Final thoughts

Taking this technology class has been a giant stretch for me. A blended format would not have been my first choice, yet I realize it was done this way to help those of us who are in the cohort and could not attend a Tuesday evening class. I appreciate the willingness of Dr. Wang to answer questions and arrange for extra face to face meeting times when needed. I also really appreciate all of my group members who were so helpful and full of encouragement.

What this class has mostly done for me is create a little confidence and a LOT of curiousity about the things I can do - both personally and for my class - using technology. I have signed up for three days of technology training this summer to learn how to use the new things we will be given to use in our classrooms next year. I am no longer afraid to experiment (really the best way for me to learn) and am looking forward to the time to do just that.

I also appreciate the subjects of some of the assignments - good review for comps I am thinking!

May 2 Assignment - Assessment

As educators, we are constantly assessing our students. Informal assessments in the form of observation, participation notes, running records, portfolio entries, and discussion go on in every classroom all of the time. I can tell more about how my students truly understand a concept in science by watching then perform an experiment than I can from reading their answers to a multiple choice, true or false, or matching test. While APPLICATION of knowledge is the true hallmark of what a student has learned, we too often rely on an assessment that is sumative - measuring FACTS that a student has memorized. These sumative assessments come at the end of a unit and do not open doors for further learning. A good example of this kind of assessment is the SAT, graduation exams, semester exams, and unit tests. Grades are recorded in a grade book or put on a data base and becomes a piece of information about the student. The information from the test not only fails to give a true understanding of what the student KNOWS, UNDERSTANDS, AND IS ABLE TO APPLY, it fails in a much bigger way. It is not used to drive further instruction.

Formative assessments - usually more informal- allow an instructor to not only measure true student learning, it provides ongoing information about the student that will allow the teacher to plan and implement future lessons that will fill in any gaps, provide future lessons to strengthen skills or to provide enrichment to the students who have mastered skills.

The use of a rubric is an extremely effective way to measure student learning. This rubric should be detailed and shared with students and parents ahead of time. There are many excellent sites on the weve for creating a rubric. I have used http://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/rubrics/ I think it is extremely important for students to be a partner in their learning experience. A good way to begin this partnership is to engage the students in creating a rubric that will be learned to assess their learning. When students are involved in setting the criteria for learning, they are more likely to succeed.

I see little educational value in summative assessments that do nothing more than provide data. The purpose of assessment should be to drive instruction and to measure understanding, not recall. Performance based assessment, which involves the direct evaluation of student effort on real learning tasks provides useful material for teachers, parents, and students.

laptops

I presently have a HP Pavilion Laptop that is loaded with VISTA. I am finally getting used to the VISTA, but have been considering buying a MAC. Many people tell me that is the way to go, especially for graphics and for managing my pictures.

Since I have finished National Boards and am almost finished with my Masters program, I am thinking that this may be my best choice.

I teach second grade. Most of th documents I prepare for my students call for simple word processing skills and perhaps the insertion of a picture or graphic. I would still like to use spreadsheets (just learned how - thank you Dr. Wang!) to manage grades, create graphs from information, etc. So what do you all think?

Learning Theories

I enjoyed this assignment - especially looking for a little extra background information other than assigned readings - and what I discovered is that I have become completely at home with doing research on line using search engines and tapping into the library. I'm not sure when that happened - it used to really throw me for a loop!
Our group split the research and I chose the constructivist learning theory. Though I use a constructivist approach with many of my lessons, I do not use it for all. I truly agree that knowledge a student can construct is better understood than knowledge that is merely transmitted to them.
As group leader, it was my job to compile everyone's learning theories after we had all read and edited. This should have been easy - another group member had put together a table for us to use and I thought it would just be a matter of cutting and pasting. It wasn't. I got tangled up in entries that had bullets that were difficult to remove in order to make the document uniform. charts were not all exactly the same and had to be adjusted. Fonts were different. One member added color to subtitles - a great touch, but I had to figure out how to do that to the rest of them too. All of this sounds simple, but to me it was not. The point of this narrative is to say that I actually constructed learning (go me!) by trial and error. I think I learned more than I would have if someone had given me instructions on how to fix things. I will certainly remember now.
The final problem I had was getting my finished document to look just as good on the discussion board as it did on my computer. Even though I saved it in Rich Text format, the one posted on the discussion board had all kinds of spaces that the saved document did not. Here is where I cried UNCLE and called my neighbor to help. We played around with it, and finally were able to post it like it was intended. I cannot even tell you what we did in the end. The end result was that I owed my neighbor a six pack, and I feel like our entry reflected the careful work of my group members.
Here is my question - Why would a document that is saved in rich text NOT transmit as saved? I am wondering if it has anything to do with my having VISTA and other team members having different operating systems. Could they have saved differently?

Technology in Language Arts Instruction

My second graders have been working very hard to use the computer to word process short stories they have written. We have spent hours on keyboarding skills and practice. Still, this assignment is taking FOREVER. Little hands do not easily reach all of the keys. They constantly need reminders about spacing, forming upper case letters, and punctuation. Still, we are making slow progress.
The children are much more interested in their writing and in editing when they do it on the computer. They LOVE spell check (well, who doesn't?), although they do not often stop to think or have enough base knowledge to choose the correct option that is offered. They click on the first suggestion. I try to remind them that you still have to stop and think!
I have one child who has handwriting that is impossible to read. He loves the idea of using the computer, and I do allow this, although his fine motor skills are so poor that keyboarding is difficult for him. There are two schools of thought: 1. allow him to do all of his work on the computer (this requires constant teacher support) or 2. have him do some assignments on the computer and some by hand. This is the strategy I am using.

Learning Theories

This week's assignment was to look at different learning theories and also tie in how technology can be used to support those theories. My focus was on the Constructivist learning theory, and even though I thought I knew a lot about it, there was still much to learn. Teaching using this method is definitely more work than merely transmitting knowledge to students, but I think it is WAY more rewarding to see the children construct their own knowledge and drive their own learning. If we believe in assessment as a tool to drive instruction, then the formative assessments a teacher uses with a lesson taught with the constructivist method is valid and useful. I was interested to learn about MUDs and MOOs and even WOOs and would like to do some research to see how I can incorporate these into my classroom learning.

I am nervous about being group leader for this project. My group consists of three very competent computer users and me. They have all been very patient and helpful to me as I have grown through this class, but now they are putting their fate in my hands! I appreciate all of them posting entries well ahead of the due date to help me get it all organized to post. I will attend the face to face class offered tomorrow in hopes to learn how to do a spreadsheet - that seems like a good way to organize the information.

Web - based lesson / amazing new technology

After reading Chapter 8 in our textbook, I found a web-based activity for my students. It is an international webpage that links students from different countries together as pen-pals. (see page 254 in text if you are interested). I have found a class in Australia with students that are the same age as my children. We will be partnering with a class from Australia to exchange information about culture, customs, foods, and leisure activities. I am hoping that once this progresses we will be able to have some voice to voice contact through Skype. My students (when they get back from Spring Break) will be very excited!

I just purchased a Garmin navigational device - perfect for me who is perpetually lost. All I have to do is program in an address and it directs me turn by turn to my destination. If I take a detour during part of the trip, it will recalculate my route and tell me. I can even just program in a general destination like Mexican Restaurants in Birmningham and it will give me a variety of places to choose from. My favorite feature is how I can just press favorites and home (already programmed in) and it will direct me back home from any destination. I am so excited and am ready to go ANYWHERE!