that could be multiplied by its weight and when they are all added up they make the final grade out of one hundred. For example, V2 (Final Grade) had this function in it: =(U2*20)+(R2*45)+(N2*15)+(C2*10)+(B2*10).
So I was able to make it work for me to a certain extent, but I still feel like I am missing a world of information on this. None of it was really easy until I found a method and stuck with it. If I have a question it would be, "what am I missing?" I know I am missing something that would make all of this easier and more practical but I do not know what that is right now. But like I said, this was an initial stab at making a spreadsheet and if nothing else I at least produced what I think are accurate results.
2. This subject was a difficult one to learn about through reading. I learned a little bit of vocabulary and had a little bit more of an idea of what I would be doing but I really didn't start learning about Sheets until I started looking at videos and especially when I started playing with the functions myself. However, I believe the use of Sheets in the classroom was well described and even though when I read the chapter I was very ignorant of Sheets, I still gained an understanding of how Sheets can fulfill Common Core Standards from the reading. Again, Google Drive comes out strong for this app in the classroom. A teacher can create a Spreadsheet and post the link, the students can copy that Sheet and use it for an array of assignments that fulfill technological and mathematical standards. For example, the standards that says, "Show data by making a line plot..." can be fulfilled in Sheets because charts can be inserted into them according to the data that has been entered into the cells.
Monday, May 11, 2015
Gain: 5/11 Drawing
Learning to Use Draw
1. There is not a function in Microsoft Office that is dedicated only to drawing, but the drawing functions in Microsoft Word were similar enough to Google Drawing that there was really no difficulty in the actual drawing process. Google Drawing is easy to use and just like the other Google Apps, it is totally set up for collaboration. However, there were a couple of problems I faced when making my drawing, which can be seen at this link... https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1A_EzwLgwFGQlR7tSg5VxmspFR5-8Ergh6_f8tE6OtTQ/edit
The first problem was faced when I tried to insert an image straight off of Google images. It appears that the images feature available in Google Drawing are not updated. They are at least a few years behind. I know this because I created a little celebratory poster for the Ohio State Buckeyes. I typed "Ohio State Football National Championship," and it produced images from the 2007 national championship, not the one that was played on December 13th of this year. It also produced images of former players that have not played for years. This is not a major problem of course, but it meant I just could not really utilize that function and indicates that the search system across the Google Apps might not be as handy as I thought it was.
I faced the second problem when I began to have internet connection problems in my apartment. My work had to come completely to a halt. This is probably the major problem with all of the apps but this was the first time I experienced it in one of our exercises. If I had been working on Microsoft Office, I could have continued working. I probably wouldn't have even known that there was an internet problem. So the cloud saving system is very flexible and mobile, but at the same time, it makes your work fragile in a way.
Other than those two difficulties, I thought the learning experience was very easy and so long as there is an internet connection, the Drawing app is very good and superior to the Microsoft Office drawing functions.
2. For the lesson plan portion of this exercise, I chose the middle school Tangram plan. This provides a few great resources. It provides a video on the Tangram myth, a set of shapes made in Google Draw, a step by step process for executing this in the classroom, and a list of the Common Core Standards that are addressed in this lesson.
This plan would require the students to put shapes together to create objects that appear in the story. It appears that some of the major goals of this lesson are to give the students a chance to work with Google Drawing and learn how to manipulate the shapes. They learn how to flip them and move them around and eventually transfer them into a Google Slide.
This is a great lesson plan that promotes collaboration, careful listening, and use of technology. It is a very clever way for the students to learn in an interactive and fun environment.
3. The chapter on Drawing in the Graham book describes three common core standards that are met with Google Drawing. Honestly some of these seem like kind of a stretch. For example, I am not sure exactly how drawing relates to the Anchor Standard 1 for Reading. To me this means that the standards may be a little more flexible than it would seem. This makes meeting those standards with my future lesson plans a little less intimidating.
The second and third standards are more related to the drawing app. The first one says "Draw geometric shapes with given conditions." It is easy to see how the teacher can meet this statement with ease using the Drawing app. The second standard says, "Interpret information presented visually, orally or quantitatively and explain how the information contributes to an understanding of the text in which it appears." In this case, the statement can be met when the teacher uses the Drawing app to present the information as a chart or graph.
My favorite application of Drawing found in the book is the idea that Graham gives to use the Drawing app as an assessment tool. Student would be given the task of creating a flowchart or poster that presents information that they are then graded on.
1. There is not a function in Microsoft Office that is dedicated only to drawing, but the drawing functions in Microsoft Word were similar enough to Google Drawing that there was really no difficulty in the actual drawing process. Google Drawing is easy to use and just like the other Google Apps, it is totally set up for collaboration. However, there were a couple of problems I faced when making my drawing, which can be seen at this link... https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1A_EzwLgwFGQlR7tSg5VxmspFR5-8Ergh6_f8tE6OtTQ/edit
The first problem was faced when I tried to insert an image straight off of Google images. It appears that the images feature available in Google Drawing are not updated. They are at least a few years behind. I know this because I created a little celebratory poster for the Ohio State Buckeyes. I typed "Ohio State Football National Championship," and it produced images from the 2007 national championship, not the one that was played on December 13th of this year. It also produced images of former players that have not played for years. This is not a major problem of course, but it meant I just could not really utilize that function and indicates that the search system across the Google Apps might not be as handy as I thought it was.
I faced the second problem when I began to have internet connection problems in my apartment. My work had to come completely to a halt. This is probably the major problem with all of the apps but this was the first time I experienced it in one of our exercises. If I had been working on Microsoft Office, I could have continued working. I probably wouldn't have even known that there was an internet problem. So the cloud saving system is very flexible and mobile, but at the same time, it makes your work fragile in a way.
Other than those two difficulties, I thought the learning experience was very easy and so long as there is an internet connection, the Drawing app is very good and superior to the Microsoft Office drawing functions.
2. For the lesson plan portion of this exercise, I chose the middle school Tangram plan. This provides a few great resources. It provides a video on the Tangram myth, a set of shapes made in Google Draw, a step by step process for executing this in the classroom, and a list of the Common Core Standards that are addressed in this lesson.
This plan would require the students to put shapes together to create objects that appear in the story. It appears that some of the major goals of this lesson are to give the students a chance to work with Google Drawing and learn how to manipulate the shapes. They learn how to flip them and move them around and eventually transfer them into a Google Slide.
This is a great lesson plan that promotes collaboration, careful listening, and use of technology. It is a very clever way for the students to learn in an interactive and fun environment.
3. The chapter on Drawing in the Graham book describes three common core standards that are met with Google Drawing. Honestly some of these seem like kind of a stretch. For example, I am not sure exactly how drawing relates to the Anchor Standard 1 for Reading. To me this means that the standards may be a little more flexible than it would seem. This makes meeting those standards with my future lesson plans a little less intimidating.
The second and third standards are more related to the drawing app. The first one says "Draw geometric shapes with given conditions." It is easy to see how the teacher can meet this statement with ease using the Drawing app. The second standard says, "Interpret information presented visually, orally or quantitatively and explain how the information contributes to an understanding of the text in which it appears." In this case, the statement can be met when the teacher uses the Drawing app to present the information as a chart or graph.
My favorite application of Drawing found in the book is the idea that Graham gives to use the Drawing app as an assessment tool. Student would be given the task of creating a flowchart or poster that presents information that they are then graded on.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Gain: Presentations
Google Slides
1. The functions of Google Slides are really very similar to that of PowerPoint. This is really great because most people have some experience with PowerPoint and those acquired skills can be transferred over to Slides very easily. The only real difference in the interface is the toolbar. There are not multiple tool bars in Slides, instead there are lists that scroll down. I really prefer the multiple tool bars over the lists, but that is not the major difference between the two. There are three differences in Google Slides that makes it superior to PowerPoint: Sharing, Collaboration, and Price.
Sharing
It is easy to share Slides so long as you have internet. As soon as a Slide is made, Google provides a unique URL to go with it. All you have to do is copy and paste that URL and the Slide can be shared with anyone. This can be very helpful in a classroom. I could imagine putting the URL to different presentations right in the syllabus at the beginning of a semester for students so that they could go over the lecture notes for an exam.
Collaboration
Just like in Google Docs, Slides let the users collaborate on the same presentation at the same time. They can edit the same material and even use a chat feature. This is an even more useful function in Slides than it was in Docs because generally, presentations are more likely to be a group project than a word document in the classroom setting.
Price
All of the Google Apps are free.
Here is a presentation that I made originally on PowerPoint, but edited today on Slides. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QfyIE57J7-xt7AIF4jU3pqNuCK-XgvdHET6iQOr5tcg/edit#slide=id.p4
I had no trouble at all getting it into Google's format, actually it was already there waiting for me when I went into my Drive account. One of the things I was most impressed with was how easy it was to insert a video. I always seem to have trouble with that in PowerPoint. But with Slides you can just hit the insert tab and select video, which brings you to a search bar that takes video straight off of YouTube.
2. The book details a lot of the ways that Google Slides helps teachers meet Common Core Standards. But a lot of those can also be met by PowerPoint. The area where Slides outdoes PowerPoint is in the 9-12 grade range as described on page 73 of Graham. The high school standards describe using technology to "produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products." This "shared" designation becomes more frequent in high school standards and it is an area of the Common Core that can be very easily addressed with Google Slides. As mentioned above, Slides allows users to collaborate on the same presentation and use a chat function. Therefore students do not need to coordinate schedules or stay after school, they could just work on the assignment from their bedrooms. This makes collaboration easier, which means it can happen more frequently. When I was in high school, collaborative projects were actually pretty rare. But today with Google Slides, it could become a weekly assignment. That is something that appears to be a goal of the continually evolving standards and I believe it will be met by Google Slides.
Tablets in Education Tech 5/11
Tablets in Education
For the first portion of this assignment, I followed Jennifer LaGarde's "Our Nook Adventure." This series follows her experiences with her school choosing the Nook tablet to utilize in the classroom. In this series we see four posts that detail that process and the changing opinions that Jennifer had along the way.
Part One: http://www.librarygirl.net/2010/11/our-ereader-adventure-part-i.html
This post gives a lot of information on the reasons for choosing Nook over Kindle, or iPad. The major reason that Jennifer chose the Nook over those other brands was that Barnes and Noble offered much more support than anyone else would. She believed the support would be a necessity in the transition time. On top of that, the main reason for the tablets was for textbooks and Nook has exclusive rights to certain textbook companies.
The rest of this article explains the exact process they took to activate each Nook. This process was a lot more tedious than I thought it would be but this blog offers valuable advice in how to perform each step of that process.
Part Two: http://www.librarygirl.net/2010/11/our-nook-adventure-part-ii.html
This part is basically an update on what Jennifer has learned about the Nooks. In this part, she describes five things that she has learned so far in the "Adventure." Judging by this post, it seems that there is still a lot to learn about Nooks and that the services provided by Barnes and Noble were not enough for Jennifer to be 100% confident in her ability to operate the tablets. This might be a strike against the Nook, but it seems like Jennifer was not terribly phased by the continual learning process.
Part Three: http://www.librarygirl.net/2010/12/our-nook-adventure-part-iii.html
This was a cool look at how the Nook can change the textbook experience for the students. Jennifer utilized it in such a way that the students could select which books they were going to read. They would be provided a list of books that they could select and after they had turned in their selection the teachers would put those books on the student's assigned tablet. So when the kids came in the next time they had all of the books on their device.
Their was a section after this one that talked about the negative parts of the technology and Jennifer only discussed one negative, the purchasing process was not very practical for them. They had to put their credit card information into each Nook before they could purchase anything and then they had to delete that info and put it in again on another one. If there was some way to purchase all of the books on a computer that was connected to the Nooks, it'd be a much less time consuming process.
Part Four: http://www.librarygirl.net/2011/03/our-ereader-adventure-taking-plunge.html
At this part of the process, Jennifer expressed having a great experience with the Nooks. But the major issue she had with the process was simply that a classroom was not the target consumer for Nook at this time. They were not going to bend on policy or change the ordering system for the classroom. I do not know if this has changed with the eReader market but it seems that iPad has made a focused effort on the classroom. The next three responses are to articles on iPads in the classroom.
iPad Only Classroom: http://www.eclassroomnews.com/2011/06/02/new-jersey-district-plans-ipad-only-algebra-course/?
This article is about a school district in New Jersey that has implemented an iPad only classroom for Algebra I students. They are the first school district in New Jersey to have a classroom like this and they are having great success. 90.5% of students this school district are proficient in Algebra compared to just 60% in non-iPad classes. The success comes from the extra instruction given through the iPad, which gives the students step by step guidance on problems and offers video instruction. If that is not enough to surpass paper, the math app that they have is the equivalent of a 950 page textbook. The iPad is being used with very impressive results in this school district.
Bring Your Own Technology: http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/04/29/bring-your-own-device-catching-on-in-schools/?
This article begins by talking about the benefits of a 1:1 computer to student ratio in a classroom, indicating that the school provides the devices. There are clear benefits to the technology, but the cost is very high. It seems unlikely that school districts across the country will provide technology for their students. But research shows that 75% of student already own a cell phone or smart phone, which makes the possibility of implementing a BYOT rule more reasonable. This is a major issue today in education and eventually it will reach a tipping point, probably in favor of 1:1 through BYOT. The benefits of the technology and the increasing number of students with smart phones seems to indicate that.
iPad Academy: http://ipadacademy.com/about/
This website provides helpful guidance in the technology of the iPad. It is created and led by teacher who has plenty of experience in the technological world. It is set up almost like an online school and the cost for entry into a class is pretty steep (cost for the first class is $39). What I can learn from seeing this website is that there really is a need out there for people to learn this technology. People see that the work and social worlds are changing and they are willing to pay that much for a class on something that they could probably get the hang of if they read the owner's manual or went to an apple store. So what I have learned from this website is that I should make sure I do what I can to learn about this technology (hopefully through a free source).
For the first portion of this assignment, I followed Jennifer LaGarde's "Our Nook Adventure." This series follows her experiences with her school choosing the Nook tablet to utilize in the classroom. In this series we see four posts that detail that process and the changing opinions that Jennifer had along the way.
Part One: http://www.librarygirl.net/2010/11/our-ereader-adventure-part-i.html
This post gives a lot of information on the reasons for choosing Nook over Kindle, or iPad. The major reason that Jennifer chose the Nook over those other brands was that Barnes and Noble offered much more support than anyone else would. She believed the support would be a necessity in the transition time. On top of that, the main reason for the tablets was for textbooks and Nook has exclusive rights to certain textbook companies.
The rest of this article explains the exact process they took to activate each Nook. This process was a lot more tedious than I thought it would be but this blog offers valuable advice in how to perform each step of that process.
Part Two: http://www.librarygirl.net/2010/11/our-nook-adventure-part-ii.html
This part is basically an update on what Jennifer has learned about the Nooks. In this part, she describes five things that she has learned so far in the "Adventure." Judging by this post, it seems that there is still a lot to learn about Nooks and that the services provided by Barnes and Noble were not enough for Jennifer to be 100% confident in her ability to operate the tablets. This might be a strike against the Nook, but it seems like Jennifer was not terribly phased by the continual learning process.
Part Three: http://www.librarygirl.net/2010/12/our-nook-adventure-part-iii.html
This was a cool look at how the Nook can change the textbook experience for the students. Jennifer utilized it in such a way that the students could select which books they were going to read. They would be provided a list of books that they could select and after they had turned in their selection the teachers would put those books on the student's assigned tablet. So when the kids came in the next time they had all of the books on their device.
Their was a section after this one that talked about the negative parts of the technology and Jennifer only discussed one negative, the purchasing process was not very practical for them. They had to put their credit card information into each Nook before they could purchase anything and then they had to delete that info and put it in again on another one. If there was some way to purchase all of the books on a computer that was connected to the Nooks, it'd be a much less time consuming process.
Part Four: http://www.librarygirl.net/2011/03/our-ereader-adventure-taking-plunge.html
At this part of the process, Jennifer expressed having a great experience with the Nooks. But the major issue she had with the process was simply that a classroom was not the target consumer for Nook at this time. They were not going to bend on policy or change the ordering system for the classroom. I do not know if this has changed with the eReader market but it seems that iPad has made a focused effort on the classroom. The next three responses are to articles on iPads in the classroom.
iPad Only Classroom: http://www.eclassroomnews.com/2011/06/02/new-jersey-district-plans-ipad-only-algebra-course/?
This article is about a school district in New Jersey that has implemented an iPad only classroom for Algebra I students. They are the first school district in New Jersey to have a classroom like this and they are having great success. 90.5% of students this school district are proficient in Algebra compared to just 60% in non-iPad classes. The success comes from the extra instruction given through the iPad, which gives the students step by step guidance on problems and offers video instruction. If that is not enough to surpass paper, the math app that they have is the equivalent of a 950 page textbook. The iPad is being used with very impressive results in this school district.
Bring Your Own Technology: http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/04/29/bring-your-own-device-catching-on-in-schools/?
This article begins by talking about the benefits of a 1:1 computer to student ratio in a classroom, indicating that the school provides the devices. There are clear benefits to the technology, but the cost is very high. It seems unlikely that school districts across the country will provide technology for their students. But research shows that 75% of student already own a cell phone or smart phone, which makes the possibility of implementing a BYOT rule more reasonable. This is a major issue today in education and eventually it will reach a tipping point, probably in favor of 1:1 through BYOT. The benefits of the technology and the increasing number of students with smart phones seems to indicate that.
iPad Academy: http://ipadacademy.com/about/
This website provides helpful guidance in the technology of the iPad. It is created and led by teacher who has plenty of experience in the technological world. It is set up almost like an online school and the cost for entry into a class is pretty steep (cost for the first class is $39). What I can learn from seeing this website is that there really is a need out there for people to learn this technology. People see that the work and social worlds are changing and they are willing to pay that much for a class on something that they could probably get the hang of if they read the owner's manual or went to an apple store. So what I have learned from this website is that I should make sure I do what I can to learn about this technology (hopefully through a free source).
Saturday, May 9, 2015
Professional Blogger Post
Professional Blogger Post
For our assignment to comment on a professional blog, I chose Clay Burrell, creator of Beyond-School.org. He has a section on that blog where he provides commentary on classic literature for high school kids. The idea is to make it exciting and relevant to high school students. I chose to read his first post in his series on Gilgamesh. After reading his post I was disappointed. It seems that all of his efforts to build up the story of Gilgamesh also take a swipe at Christianity. He seems to think a lot of Anush in the story and frequently compares him to God, saying that Anush is a better god. I commented on this post, asking Clay how he could have such high praise for a god who flooded the world, not because of immorality, but because the people were being "too loud." To me, Clay does not seem to understand the grace God offers.
For our assignment to comment on a professional blog, I chose Clay Burrell, creator of Beyond-School.org. He has a section on that blog where he provides commentary on classic literature for high school kids. The idea is to make it exciting and relevant to high school students. I chose to read his first post in his series on Gilgamesh. After reading his post I was disappointed. It seems that all of his efforts to build up the story of Gilgamesh also take a swipe at Christianity. He seems to think a lot of Anush in the story and frequently compares him to God, saying that Anush is a better god. I commented on this post, asking Clay how he could have such high praise for a god who flooded the world, not because of immorality, but because the people were being "too loud." To me, Clay does not seem to understand the grace God offers.
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
GAIN 5/4
1. Strengths and Weaknesses of Google Docs over Word
- Strengths
- Items are saved to the cloud. This means that the student can be more mobile, not tied down by hardware. They can save a document at school and open it up in their living room.
- It is very easy to collaborate on a document. Each person can literally write their own piece of the paper on the same document and the participants do not need to be in the same room. On top of this there is a useful revision history tab that keeps track of all changes.
- Google Docs is free.
- Cans be utilized on any device, not just Chromebook.
- Functions much like Word, which is a system most will be familiar with.
- Weakness
- The biggest strength of Google Docs is its major weakness. The fact that documents must be saved to the cloud can be inconvenient and potentially unsafe. For example, yesterday I had to drive to McDonald's simply to access the Google docs account. In regards to safety, anything that is saved to the Google Drive can potentially be hacked. Of course this is a possibility on Word, but there are measures that can be taken to insure that those files are kept safe and these measures cannot be taken by the consumer with Google Docs.
2. Common Core
There are at least three standards addressed in the Graham book that Google Documents emphasizes. These standards are...
- Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach.
- Use technology, including the internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.
- Write routinely over extended time frames and shorter time frames fora a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences. (Graham, 42)
3. Collaborative Document
There were a couple of takeaways I had from the collaborative effort. First, it can be difficult to find an internet connection at times, which throws the whole process for a bit of a loop. This is maybe the biggest flaw with Docs. Other than that I was very happy with how the collaboration worked. Our inputs were very responsive and the interface was a lot like Word, which was helpful since that is what I am most familiar with.
TECH 5/4
Tech
5/4
1. The
tablets that the school uses may be used in a variety of ways, so the ideal
tablet will have access to apps, book, internet, newspapers, video, and
music. The problem is that none of the
tablets offer all of these at the same level and with a low cost. So then the essential pieces need to be
determined.
a.
The most practical use of the
tablets may be simply to use them as an alternative to textbooks. This would save the school money in the long
run and it would make the texts more accessible to the students, while
requiring them to carry a smaller load.
b.
Another issue is cellular
capability. It would be great to have
tablets with cellular capability for students who do not have internet access
at home and for when the internet connection is rocky at the school.
c.
Apps would provide a wide base of
possibilities for use in the tablets for education. Apps would potentially fill in the gaps of
tablets because they are the result of hundreds of niche groups finding very
specific uses for the tablet. Ideally,
our tablet would provide a rich source for education apps.
d.
Magazines and newspapers are
useful in a variety of classrooms so this would also be something desired.
e.
Videos, along with learning apps,
may be the thing that pushes the classroom into the next generation of
education. The internet offers an
abundance of learning resources today through groups like, Kahn Academy and
Crash Course. Videos can become an
important part of the learning process for students as they can simply pause
and rewind the video if they are unclear.
So video capability should be high on the list of requirements.
f.
Music may not need to be as high
on the list as videos because if something is public domain it is usually very
easy to find on YouTube anyway.
2. For
the rest of the assignment, only the larger devices will be considered.
3. IOS
a.
Positives
i.
Has the most apps specifically
for learning and these apps are not available in other operating systems.
ii.
The system is easier to use if
one has not had experience with tablets.
iii.
The apple stores offer some
assistance.
iv.
Offers cellular.
b.
Negatives
i.
Does not come with flash.
ii.
Most expensive operating system
Android
Positives
Can
be used in a variety of tablets (Kindle, Nook, generic)
Barnes
and Noble has exclusive rights to some textbook companies.
The
Nook is the most supported device.
Barnes and Noble staff will come in to the school and train teachers as
well as offer support at any of their 1400 stores.
Kindle
has the most total titles.
Negatives
No
cellular for Nook
Kindles
are not supported in the larger Android market environment
Microsoft
Positives
Has
Microsoft office, which will likely be a familiar system.
Is
something of a laptop hybrid, has a keyboard.
Large
memory space.
Negatives
Largest
tablet (not necessarily bad thing)
Since
it is so close to operating like a laptop, it really will not educate the
students in the use of tablets. If we
want them to learn how to operate tablets, this might not be the best option.
From this article, I learned that the
big factor in favor of Nooks is the support that Barnes & Noble
offers. They will send staff to the
school to train teachers and they will offer face to face assistance in any of
their stores.
http://allthingsd.com/20110718/amazon-tires-taking-the-kindle-to-school-again-with-textbook-rentals/
This article is about ho kindle is
getting into the textbook industry by creating a rental system. This system will charge people based on the
amount of time they will be using the product.
This is an important step for a company that already dominates the ebook
market.
http://www.ipadinschools.com/338/ipad-changing-schools/
The author of this article believes that
the Ipad will do a lot to change education.
He writes about the vast number of education apps available and provides
a number of articles that show how there are many schools moving to use Ipads
in their curriculum.
Uses of Ipads in education
I
learned in this section that the major reason for switching to Ipads is their
implementation for textbooks. On a
tablet, a textbook is cheaper and there are more ways to interact with the
students with the text. I also read in
this article, www.eclassroomnews.com/2011/06/02/newjersey-district-plans-ipad-only-algebra-course/
that a New Jersey district is planning on going to an iPad only curriculum for
their algebra course. They are doing
this because they believe tablets are the way of the future in education and a
way to produce higher achievement.
In this
article, http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2011/05/interesting-ways-to-use-ipad-in.htmlutm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+freetech4teachers%2FcGEY+%28Free+Technology+for+Teachers%29&utm_content=Google+Reader orhttps://docs.google.com/a/tonykrug.info/present/edit?id=0AclS3lrlFkCIZGhuMnZjdjVfNzIxZ2RrNWp0ZDg&pli=1 I learned about several free apps for the iPad that can be used by
teachers. There is Class Dojo, which allows
the teacher to award merits and demerits electronically. There is Remind 101, which is essentially a
texting system designed to give teachers the ability to remind students of
upcoming events and encourage them. And then there is Trello, a project managing app.
4. Cellular is essentially mobile data. This is data that is being used away from WiFi or when the WiFi is not connecting for whatever reason. One can purchase mobile data with a plan that will normally last two years and provide 250mb, 3G or 5G of data. Data can also be purchased on a prepay and postpay plan. The benefit of mobile data is that a student would not have to be near a WiFi source to access the internet. It would be advisable to have cellular if the intended use of the tablets will require the students to access internet, because there are still many students that may not have internet in their homes.
5. The best option in my opinion is to use the Android operating system and one of the tablets in that system. This is a good option because Android is an inexpensive system that has both the Nook and Kindle offered under them. I believe from their the Kindle is the best option. Amazon offers the largest number of books and the renting option puts it over the top as the best choice. Not to mention the Kindle offers cellular service which will be helpful for students who do not have internet in their homes.
Monday, May 4, 2015
Hello! My name is Thomas Hodges and I have just graduated from Johnson University and now I'm pairing my history degree with the MAP program in the hope that I will be a high school teacher one day. I am from Columbus, Ohio, where I began my college career in Fire School. I wanted to be a firefighter for years but when I got the opportunity to teach in Sunday schools and youth groups I realized that I really enjoyed teaching young people. So this pretty exciting! We are on the cusp here! Only 14 more months and we all can fully enter the teaching profession!
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