MACUL

On Friday my fellow teaching interns and myself attended the MACUL(Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning) conference in Grand Rapids.  At the conference we got the opportunity to attend 3 different session and to explore the vendor area.  While I was initially not looking forward to the drive to Grand Rapids I found that it was a GREAT use of my time.  I loved learning from the presenters not only more about their chosen topic, but also more about presentations in general.

One of the presentations that I was really looking forward to was the presentation about Pinterest in education because Pinterest is a site that I already use on an everyday basis.  Unfortunately I ended up being disappointed by this presentation because it focused too much on the how-to of Pinterest and not enough on the application in education.  Also while knowledgeable about the ins and outs of the website, I thought that the technical difficulties that the presenter often ran into with Prezi and with the site itself detracted from the presentation.  Also because the presenter was a Kindergarten teacher the presentation was geared toward Kindergarten examples.

On the whole, the Pinterest presentation only solidified my understanding for how to use the website, but it did not further my understanding to new ideas about how to use Pinterest in the classroom.  

My favorite presentation was the Lightning Talks that I attended last in the day.  Not only was it inspiring as a teacher to hear stories about connecting to colleagues and inspiring our youth, but it inspired me to have my students use a variety of different presentation styles.  I could challenge them to explain a concept in 30 seconds or less, they would have to script it out to ensure that they did not go over time.  Not only would it be a good way to change things up for my students but it would make presentations more engaging and increase the likelihood that my students are actually listening to each others presentations.

The most surprising aspect of the conference for me was the vendor area.  It was really informative to go around and see what the upcoming trends are related to education and technology.  Not only was I able to see what the vendors were trying to sell, but I was also able to get the contact information for companies that hire teachers to teach online.  

All in all this conference was well worth my time and driving and I would love to attend more conference like this one.  This was a field trip that should be kept in the 504 calendar for MAC’ers to come.

My Ideal Classroom, Revisited

Technology is not a huge part of my placement classroom.  However I feel like my experience so far in the field has helped me to form a more concrete vision of the kind of classroom that I would love to have, at least in terms of the available technology.  This was the topic of our first Educ 504 class, and I feel more able to discuss it now.

My ideal classroom would not be extraordinarily fancy by any means, there are just a few gadgets I think could really benefit my students.  Fun gadget number one that I would want in my ideal classroom is a document camera. (Side note: I am super pumped because my placement classroom is about to get one!)  A document camera can be useful in a science classroom for a variety of reasons, the first of which is demonstrations.  It would be SO much easy to demonstrate smaller phenomenon for my class if I knew that they would be able to see it!  This could also be useful for diagrams, because I like to do some of my notes on the board instead of in power point it would be nice to use the document camera to show students diagrams and not put them through my not so artistic rendition.

Another helpful piece of technology that my students could benefit from would be a laptop cart. I don't think my students will need to have computers everyday, but access to a laptop cart would make activities such as making graphs for a lab report, or doing online lab simulations so much easier.  This technology would only be ideal however IF it worked at a reasonable speed.  I hate how some school laptops are so slow that they are hardly worth using.

Finally I would like to have the basics in my classroom, a white board (preferably more than one) and a projector.  While I'm sure that there are things that I am forgetting, I think that I could really extend my students learning just by using those simple tools.

Response to an Edublogger

Now I must admit, I did not think that shyness was a character trait of mine.  But I found the task of replying to an Edublogger to be surprisingly nerve wracking.  I think in a lot of ways I just felt like to much of a newbie, maybe even a bit like an impostor.  Who am I to comment on their experience rich posts?  The experience that I have to draw from feels laughable outside of our program.

However I bit the bullet and did it anyway, and while I found the commenting part slightly painful, digging through the posts of other teachers.  I think that was the most valuable part for me, scrolling through and skimming (because frankly I did not have time to deeply read all the bloggers sites that I visited) countless blogs, just to get an idea of what was out there.

I ended up commenting on two blogs, that while well written and helpful, were not stand out posts by any means, just posts that I think that I will be able to come back to in the future.  The first post that I commented on was about how to get ready for a first day of school.  The advise ranged from the mental preparedness of just simply being positive to the procedural aspects like setting up classroom norms on the first day of school.  I liked this post because it was practical little things that I would be able to do to have a better first day of school, it was nothing overwhelming or complicated.

The second blog post that I commented on was a simple post from a teacher in California about an activity that he did during the week prior to the standardized tests.  It seemed to be a requirement at his school to give his students time to review and prepare for these tests.  The jigsaw activity that he did seemed like a great way for him to judge student understanding and allow students to be teaching other students.

While there were plenty of interesting posts about big ideas and important talking points, I chose to comment on these posts because they were things that I could put in place in my own classroom.  I don't have tons of time now, but reading ideas that other teachers have through blogs is a practice that I would really like to continue in the future!

Podcasting Presentation Peaks Interest

For any of you out there that attended the podcasting presentation in class the other week(eek time flies), you know what I mean when I say that it was SOO informative!  Hello audio tools I never knew how to use, its nice to finally learn about your existence!  But really I was actually incredibly grateful to the presenters for giving an engaging but very educational presentation.

All of the coolness of their presentations aside however, I have to wonder what this tool could really do to improve student learning in a Biology class.  I can see how creativity and functionality could flow from these in the humanities and I think that the sample podcasts that the presenters gave were  awesome (I think that the podcasts convinced me to actually do those fictional assignments) but us Biology kids could only come up with half hearted uses in our discipline.

One idea that I did think was really cool would be to use podcasting as a note taking device during a lab, especially a lab that requires a lot of hands on maneuvering, however I wonder if this would take away from the valuable lesson of teaching students how to keep proper scientific records.  Also a lab is not typically the most desirable location for doing a podcast, as multiple groups will be up around and talking as well.

With all of that said I would like to invite the ideas of the audience, what do you think a science teacher could do to bring this cool piece of technology into the classroom in a meaningful way?

In the meantime I am content with the knowledge of how to use cool tools like garageband for myself, even if I can't bring it into the classroom yet.

Tech in my placement

I found that the tech in my placement assignment was a really good way for me to begin to get to know not only my own classroom better, but also the school that I will be spending the next year learning in.

I am not placed in a wealthy school district for my student teaching, so I was unsure of what kinds of technologies I would encounter.  I must say that the discoveries that I made about my school were surprising on both ends of the technology spectrum, there were somethings that I was surprised and impressed to hear that we had available at my school, while other things I was disappointed to hear weren't available.

One fun peace of technology that the students at my school have access to is video and video editing equipment, while this does not take place in my classroom I think it is great that our announcements are put together by a group of students.   Using that kind of equipment and getting that kind of experience is something unique that I think could be really valuable to students in the future, I wish we had that in my high school!  Another awesome thing that is available in some classrooms in my school are Google Chrome Books and Smartboards! Woo! While almost all of the teachers in my school do not have access to these technologies, I think that it's pretty awesome that some students get to experience using them!

Some of the other technologies that I learned about were pretty standard, there are computer labs that teachers can reserve for a class period if they want to do online research, and my mentor teacher has taken advantage of this more than once already this year.

What I could NOT believe was that my mentor teacher had to pay for her own projector!! Doing power points in class is a pretty standard way of getting dense scientific information across to students before we move on to the hands on learning.

So while there are so cool flashy technologies at my school it is easy to see that there is still a serious funding issues at play here that are creating a large gap.

A new view on grades and student achievement

This past week Pete Pasque came to speak to use about a couple new tools to use in student assessment, e-portfolio's and badges.  These two processes really opened my perspective on how we should.could be thinking about student progress and achievement.

In our current school system a student could go through all four years of say English classes only being able to write at exactly the same level.  Improvement from year to year is never really checked because teachers don't have access to past assignments and students rarely look back at their old work.  With the E-portfolio system there would be a central digital location for all of these kinds of assignments to be held for the entire high school career.  This E-Portfolio system that they have in place at Skyline High School is great, students have access to previous years work and progress can clearly be shown throughout.  Not to mention that it is really cool that they are able to turn in so many assignments electronically, yay saving trees!  This is one great way to emphasis to students that it is important to be able to have proof that they are able to do something beyond just the grade, for future college applications they can not only show that they got an A in their English 10 class, but that they also were able to write and awesome compare and contrast essay.

The next topic that Pete talked about, badging, was a little bit less intuitive to me.  I, like most people I would imagine, am most comfortable doing things the way that I have seen them done before.  Don't get me wrong, I am not stuck in my ways, but sometimes I need a little convincing.  Badging is one of those topics for me, I like the idea of being able to see student achievements and skills simply by checking out the badges that they have received.  In some ways it seems like a more accurate account of what a student knows than a grade in a class because quite frankly you have no idea what a teacher covered in a Biology class, it could be totally different from school to school.  Badging provides the answer to the topics that were mastered.  However in my mind grades mean something, this student really grasped the concept therefore they earned an A and this student has an OK understanding therefore they earned a C.  That is how my brain is structured, therefore giving both of those students the same badge is a little hard for me to get my head around.  It would mean a whole different understanding of education

While I don't think either of these electronic tools will be put to use in my classroom anytime soon, I think they are well worth another look, and hearing Pete talk made me really think about what it means to organize your digital life.  I would love to learn more about all of those topics so that I can do a better job preparing my student's for the future, because I know that I am currently not informed enough to give them the support that they need.

See you this fall!

In today’s Teaching with Technology class we wrapped up the summer session discussing how technology will be making its way into our standardized tests in the near future.  I had not heard of the impending Smarter Balanced Assessment that would be accompanying the common core standards in as soon as March 2015.  As this would be during my first year of teaching (hopefully!) this is of great interest and concern to me.

One aspect of this test that concerns me that whether the test is good, bad, or neutral it will be difficult as a first-year teacher to prepare students for a radically different test while we are still navigating the waters of our standard teaching practices.  It will only be a comfort that everyone else will also be new to this particular testing style.

Another concern that I have about the Smarter Balanced Assessment is the online format.  So far in our teacher education we have been learning about frameworks such as Reading Apprenticeship where we teach students to ‘talk to the text’.  These techniques which have been proven to improve reading comprehension would not be as feasible or as effective for readings done on a screen, where there is no ability to highlight or annotate the text.  We would be asking students to do things that they are not ready for.  What would the solution to this be? Structure our activities to match one assessment?  Is that really doing the best thing for the students?

While I do not have the answers to these questions, and while I am by no means excited about its implementation, I do understand that this is the direction the world is taking.  Getting students used to doing more things on a computer will only make them more computer literate, a necessity in many modern jobs.  Another plus of online testing is that they can be made to adjust based on student responses, in this way testing could be more accurate by asking more questions in a students ZPD.

Also as this is the last blog post for the summer class I will probably not be posting again until the fall.  Not that I don't love blogging, but more that I think my computer and I are going to take a slight time out (Which I wish could start tonight, but there are papers looming in my very near future)!  See you soon!