Goodbye

Mr. Wakeman and the rest of my EDM310 classmates,
It’s been a pleasure to spend the fall semester in class with you. Mr. Wakeman I have enjoyed having you as an instructor. I appreciate the way that you made an immediate effort to call everyone by name. It made everyone feel more comfortable in class as we stood up to defend our points of view in our blog posts. I know that you are once again retiring from the teaching profession. I wish you all the best in whatever you choose to do with your new found time. I wish all my classmates the best as you continue your education at USA!

Things We Have Covered in Class Summary Post

I consider myself to be in a unique situation as a student in this course. As a student who is already teaching in the classroom, I think my perspective of things is slightly different than my classmates. Teaching in a 2nd grade classroom currently, I tried to tune myself in to the things that I found most useful to me in the course. Since I graduated from college in 1993, most of the information in this course was not available to me at that time. It is amazing to think of how things have changed in a relatively short amount of time.

1)Our class blogs gave me a chance to think about my feelings on each subject. I was able to post my thoughts and feelings on each subject without worry of judgement. I did have strong feelings about Google docs, I hated them! Although I like the premise behind google docs, actually producing material on the website was frustrating to say the least. The collaboration aspect is nice one though. I was never an active Twitter user before this course. I'm an avid Facebook fan, but I still find twitter leaves me uncertain of my purpose there. My experience with podcasting was a good experience for me. As always I enjoy working in a group each time the opportunity presents itself. iTunes University was a new concept for me. I had not previously had experience with it before. I think it is particularly useful to high school students or college students. ACCESS is also a great opportunity for our high school students. ACCESS can save our states a lot of money by allowing them to listen to someone directly, instead of having an individual teacher at each school to do handle each subject. ALEX appears to be a great resource to Alabama teachers. Although we touched on many of the items listed in #1, I don’t know that I could speak in an educated manner about all of them. But I do feel as if I have enough knowledge to decide what I would like to use in my classroom. My mind has been changed in many ways about the use of some of them in the classroom. I was not in favor of using facebook in the classroom, but now I see where it could have some positive points to it. I would love to Skype with another 2nd grade classroom in the near future. We as educators have our own work cut out for us in our school systems. Trying to convince our principals and technology managers that we should have access to these programs on our school computers will be a difficult challenge!

#2. I felt as if we covered many different topics in class. I’m not sure what I expected to get from this class, so it’s difficult to say if there was something else I wish we had covered. I do know that many of the items/ideas we covered in class caused me to think about the changes that are occurring in education because of technology. It will be amazing to think and see where technology will take us in the near future.

#3. The assignments that we had to do in Google were probably the most difficult for me. The frustration I felt trying to create those made me not appreciate Google! Of course in all honesty the fact the instructions for the assignment were not the best did not help. There were instructions to highlight every other line gray, well guess what; you can’t do that in Google without manually doing each line separately. You can do it in PowerPoint, but not Google. Nice to know after you have wasted an hour in your life trying to figure that out! The directions for the assignment need to be reworked in my opinion.

#4. I’m excited about the prospects offered to my classroom from some of the things that we learned. I love the thought of a classroom blog. I’m excited about the fact that almost everything we learned to use in class was free! School systems do not have any extra funds to work with at this point. I can’t recall that anything we learned had an additional cost to it. My biggest frustration will be that fact that many of these resources are not “allowed” at school. I can understand the school systems concern about the use of Twitter, Facebook, and blogging in the classroom, but they hopefully will come to understand what valuable resources they can be to the school.

#5. Well I found the whole class to “intellectually challenging”! Since I had been out of college for over 16 years, it was hard for me to get back into college mode. It was a whole lot easier the first time around before I had a full time job, a husband, and three kids.

#6. Bored? Never! If I looked away for even a second, I missed something going on and felt behind.

#7 Keep in mind that you’re teaching this course for those trying to enter the classroom. If my school won’t allow me to access over half of these programs that were used in class, it isn’t going to do me a lot of good. While I enjoyed most of the things we learned about in class, I think you should focus more on the concepts that most teachers can use. The presentations, and the building of presentations, are probably far more useful than knowing how to use Twitter when it comes down to truly useful information.

#8. I think that I am a technologically literate teacher. I think we established in class that you don’t have to use every form of technology to be considered literate. I would consider myself to be good on the scale we were given. I think it’s important to constantly update yourself, or you will fall behind quickly. With the ever changing technology, it wouldn’t take much time at all to let yourself fall into the illiterate category.

#9. I’m not sure how to apply this question, since my situation is unique. I’ve already graduated and have a full time teaching job. I am going to continue to try to build on the knowledge I’ve gained in this class. I’d like to try to integrate a few concepts immediately into my classroom. Others, I’d like to research and build on. I’m not as afraid to jump in and start using some of these programs that are available. I think I’ll be a little more willing to put myself “out there”, if that’s what I’m going to ask of my students.

Personal Learning Network

I have actually had a small PLN for sometime now, although I never referred to it as a learning network. It is a learning network, but I have always thought of it more as an exchange of information from other teachers in my area of interest. I have long been a member of The Second Grade Teachers Club website, where 2nd grade teachers exchange and information. If you have a question, you can post it and other teachers will help locate the information you need. If obtained wonderful resources from that website, as well as helped others that needed information or ideas.

In EDM310 we were asked to build a personal learning network by using twitter and other blog sites. I followed a few blogs, and followed some fellow educators on twitter. Most of the folks I chose to follow on twitter were fellow elementary teachers. But I've also followed some others that were not elementary ed. I also follow some people on twitter that help me from a spiritual perspective since that is a huge part of my life. Listed below are some of my twitter connections, or websites or blogs that I received RSS feeds from. Most of the contacts I made were made through discussion boards on the websites listed below.

Kellycraig
iteachgrade2
TeachPaperless
mritzius
mayfieldz
paulrwood
shirley8153
speters
ReadCloud
prestwickhouse
JackieB
Joeysparks
STEMschool
MITOCW
Harvard_Press
CUPBooks

http://secondgradeclub.ning.com/
http://classroom.jc-schools.net/waltkek/
http://www.mrscarosclass.com/

At the Teacher's Desk

At the Teacher's Desk Blog

At the Teacher's Desk blog is a collaboration of several teachers that is maintained in a blog format. Wm Chamberlain maintains this blog as well as his own classroom blog. At the Teacher's Desk is a blog that features thoughts and ideas that others want to share with their fellow educators.

I read several of the posts on the blog as well as followed the various links and comments that others have made. I read through the Fundred Project and watched the video. It will be interesting to follow the idea and see if it turns out over time to bring about change in the New Orleans area. The blog provides an outlet to gain exposure to people that might be interested in helping with the cause.

Other topics on the blog covered were to how to grow and maintain visitors to your blog. Chamberlain offers several ways to help your blog succeed. Maintain the same blog address in order to build support over time. You need to be consistent with posting blogs, so that people will have a reason to come back and check your blog again. Use titles in your posts that represent your main idea. Using good titles will allow those that are searching for the information on search engines such as google to find your information. Be sure that you are a supporter of the blogs you read. Leave worthwhile comments to the poster and make appropriate links so that others can build off of the information left there.

Some of the other posts addressed important issues such as building a positive digital portfolio. We need to address the importance to our young people of the importance in maintaining their images even on social networking sites. This is something that hasn't needed to be addressed until recently. Young people don't often think before they speak and write and with all the new social networking sites, they need to learn the importance of those comments following them. I think as an educator using technology, this should be one of the pressing issues that we have in the forefront of minds while educating students in technology.

One of the last posts that I visited was the post by teachernz. The post was titled, Getting over it! The YouTube video addressed getting over our personal issues with technology. This really hit home with me as we enter in to the final stretch of our course. The thoughts of watching ourselves on video, listening to ourselves in a podcast, and putting ourselves out there in front of others is somewhat unnerving. We have to learn to get over our personal issues in order to help others work with technology. If we aren't willing do things ourselves, it will be hard to teach our students the benefits of these advances.

Toward a New Future: Michael Wesch

Michael Wesch Video

I found the Michael Wesch video interesting and thought provoking. I'm not sure that I could do, or would really want to do Michael Wesch's job. I'm not sure I could spend hours on the history of the word "whatever". His comments that referred to YouTube as 99.9% irrelevant to your life, pretty much applied to me as I watched his video. I know that these things may sound harsh to some degree, I just don't share the interest in studying human nature that these people do. It is my opinion that human beings haven't changed that much over time. There are good people and bad people in the world today, just as there were good people and bad people clear back to biblical history.

Technological mediums have changed and allowed more people to be more vocal about themselves throughout history, but I don't think basic human nature has changed. It's kind of the theory that we discussed in class about people uniting together as a group via the internet. That can be good and bad, depending on the intentions of the group. Michael Wesch pointed out a video where the girl was discussing the use of YouTube as a voyeristic tool. We are curious about people who are different from us, but we don't want to stare at them in public. With YouTube, you can stare all you want at someone! People reveal things to strangers that they would not normally do. I almost wonder if in one sense that commom manners and courtesies are lost when we sit behind a computer screen. Do we type things in emails that we would never say to a person if we were face to face with them?

I do think technology affects both teachers and students. In the same respect that I'm not always happy about the emails that I receive from parents that come across as unpleasant, there are days when I am appreciative of sending off that note via email vs. having to make an unpleasant phone call to a parent. I do think that technology has made us an impatient population of people. The advances we have in technology allow us to move about freely. Gone are the days of us sitting at home waiting on a telephone call, having to wait for mail to arrive, waiting on graded papers to come home from school, trips to the library for information, and in some cases not having to get out of your pajamas to attend school. You can do all of these things from the comfort of your home.

I think we have to be careful that we don't totally loose the rules of ettiquette. Face to face meetings with people and teachers are important. Facial expression and voice inflection cannot be shared via email. We don't want to loose the personal touch and interaction that are so important to human beings and especially our students. I think students need interactions with their teachers and other adults to learn how to be affective with others.

PS22 Chorus

PS22 Chorus

The PS22 Chorus is obviously a talented group of children. There are probably many talented groups of children out there, but because of PS22's use of technology and and a blog, we are now familiar with them. They have received the praise of many famous people on their blog. In the particular video we watched here, the chorus received the attention of Stevie Nicks. She was so smitten with the children that she offered them a spot on her stage for one of her performances at Madison Square Garden.

PS22 Chorus Blog


Stevie Nicks

The exposure that technology offers to our children in this day is not something that children or adults for that matter have ever known. I think of struggling musical artists who would fight so hard to get a break in the music business. Most would beg for their music to be played on the radio. In this day we can post our own music on YouTube, or post a blog and get exposure to people all over the world. For the most part, this exposure doesn't even cost us that much money. No price tag can be placed on the experiences that these children received from their exposure to a famous person and the opportunity it afforded them.

We have had several opportunities to read about school children through their blogs. Most recently we read about Mr. C's class, and their contact with Kaia in Qatar.

Mr. C's Class Blog


Kaia

Mr.C's class was so touched by young Kaia and her appreciation for the beauty of her country. Children in Missouri were probably hardly aware of the existence of Qatar, let alone sharing part of their lives together. I would imagine that most of those students in Missouri are still following Kaia's blog today.

I also remembered the Michael Wesch video that we were required to watch awhile back. Those college students offered their views of college life and how they were affected by it. Kansas State University continues to study how students learn and their characteristics in this day and age. They study their hopes and dreams and the goals that 21st century student's share.

YouTube Video from Kansas State

Kansas State University

I searched for elementary schools that are using blogs and came across several. The Georgetown Elementary School maintains a blog for each of their classrooms. The communication between the teacher, parent, and student is vital in the classroom today. Parent's expectations for their children's school have risen to new levels. They expect to up to the minute information about classroom activities, and if an emergency situation arises, they expect immediate notification. We have to do our best to meet those expectations to the best of our ability.


Georgetown Elementary Website

Mrs. Reagan, Principal of Georgetown Elementary School

ACCESS

ACCESS Distance Learning

ACCESS Distance Learning is part of the Alabama Connecting Classroom program. The vision is for the State of Alabama to provide equal access high quality instruction to improve student achievement. These resources are provided to all Alabama public high school students. The ACCESS program was launched November 1, 2004. Alabama has garnered some national press attention with it's leadership in distance learning.

I have long been aware of the inequites in the Alabama school system. I have nieces that were raised in the Birmingham area who have had all types of school perks that were not offered to my children in Baldwin County. I was amazed at the courses that have been offered to them in high school vs. what is offered in the Mobile/Baldwin county system. I know that some of the cities in the Birmingham area do a lot of their own funding to their local schools. I think the ACCESS program is a way to try to bring equality to the Alabama system.

For many schools it is difficult to find qualified teachers for areas such as a foreign language, or upper end math and science courses. Many rural areas can't even offer these courses at all. School systems sometimes have difficulty justifying the expense of paying a teacher in areas where only a handful of students will benefit from the course. ACCESS allows students all over the state to have access to qualified teachers in many subject areas. Advanced Placement courses for college credit are also offered through ACCESS. Alabama is one of a handful of states that offer such courses.

ACCESS offers CAST (connecting ACCESS staff and teachers). CAST offers many web tools for professional development such as NetTrekker and Curriculum Pathways to further our knowledge in our subject areas. There are also chat forums and discussion boards for teachers and facilitators.

ACCESS recommends distance learning for students who are self motivated and self disciplined. They must have access to a computer and be recommended to the program by their school counselor or advisor. ACCESS is open to students in 9th-12th grade.

ALEX

Alabama Learning Exchange

The Alabama Learning Exchange is a website where teachers and administrators can find the Alabama course of study, web resources, and lesson plans that are aligned with the Alabama course of study content standards. The Alabama Learning Exchange is referred to as ALEX. The ALEX website is made up of 8 different sections to assist you in your teaching of Alabama students.

The first section of ALEX is the course of study. You can search by grade level or keyword for all subjects to locate the course of study requirements. The second section is a Web Links section. Located in this section you have teacher web links, administrators web links, and student web links. You may even search for a web link as it correlates to the content standards. If you would like to submit recommendations for web links, you must become a registered member of ALEX. The third section of ALEX is a lesson plan section. You can have access to many lesson plans by searching for your grade level or subject. For those that want to share lesson plans with others, these can also be submitted to ALEX for approval and inclusion on the website. If you know of someone, or a particular school that submitted a lesson, you can also search using that person's name or school name. For it's fourth section, ALEX also features a search datebase for the website.

The fifth section of ALEX is a personal workspace section. This section is for those that would like to contribute to ALEX. You can register your information here, and then be permitted to make website recommendations and submit lesson plans. The sixth section is the professional learning section. This section keeps you up to date with professional development opportunities, teaching and learning tools, and the latest news in education. There is also some information for writing grants for your classroom projects available in this section. They include lists of available grants in Alabama and the U.S. This section also includes information on the Alabama virtual library. The seventh section is a podcast treasury section. Many of the podcasts featured here are specific to Alabama school children and Alabama history information. It also contains links to special places in Alabama like the Space and Rocket center. This information could be used as prepatory information for an upcoming field trip, or as a virtual field trip by itself. The final section of ALEX is a help section for troubleshooting on the website. If you have trouble registering or submitting information this section will assist you.

I found this website to be a great resource as a Alabama educator. I was not aware of this site previously. I also found a facebook page for ALEX while doing my search on Google. I became a fan as part of my PLN.