Stop-Motion Animation Reflection

In the stop-motion animation assignment we used imovie which is fairly simple to use. One thing that I liked about it was how easily you could add your pictures to it and create a production. Going into it I thought that it was going to take our group a long time to take as many pictures that we needed.

I liked our groups idea, we used Marissa's dog, Mr. Ty as our star and we were a little uncertain how he was going to behave. But he actually did exactly what we wanted of him. Our public service announcement was on the importance of training your dog. Me and Marissa were having lunch and as I dropped something from the table, Mr. Ty jumped up and stole my sandwich that I was eating. Then Marissa decided to train him so he would behave better around her friends. The next time that we had lunch, he sat on the ground and was very well behaved the whole time. The moral of the story was that people love a well trained dog. It was a lot of fun and it was very cute.

I would love to create a stop-motion animation in my future classroom. Like I have said before, I really want to teach early elementary grades so some of the things that we have done are really more pertained to older students. But I an always thinking of ways that I can incorporate them for younger students. It may require a lot of help from me, but I am sure that they can be active participants in creating the story line and acting out the scenes.

I am still really surprised how fast we created it and how many pictures it took for only a minute or so for the final project.

Scratch Project Reflection

This project was a lot of work. It took me a very long time to figure out how exactly to get the "sprite" to do what I wanted it to do. After playing around with it a lot and getting some information from classmates and Jeff, I eventually figured it out. The more I messed around with it the better I think it got. Once a person learns the basics, you should be able to manipulate it anyway you want.

When I finished it i did get a sense of accomplishment. I made everyone in my house play with my moon phase model that I created. They thought it was cool and I tried to get my 11 year old to create his own, but I didn't have time to give him much direction and he quickly lost interest.

I feel that this would be a fun and interactive project that student can work on over a period of time. They are not something that can be created in a short amount of time, I don't think anyway. I do feel that it would be a very rewarding project because I was very proud of my finished project in the end.

Since I want to teach K-2nd grade, I feel that I would have to be very involved in helping students create these projects if I was to use them in the future. I think they it would be perfect for third grade and up though because it does require some reading skills and coordination to create.

I still could place context on one and have younger students use the "game" to reinforce inportant concepts and skills with the younger kids in my future classroom.

Podcast Assignment Reflection

This assignment was a lot of fun. I made my podcast in audacity which is pretty easy to use and did not take a lot of time to create. My hardest part of this assignment was trying to come up with an interesting topic that was educationally relevant. After many scratched ideas I decided to make it about adventures and how the local library is your source for wonderful adventures without having to leave your town. I talked about how you could visit the jungles of Africa or the Pyramids with just a trip to your library. I thought it turned out pretty well and that any student no matter their age should be able to create one fairly easily with little instruction. I feel that I should be able to incorporate this type of technology into my future classrooms for a fun way to have students share their knowledge of a subject in an interesting way. I liked that we had the freedom to create pretty much whatever we wanted but it is a little broad for younger children. When I use podcasts I think I will give them a topic like science or math to make it more focused but besides that it was great and I enjoyed creating it.

Exit Slip How did your Idea of Tecnology Changed over the Semeter?

My idea of technology has changes some from the beginning if this semester. I though to begin with that technology was important and that teacher should incorporate it into their curriculum. Now I feel much more comfortable using technology in the classroom and I like learning about new technologies. I have enjoyed this class so much that I am changing my masters specialty to technology. I want to learn more about how to incorporate technology especially with younger children since I don't see teachers using it as much as they could with the younger grade levels.

April 8th Exit Slip

Today we reviewed chapter 10 and started with going over authentic assessment and performance assessment. In this class since it is a technology class we focus on performance assessment We learned that the clickers had different capabilities such as texting which I did not know you could do with them. He also shared a few books that are useful for new teachers. Visible Learning and How People Learn and Harry Wong-First Days of School. He stressed that feedback as a teacher is a great way to know how you are doing as a teacher. Through doing assessments you will know how effective your teaching is because you can see how your students are learning. He talked about how struggling readers feel that they are the only ones that get off task when trying to read. But in fact everyone does. The clickers can be used to show students these facts. That not everyone gets the right answer all of the time. Clickers are expensive which is a downfall of this device. Polleverywhere.com can be used in place of a clicker using cellphones. Next we talked about rubrics. He said that rubrics are difficult to create. It is very easy to create a crappy rubric and very hard to create a really good rubric. They don't allow for much creativity on the part of the student. Then we talked about electronic portfolios and how many students are using them for student led conferences. Then we went into computer based testing. Using survey tools can be used as a computer based test and they can be graded and give you a spreadsheet of the data rather quickly. After the chapter discussion we went over contemporary issues and cool tools. Kathrine went first and talked about hoe technology can help students learn more about science concepts with technology. Bring experts into the classrooms to discuss their expertise either through video conferencing or actual classroom visits. Kelsey shared her cool tools which was flicker which is a photo sharing site. Katie shared wordle.com to make word clouds. Amanda was up next and she shared Ning.com. Finally we finished our stopmotion animation. All of these tools are very useful to use and I will definitely use them in my future classroom.

Chapter 10 Assessing Meaningful Learning with Technology

I was looking forward to this chapter. We have spent lots of time in class and in the text finding out how technology can be used to help students and support meaningful learning in the classrooms. But there has been no talk about how to tell if your students are actually learning through the process. This chapter discusses two different types of assessments. One is authentic assessment which is evaluating their authentic learning. The other one is performance assessment which is assessing the actual skills that a student has by seeing them perform that skill. I feel that we have been assessed in this class according to performance assessments. We have received a met or not met depending on weather we were able to complete the required assignment using technology. I agree with this type of assessment. Especially if it is on an individual basis. If you assign a podcast you will know if a student is able to use the technology or not to create it if they produce one and it meets your requirements. I will definitely use this type of assessments in the future since I feel that they do work and show the instructor that they can create the required task. I like the portfolio idea for keeping students work all in one place. I forget sometimes that when I have my own classroom we will not have a class website like we do in our college classes here. Creating a place for students all to submit their assignments and keep them together for later use is a great idea.I watches some of the reviews on the site that was mentioned in the chapter called foliotek.com. This site seems to offer many different options that are useful in creating an online portfolio. Rubrics are important for assessing technology. A rubric is a set of requirements for any particular assignment. As long as the requirements are met the assessment is complete. I like rubrics, they help me stay on track for my assignments and keep me inline with what the instructor is expecting for a particular assignment. There are sites online that can help instructors generate rubrics such as ide.ed.psu/ITSC/RubrProc/ that is mentioned in the text. I would probably need help with creating a rubric for the first time and this tool could be very valuable to me in the future. The student response devices that we have used in class before we mentioned in this chapter. I feel that these tools would be very useful for assessment on a whole class basis. Since they are done somewhat anonymous students will not feel pressured about raising their hand or answering with the whole class looking on. I hope to get a set of these in my future classroom to use for assessments. Our TESOL teacher used a website that allowed her to do the same thing but with students using their own cell phones and texting in answers. That would probably be great for older students but I don't think (or I hope that) my future Kindergarten or First grade students would have cell phones that they can text on and use in the classrooms.

April 1st Exit Slip

Today we learned about chapter 9 which was presented Christine and Sarah. The discussed that visualization is a key tool for learners and technologies can help with visualization. I thin that they did a great job of sharing what the chapter was about with the class. I shared my contemporary issue today which was focused on how students are using different technologies in the classrooms to cheat in the classroom. During my search for a topic I was anticipating finding links such as plagiarism and spark-notes but I ran across numerous sites that were mentioning how students were using ipods to cheat. This was interesting to me because I thought that you could only really put music on one and maybe pictures. I did not know that you can put documents into the ipod. The class input was great when I did my presentation. Many mentioned that they did not know that students could do this in the ipods like I thought. And many thought that listening to music during an exam is helpful for some to focus and concentrate on the material. Marissa mentioned about whether or not is a teachers place to teach students how to have online etiquette. The class agreed that students do need to be taught when is the appropriate time to type correctly like writing formally and informally. The cool tools were on twiddla, live mocha and twitter. These sites were pretty cool. I really liked the twiddla site since students can collaborate on assignments. I liked the idea of collaborating with other classrooms I definitely feel that I will use this in the future. We also took pictures for our stop motion productions. I am excited about that since we are staring "Mr. Tye" Marissa's dog.