EPortfolio

“Teaching Students to Use Their Heads, Hands, and Hearts” by Lisa Bucciarelli is an article on a teacher who uses technology to help engage the students to learn a foreign language. This sound very much like what we do in our Education class. The teacher has created an online portfolio that is safe and secure for the students. This is also accessible for the parents in order to see their kid’s improvement. There does seem to be a lot of improvement and really positive feedback on the matter. The teacher found many useful sites that can be used to create assignments that are not only interesting but also educational. This is a great route to take as a foreign language teacher.

The author provides many links to the sites she uses to create these assignments. I think I could really follow in her steps in order to teach my students, surely after modifying it to my teaching styles. I think these are great example of successful teaching techniques that we can take advantage of and use them in our classrooms.

Hooray for Laptops!

The article “Assessment made Easy” by Andrew A. Zucker demonstrates how well the school, Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) is doing with technology. This is a school that had $1million gift from Hewlett-Packard. This school had a one-to-one laptop for students. Although there are other schools that have this, these students seem to be doing very well all around. For example, they have great test score and great outcomes with college acceptances. They are also now getting more money to be a school to get studied on their teaching techniques with this technology.

This school is doing very well because there are many positive things they are doing with all the students having computer access. To start off with, the laptops are fully loaded which is beneficial to the students since many of them are from low-income families. I believe this would defeat the purposes if students go laptops and had to buy programs with money they don’t have. There is also a lot that teachers are doing to take advantage of this technology. They can now grade tests and better assess students to give them better feedback and faster. This is important because teachers can better spot out what the students need help with. What I liked, in addition is that teachers have choices in how they would like to use the technology.

I think in a perfect world, all students would have access to such great technology and not have to worry about having to afford it. I would really like to have these kinds of opportunities because there is so much you could do as a teacher when grades can be graded almost instantly. There is also a better and faster way to communicate with students. So much can be done, but we have to make sure that we can make it relevant and interesting, while educating.

Lights, Camera, Action!

The article I read for this week is titled “Another View on Mentoring” by Anissa Lokey-Vega and Laurie Brantley-Dias. This article was interesting because it was a little different from the rest of the articles I have reviewed. For instance, this article demonstrates how technology can be used for the benefit of the teacher. Here a couple of teachers are mentors to help other teachers with their teaching. In this case, the teachers record a teacher’s lesson with a video camera and use that to help the teacher being mentored. Through the recording they are able to play back the teacher’s teaching and point out her skills. The teacher being mentored can also analyze and critique themselves. They mentioned, “Through this process, Weingart (the teacher being mentored) was able to receive emotional support as well as instructional feedback from me without feeling frustrated and discouraged.”

I think technology can also be for the benefit of the teacher. In this case, I think it will help the teacher improve her teaching and see what things are to be done differently. As teacher’s we should welcome technology that will make us become better teachers.

I can see myself using video cameras a little differently in my class. I think students would have a great time creating projects were they can express themselves and their creativity. This would also help break from the norm of always doing the same kinds of projects. They can work together to have a great time during an educational activity.

Just Twitting

I read the article titled “Have You Tweeted Today?” I am not sure of the author (Diana Fingal?), perhaps this was just a blog in the magazine of the September/ October issue. This caught my attention since we had to get a Twitter for class. I am still not too happy about the idea since Twitter is not very appealing to me. However, as the professor mentioned, it is very important to try it before we make a decision about it. In the article it mentions how some teachers favor this form of technology since it gives them the opportunity to follow other educators for feedback and collaboration among each other. They also make the point that we must keep up with the technology and know what our students are doing on the web.

Although, I am still somewhat skeptical about things such as Twitter, I feel I am opening up to the idea. I feel that if these are good strategies for students to learn, than why not use them? I can see myself using things like that to post up the homework for students. Maybe we can also use it to communicate amongst each other. I think this could also be used to communicate with other teachers and see what they are doing. We could throw some ideas at each other to make our lessons more interesting.

Google Skills

"Media Matters Your Google Guide" by Doug Johnson (from the May 2007 issue) is an interesting article that explains some things we need to know in order to make a search in a search-engine like Google, a successful search. This article is really a guide that would be useful for teachers to review with their students before an assignment that requires gathering information that comes from the internet. For example, we must know how to narrow down our options when searching. For a focus search, we can search for the information as a question. We must also know how to differentiate between sites and which ones have scholarly information. It is important to also keep in mind that not all links to sites are necessarily good since these are often ads and have no relation to the site where there is information.

This article has provided me with very useful information that is important for students to know for when they are going to use a search engine such as Google for research. I can see myself giving my students this guide to help facilitate their learning experience. There is so much information to learn from the internet but it can also be hard to find that information without the right skills. I think it is important for students to spend less time trying to find the information and more time learning what they have found.

Virtual Reality

In this article, "Walk, Fly, or Teleport to Learning" by Maureen Brown Yoder focuses on the use of the Internet- based multiuser virtual environment (MUVEs). It is mentioned that by 2011, 20 million children will be members of this group. From my understanding this is a kind of game that is meant to give people a learning experience of the “real world”. Here you create an avatar and roam through the virtual world. There are different “worlds” people can experience that have different kinds of real life learning situations. For example, there is one that takes place in New Orleans and you have to find your mom and along the way you earn points by talking to heroes.

I don’t know exactly how I would use this in my classroom. I like the idea that students would be entertained and probably very interested in interacting with their peers in this “SIMS” kind of program. I know that it is important as educator s to make learning interesting for students but I am debating as to if I would use this in class.

A Learning Activity

The article “Let it Snow” by Kathy Sanders and Gwen Pavelski is from the February 2009 magazine. I really liked the fact that in this class, students had an opportunity to learn while enjoying learning. I think this always helps the students and the teacher. In this case, students seemed to have a good response on the activity. This activity was relevant to the students since it was based on snow. Living in Wisconsin and witnessing history of the greatest snowfalls in their city, these students were ready to learn more. Snow was integrated in their learning in research, reading, and science. Technology was effective in their research for the calculations of the amount of snowfall. These students also used technology to take photographs, digital video interviews, computer art, and more. Students had positive results and seemed to learn more than what was expected.

I would love to incorporate activities for students that are relevant in their lives. For example, this could be used in southern California with rainfall. I think this could help students learn so much about where they live and how they can help to make a difference while learning skills in science and technology. This once again shows the importance of getting the students interested and capturing their attention for better learning. Most students love technology and it is our duty to find was to use it and allow them to learn while using it.