My Group - The Tech Trekies

Our 5 week mission: To explore strange new Technologies;

To boldly do what we have never done before!

Our Group members:
Joy, Krista, Therese, Betsy, and Dawn

Visit our WIKI to see what we have created on our mission.....
http://planning20.pbworks.com/Group+2-+Tech+Trekies

To reflect back on the five weeks we spent together. I remember a lot of laughs, learning, collaboration and challenges. We were a dynamic group and worked fabulous together.

Now that the stress is over and all the assignments are in, I just want to thank my group members for all their support and hard work, my classmates for their kind words and encouragement, and Dr. Smirnova for making us reach for new worlds that we may never have explored without the push....

My Class Assignments

Animoto - I'll put this first because it was the easiest and best assignment of them all. I really enjoyed making this little video and I'm sure I will be making more....
ENJOY!

Letter Pop- Another one of my favorites. Here I created a Newsletter to send home to parents and students introducing them to my fifth grade class....

Here's a crossword puzzle I created in Excel.....
I think this assignment is a wonderful way for a teacher to

incorporate technology into a lesson. This assignment is

a great way to demonstrate the benefits to Excel while

incorporating a vocabulary lesson at the same time.

Working with Engrade Software I chose to use Engrade Software for my A6 assignment. It was so easy to use and is very similar to something a teacher would create using Excel. It is extremely user friendly. My very favorite feature was the calendar, I loved how you could post everything into the calendar. This calendar can be posted onto a website every month, printed and hung in the classroom, or sent home to parents. It is a great way to keep everyone aware of what is expected of them, when to prepare for exams, quizzes, and when homework assignments are do. I will look forward to using this software in my classroom.

Windows Movie Maker - this is a small clip about the Hudson Rivers 400th Year celebration. I created it using Movie Maker in Windows and then uploaded it onto Neptune to create a URL so I could post it to the web.... ENJOY!

Here is my Mind Map created using a Web 2.0 tool - Mind Meister.
The map is a description 5E's in the Learning Cycle.

My Final Project Topic Treasure Hunt
The History of Computer Simulations and Gaming to Enhance Literacy Learning.

View the quest to learn more about it.

A quote I thought was enlightening for future teachers.....
"If students are to be competitive in the years to come, faculty need to be able to provide their students with the cognitive strategies that will enable them to think critically, make decisions, and solve problems."
Pogrow (1994)

Engrade Grading Reflection

I chose to use Engrade Software for my A6 assignment. It was so easy to use and is very similar to something a teacher would create using Excel. It is extremely user friendly.
One of the features I liked about Engrade was the many reports the software generates, I particularly like the individual student reports, which could be printed and used for parent teacher discussions, along with the missing assignment reports.
My very favorite feature was the calendar, I loved how you could post everything into the calendar. This calendar can be posted onto a website every month, printed and hung in the classroom, or sent home to parents. It is a great way to keep everyone aware of what is expected of them, when to prepare for exams, quizzes, and when homework assignments are do.
I will look forward to using this software in my classroom.

Authentic Assessment

Authentic Assessment when the teacher first determines the tasks that the students will perform to demonstrate their mastery and then a curriculum is developed to encompass those tasks, to enable students to perform those tasks well.
The assigned article discusses electronic portfolio's. I created a electronic portfolio in our Methods class and still use it. I just added some new material from our Literacy and Technology class. I find this portfolio a great place to keep all my assignments, projects, lesson plans, etc. I find that I refer back to it often. I would suggest if you haven't created one, do it! It's a great way to keep all your hard work organized. Here's the link for my e-folio...I hope you enjoy it.
http://joyswikiwiki.pbworks.com/

What is IPM?

What is IPM?

It is a teaching model. The theory behind this model is constructivism and the 5E's.

The IPM model is a method of teaching where the teacher presents the students with a problem/situation and gets them to investigate and find the solution on their own.

The IPM method is like an onion or artichoke. You keep peeling the outside to discover the solution in the inside. Teaching is done by asking instead of telling. This method of teaching allows the students to become independent, autonomous learners capable of figuring things out for themselves.This is the theoretical foundations behind IPM?

The theoretical foundation of IPM is the Socratic Method, named after the Greek philosopher, Socrates. It is a form of philosophical inquiry in which the questioner explores the implications of others’ positions, to stimulate rational thinking and to illuminate ideas. The term Socratic Questioning is used to describe a kind of questioning in which an original question is responded to as though it were an answer. This in turn forces the first questioner to reformulate a new question in light of the progress of the discourse. IPM is a learning environment which is open, allows active student involvement, and an atmosphere of intellectual freedom.

The IPM method consists of five phases, which are:

Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate

• Orient students to the problem

• Organize students for study

• Assist with independent and group investigations

• Develop and present artifacts and exhibits

• Analyze and evaluate work

Of course there are advantages and disadvantages to using any teaching method...

Some benefits of IPM would be that it helps the students develop investigative skills and problem solving skills. It allows students to gain confidence in their own ability to think, access, process and reflect on information.

Some disadvantages of IPM is it requires major planning, clearly communicated goals, designing interesting and appropriate problem situations and logistical preparation.

IPM should be used when you want to further encourage the students thinking and promote higher leveling thinking.

Weeks of Knowledge

Over the past couple of weeks we have covered a tremendous amount of material. Some of the highlights for me were:

Group Work
My group consists of five women who are all extremely talented. The fact that we work well together and combine our weaknesses and strengths makes this class so much more enjoyable. The first week we tackled a task none of us had ever done before. We Incorporated narration into our ppt presentation. It was challenging and exciting. The amount of collaboration that was involved in that project would have made a collaboration teacher proud. We each narrated our own slides and then merged the whole project together. Viewing the final presentation was so rewarding.

We had a great discussion on LoTi; what it is, and how we all rated. We discussed what we thought about it in the classrooms we have been in. Here is my reflection of our discussion:

The Loti presentation was very informative and explained the concept of this assessment in a user friendly way. It explains the importance of and why technology should be used in the classroom.
I am not working in a classroom yet, and I really don’t have a lot of experience other than my observation, fieldwork, and my own personal experiences with my children.
As far as my own personal rating, I think I would be at a level 3. I use a lot of technology in my every day life and in my current position. I think this experience puts me in a good position. I believe that when I am in the classroom I will be able to implement my technological skills with hopes to continue to improve upon them to achieve level 6.
After our group discussion, I think we all agree that many classrooms have technology in them, like Smart Boards, but many teachers do not use them. I have noticed that “new” teachers, young and old use the Smart Board, but “veteran” teachers seem to shy away from them. In my opinion, it seems that the more experience teacher, teachers who have taught for many years, are “comfortable” with the way they teach and would rather not incorporate technology.
I hope that over the years and through natural attrition, the implementation of technology improves in the classroom, I know it will be in mine.

We are moving on to our next group project "Constructivism and the 5E's so more on that later...

Online Class Discussion

This week we had our first online class meeting. It was so nice to meet with the other's in our class. The feedback and discussions were interesting and insightful. Lot's of people responded to the Learning to Change/Changing to Learn video clip. I have already posted a reflection on that, I agree it gets you thinking about what we need to do in our schools today.

We discussed LoTi as a class and most of of all agree that many teachers today do not use technology in their classrooms. The services are there. An example that most agreed on was we observe many teachers use the smartboard as a glorified whiteboard rather than using it the way it should be used.

As a class we also discussed the article Digital Native, Digital Immigrants. An amazing statistic in the article that really caught my attention was that "Today's average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). "Digital Native Digital Immigrants, Marc Prensky. I think I am a digital native only because I have worked in a position where technology is all around me, but for most of the class felt like they were digital immigrants. View the article and see which one you are.....

Learning to Change and Changing to Learn

I have listened to this clip and reflected on it in previous classes, but it is worth mentioning again. Here is my reflection:

“Learning to Change and Changing to learn"I found this clip to be so enlightening and uplifting. As a soon to be new teacher to the teaching profession, I have seen a division between teachers. It almost seems like some teachers don’t want, or are afraid to change, and prefer to stick to the “old style of teaching” and some teachers, most of the "newer" teachers, want to incorporate change and bring technology into the classroom. In my opinion, I believe the difference lies in that "newer" teachers just coming out of college, are learning and are very much aware how important it is for technology to be in our classrooms.
An important point addressed by several of the narrators in the video clip is that our children are exposed to so many different types of stimuli outside of the classroom we need to find a way to incorporate some of that stimulus into the classroom to maintain the balance necessary to keep them interested. Children are so much more social and technical than ever. Some key points addressed in the clip – we as educators have to accept technology, it’s not a choice. School is only one place that children learn. If they are using technology outside of school we have to have in our schools and incorporate it into their learning. One of the most significant points stated in this clip for me was “We need to shift students academic experience to prepare them for college and even life.” If we continue to teach in traditional ways and not the way the 21st century is headed we are doing an injustice to the future leaders of our country.