Online Apps

The two online apps that I will be reviewing are Google Docs and Sumo Paint.

I use Google Docs for everything in my school.  I have set up folders just like a computer and you can save everything in the "cloud".  Therefore, you are not using any of the memory on your computer.  The part that is really nice is that I can work on something at school and then finish it at home or vice versa.  I can get the documents that I am working on at any computer.  I do not have to save them to a zip drive or email them to myself.  Therefore, if something happens to your computer, you will still have all of your documents.  Google docs allows you to make word documents, presentations, excel, and many more type of files.  I also have a Google Website.  I can link my pages of my website to the files that I have in my Google Docs.  Then when I make a change to the file on Google Docs, it automatically updates my website!  I don't have to update anything twice!
The only down fall that I have found so far is that I can not get my SMART board lessons saved on Google Docs.  However, I can save all of those on Drop Box.  The only problem with drop box is that you have to have all of the programs on the "other" computers that you might be using.  Therefore, if you don't have word on a computer, you can not work on a word document.  Google Docs has its own programs therefore you can use them everywhere!

Sumo paint is new to me.  But as soon as I started playing with it I saw a lot of different ways that I could use it in my Geometry Class.  In the picture below I made a tessellation   I could have my students figure out how many degrees the figures are moved, name the figures, and tell me what properties they have in order to make them the shape they say they are.  You could use a lot of other shapes also.  It was very easy to save on my computer.  However, outside of having students creating their own pictures or looking at pictures I create, I don't know the other uses that I would use it for.

Website

This week in my grad class, we were suppose to make our own website using Google Sites.  My site is located at https://sites.google.com/site/careypyke/home.  It is still a work in progress (just like everyone elses).  We have a new trimester starting in two weeks so once I have my syllabus made and more information done, I will be adding a lot more to my website.  However, right now I have a good lay out working!

Week 10 Reflection

The concept map I made is about factoring.  I find that students are always getting confused on how to factor whenever they are given an expression.  Once they know how to start factoring, they normally do just fine.  So this concept map I would give them as a teacher in order to help them figure out where to start out at.

Graphing Calculator Video

This is how to use the graphing calculator online.

First go to http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/productDetail/us_sdk_73_83_84.html and download the graphing calculator.  Once you have it completed downloaded and you restart your computer, double click on the debugger icon.  Go to file, new.  Press the play button.  

When the calculator comes up on your screen, it will look and be exactly like the ones we use in class.  In this video, I am showing you how to find the solution to a system of equations.

Week 8 Reflection

View Lesson Plan - Distance and Midpoints in a larger map This lesson would be a great project at the end of the distance and midpoint lesson in Algebra 1 or Geometry. I would have my students make their own map on Google Maps and then place their map on a coordinate plane. Once their map is on a coordinate plane, they would have to find the exact coordinates for each location that they put on their maps. They would need to make sure that the axis on their graphs are labeled the correct way in order to make sure the distances were real life (everyone should be in miles). Once they transferred their maps onto a coordinate plane, I would find them find the exact distance and midpoint between each location. I would have them check their distances with the distances that Google Maps gave them. I think that this project would help students understand how the distance and midpoint formulas can be useful in real life situations. They could also check their work with the distances that Google Maps gives them in order to make sure that they are using the distance formula correctly.

Week 7 Reflection

The podcasts that I found to be interesting are Ted Talks and NPR education.

Ted talks isn't necessarily about education (although a lot of them are) but there are a lot of different podcasts that make you think about different things that are going on. For instance, one that I listened to was about a doctor who was a violinist and he talked about the difference between music and medicine and how music can be better than medicine.

On NPR education there are talks about great education with ideas on how to improve education. Seems like there are new talks once a week. I think that podcasting would be interesting to use while I'm just driving in the car. My family lives an hour away from where I am and sometimes I'm sick of listening to the radio. I could plug in my iphone and listen to a podcast about education while I'm driving. It seems like I never get away from it, but anything to help my students I'm definitely willing to give a try! There are a lot of podcasts on how to improve student achievement, working with "at risk" students, things other teachers have tried, lessons that have worked and not worked.

 While reading Chapter 14, this paragraph really made sense to me,

 "This has fostered movements such as HPI, which views performance outcomes as the end result of a number of interacting elements such as clear expectations, timely and specific feedback, access to required information, adequate resources, properly aligned policies, efficient procedures, appropriate incentives and consequences, targeted training, comprehensive selection systems, communication of values, knowledge sharing, and varied management support activities as well as many others (e.g., Binder, 2009; Marker, 2008). The demonstrated ineffectiveness of single-solution, miracle interventions to improve performance have bred mistrust for the next “flavor of the month” and a receptiveness to the systemic approach of HPI."

I think of all of the ideas they covered here is exactly what you need to do in order to be a great teacher. Students need clear expectations for everything they are doing. Whenever my students have a project, they need a rubric. Then they know exactly what I am looking for and exactly how to get 100% or whatever grade they are trying to earn on it. I also am doing interactive notebooks with my students. On Friday when they turn in the notebooks, I give them a grading sheet so that they know exactly what I am grading and exactly what I am looking for.

 If you give your students high expectations, they always try to meet and exceed them! If you don't tell your students what you are looking for, they will never know and be able to grow to their full potential. When I grade tests and quizzing I always give them partial credit. If they mess up something easy like a negative sign, I always circle it so they know exactly what went wrong. If they do not know how to start a problem or get stuck in the middle, I give them hints or little clues on what do to next. This way, they can always do a correct and reflect in order to earn a higher grade. I think that fixing your mistakes is a great way to learn. When you can find these mistakes, it sticks with you more often for what 'not to do' next time.

 I think that access to required information, adequate resources, and properly aligned policies go together. In order to students to be able to learn and retain as much as possible, you need to make sure they have the resources and information they need. I always tell my students different websites they can use in order to watch tutoring videos at home. I always make my students be organized so they can use their notes and homework as a resource. In their notebooks, I have them make a table of contents so they can go back to and easily find what they are looking for.

 In order for students to feel comfortable, you need to make sure that are have clear expectations, positive, and negative consequences. They need to know that you care about what they are doing and you are there to help them. I have a Google voice number that I give each of my students so that they can get a hold of me any time. That way if they are doing their homework and need to talk to me they can. Also, some of my students don't have a person in their life they can talk to about difficult situations. I feel like I can be more than just a teacher to them. Some of my students are extremely happy that I give them this opportunity.

Embedding more! Google Map

View Larger Map

Week 6 Embedding Media

I like to show my students this video before we start to learn how to factor to get them interested in what we are doing!  This high school has A TON of other videos on www.youtube.com that I like to show!

30th Birthday!

, a photo by cnpyke on Flickr.

A fellow teacher's 30th birthday gag that I got the students to do!

Week 5 Reflection

 My pictures on flickr are at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cnpyke/.

We also had to read an article about using technology in the classroom where there wasn't any evidence that the students did well.

I beleive the 4 main reasons that the project described did not work is because 

1.  Teachers were not trained properly.

2.  They did not use interactive tools found on the internet.

3.  Teachers used computer for drill and practice.

4.  Teachers did not use anything new.  They uploaded all of their old materials and just used the computers because they had to.  They didn't put any new thought into new projects or new ways to use the computers to get their students further ahead then they were with out them.

Two strategies that could have been used so that the project did work would be

1.  Teachers would be trained on how to use the internet to their advantage.

2.  Teachers would use the computers to differentiate the work given to each student.  The students who can learn more faster, would be allowed to have projects and interactive tools to get them to their maximum ability and students who need more practice in order to understand would also be given that opportunity.

Week 4 Reflection

My new delicious account is:
http://www.delicious.com/cnpyke

Social bookmarking could be extremely useful for students, teachers, administration, and people in general.  Teachers could use a wiki to make a website for their students.  Students could then use delicious to keep track of all of their teachers websites, helpful websites for their classes and/or life, interests, and so on.  Instead of "losing" websites or having to save them all on your bookmark, you could just use social bookmarking instead.  Then you can also share the websites.  I feel like this is already being done on Facebook.  For example, my cousin was in the newspaper last week so she posted the article on Facebook.  Then we could all click on the article and read it.  If she wants to be able to find that article forever (or until the news takes it down) she could bookmark it and save it.  She wouldn't have to keep checking back on her Facebook and try to find it whenever she wanted to show off to someone.

Going back to how you can use this in education.  Administrators can keep track of certain websites that are most useful.  This week in one of our meetings, most of the teachers lost the website to help them make their professional development plan.  Another teacher (who still had it), had to send out another email to everyone.  If everyone just kept track of their websites, this huge issue could have been eliminated or easily solved.  A lot of time wasted for nothing!

I have been finding websites on my delicious that I would like to use in my classroom.  They are to help my students or to help me plan better lessons.  It just depends on what I am looking for.  I have also found some personal websites that I like to look at it!  Now I can easily organize all of my websites so that I can find what I am looking for in a timely manner.

In chapter 1, we read about the definition of educational technology.  It was really interesting how it use to be a 'process', 'design and use', and surrounded by media.  Now days, it is more about facilitating learning and improving performance.  That is how I would like to start using technology in my classroom.  I want my students to understand more, faster, and gain mastery.  Instead of keeping all of my students on one pace, I think that technology can help you differentiate the learning that is going on.  I can have students working on different assignments at the same time or to different levels of the assignment.  While using direct instruction in class, you always have a student behind, on track, and ahead.  Using technology can help each student meet different goals and learn as much as they can.  I think that it will improve performance and help make learning more fun.

To me what is missing in this chapter is how to use the technology in order to gain the goals that I have for myself and my students.  I want to try new things in my classroom, but I am not sure how to get started or how to 'train' my students to be ethical while using technology.  I also see a lot of negatives that are getting in the way:  who is going to pay for the technology?  What happens when the technology decides not to work? Are my students really getting ahead?  How can I measure this?

To me there are just a lot of unanswered questions and I am hoping that through this semester more of my questions get answered so I can start using more technology in my classroom in order to help my students get the most out of their education.

Week 3 Reflection

This week we made a wiki page!  My wiki page can be found here!

I really enjoyed using my wiki this week.  So far, this is my favorite thing (besides blogger of course!)  I currently have a website for my class through google.  However, a teacher back in North Carolina helped me make it and I can't remember how exactly to do everything.  I feel like the wiki was a lot easier to use then my google website.  I'm hoping that sometime soon I will have enough time to make another class website.  I am definitely thinking that wiki may be my top choice right now.  Everything is laid out so nice and easily for you.  You don't have to search through a bunch of different things in order to make a new page or make your new page display where you want it to.  It is very user friendly and easy to start up and make changes to!  I think that it would be easy to set up different pages depending on the classes that I am teaching.  I could link the notes, homework, free graphing calculators, tutorials, and other websites that I think my students could find useful.  My students could in turn tell me what they have found useful and maybe what needs to be changed.  I could have a spot on my wiki for parents to contact me and easily be able to email me.  I'm trying to think of a way that I could have my students make their own wiki for a project in my class.  Since I teach math, I'm not sure if I found wiki's extremely useful and would love to be able to learn more about them and be able to use them in my classroom!

Week One Reflection

I'm not sure why this didn't post last week, and I just noticed it this week.  But here it is!

The articles we read this week were definitely coming from two different perspectives.  While I was reading the first article, I felt like I agreed with pretty much everything that was said.  Technology definitely helps a lot in the classroom.  When I use lessons on my SMART board that are engaging, my students want to come up to the board and show the rest of the class what they know.  I can embed different videos off of the internet in order to make my students laugh, see how what we learning can be applied to real life, or look up current events (Check this out for factoring!).  We can do so much more, so much faster!  I have also used programs like castle learning where you can get instant results for the grade the whole class earns on a test.  It will also give you all of the statistics about each question, objective, student, class, and all your classes together.  After spending awhile to make the test, the results you get afterwards it definitely worth the effort you have to put in.

However, it definitely depends on the teacher.  The article talked about the number of hours and time that you have to put towards learning how to use new technology.  To me, that is probably the biggest negative.  For instance, this week I got a SMART board in my new classroom.  I spent over 3 hours installing, uninstalling, and reinstalling the SMART board software.  After playing with the board over and over again, I finally found the only other teacher in the classroom who has one.  We spent another 30 minutes playing with the board during our planning period.  We started to unplug everything and figured out that one of the cords in the back was cut in half.  Well no wonder the stupid thing didn’t work!  I think the second article was more geared towards this type of problem.  Instead of seeing any positives at all, he was probably only in classroom that used technology ineffectively.  At my old school, our principal made it mandatory that we used laptops once in a week in our classrooms.  I loved it!  I could have the students play math related games, browse the internet to see how much cars cost with different percent of interest rates, and so forth.  However, a lot of the other teachers would just let the lap tops sit in their rooms.  Yes, it took me awhile to come up with fun activities but my students could apply what we were learning to real life and get real answers right away.  Answers that will hopefully help them buy their own car when they turn 16.  

The main thing that I have learned over the past couple of years is that you can’t already have a curriculum ready to go and only use technology when you absolutely have to.  You need to use the technology to build your curriculum.  Now days, students need to know how to use computers, make websites, blogs, tweet, etc. in order to be competitive with others in the job field.  If you go into marketing and you need to know how to reach hundreds of people in order to increase your business.  The grammar, art, and mathematics have to be used with technology in order to be successful.  I feel like a lot of us teachers are letting our students down right now by not including all of the skills that they need to be successful.  It’s not always goals and objectives that we are teaching them on a daily basis that make them successful, it’s how they are applying those along with the technology that can set them apart from every other high school graduate.

Another thing that pressed my buttons about the second article, he never used any studies to prove that what he was saying was true.  He was clearly just stating his opinion.  While we are in school, we are taught that we have to back up our opinion by facts.  Our facts must come from reliable sources and we must cite those sources in our articles or papers that we write.  

Week 2 Reflection

So far I really like having a blog.  I have been using it to watch what other people post.  I have not been posting myself, but I have been able to find a lot of other math teachers who have really good lessons who are sharing.  I find it hard to find good lessons by just searching the internet.  You have to go through a lot of stuff before you find something that does that job.  A lot of times, I would just get annoyed and end up making something by myself.  On blogger, I have started to follow a couple of other people in order to find good activities that will help my students learn.

I think that I am confused with the RSS reader.  I tried to add everyone to mine and I'm not sure if I'm not doing it right or what exactly is going wrong.  I understand that you can see who has new posts, but do you have to go to the site that you are following them on to see their new posts?  I keep trying to click on their name but nothing is happening.  Any ideas?

I think a blogger could fit into a few different parts of Dale's cones.  It depends on what you are trying to get out of it.  I think that it would mostly fall under exhibits.  It's a working model that is displayed in a meanful way.  You can easily read and see what people are trying to get across.  You can click on different links and go to different sites based on what you are trying to accomplish.  With this being said, I also think that you would be under verbal symbols and demonstrations depending on what people are blogging about.  Some people who are blogging, can post videos of them teaching, cooking, sewing, doing anything!  If they are using their blogger for this reason, it would be more of demonstrating.  Some other people use their blogger to just put out their ideas, these blogs would fall under verbal.  

I would put RSS reader under exhibits also since it gives you a meaningful list that you can go back to.  Like I said previously, I'm just not sure how these lists are extremely useful.

I could see using blogger with my students in many different ways.  I could easily post their homework or any questions that a majority of the students have.  I could also post videos from Khan Academy, Brainstorm, or any of those websites to help my students if they get stuck on a problem at home.  With blogging, the students could also talk to one another about the different problems to get help on them.  I'm just not convinced that blogger would be a better tool then other websites like schoology.

If I had my students do a blogger, I would also have them sign up for RSS reader so they could easily know when others post on their blogs.  However, right now I don't feel comfortable enough with RSS reader to have my students sign up for it.  

Grants

I just got a new job and we do NOT have SMART boards!  Does anyone know of any good places to write grants?

Just trying this out for the first time.  Trying to find some fun ideas for my classroom!  I was be teaching Geometry and Algebra 2 this year!  (Just landed the job yesterday!!!)