Professional Development in Technology Integration

For a technology integrator, I followed Vicki Davis, a social studies teacher who has found new and unique ways to incorporate technology into her classroom. She has written more than one book and runs a blog to help other teachers with teaching tips and technology tips. She writes her blog entries to help inform teachers and share ideas thought up by her and other teachers, she uses her blog to connect ideas with the classroom and help you with technology integration.

In her 7 Key Ingredients in the successful 21st Century Classroom, she discusses how to bring technology into your class in ways that you might not have thought up before. In this blog post, she links to the website Trello, which she describes as an organization website where students can vote for things and allows for more classroom interaction. One thing I really liked that she said in this post is how she's used Tumblr, Twitter and Pintrest to teach lessons, and that's something that I want to do in my classroom. She talks about how, because so many schools are moving towards being a STEM  school, that even history and english classes are going to have to start incorporating technology into their classrooms.

She also has plenty of non technology posts, one called Stay Positive, which gives you tips on how to cancel negativity in your classroom and create a more positive environment. Such as being upfront about the idea and listen to the problems that are being had and try and move towards a more positive solution, or just "renew" your mind and try and look at the situation in a new light to see a different side or just look at the situation with a fresh set of eyes. She has a lot of blog posts like these, with tips on how to stay motivated (she recommends music, being productive in the morning and end the school year well) and time management tips, like creating a calendar.

When it comes to actually using new technology in the classroom, Vicki Davis tries to find unique ways to use technology that kids might already be familiar with in her classroom. The biggest example being Pintrest, she has more than one blog post about why and how we should use Pintrest in the classroom, including Tips on How to use Pintrest (follow different boards, how to make private and group boards and organizing your pins), Pintrest for Beginners, which teaches you on how to make a Pintrest account and even has some further links to her own boards so you can get  feel for how to use Pintrest, including her education boards, which can be informational for anyone trying to use Pinrest in the classroom. She also has a blog post that is all about Pintrest in classroom, which talks about cool and unique ways to incorporate Pintrest into your classroom, like following education boards, having students make Pintrest boards for an assignment or using a Pintrest board to collect student work to be viewed by a larger community.

After looking through her blog, Vicki Davis has a lot of ideas on how to use unique technology in the classroom, and I definitely will be looking back on her Pintrest posts when I want a new and unique assignment that involves technology and motivates students to be creative, which seems to be what she strives for.

Individual Response to Team Discussion and Assessment

1. What are two things you would do differently if your team had the opportunity to give your presentation again?

2. What did you learn about yourself as a teacher through this process (from planning to implementation through self assessment)?

That, no matter how prepared you are, and how much you plan out exactly what you're going to down the minute, that anything can happen and you have to prepare yourself for anything to happen. The discussions during our presentation took a lot longer than we had originally planned, leaving us with needing to shorten other things to fit it into the time slot. So, you can plan everything you need to do and prepare every document and presentation and still not be 100% ready, because really anything can take longer or shorter, or go completely differently than you planned. 

3. What are three (or more) teaching concepts that you learned through this that you hope to use in your future teaching?

This was my first real time using team teaching, and that's something that I really want to use in my future classroom. I love the idea or working with other teachers and combining subjects so that kids can have an enriching lesson about more than one subject. I also learned about managing classroom discussions. I've never had to manage a classroom discussion before, and I want to have a really deep discussion classroom so, being able to facilitate one was really useful to what I want to do in my classroom in the future. Collaborative preparation was also something that I think was really useful and really fun to do to, everyone in my group had their own ideas and brought something new to the table and those discussions were part of my favorite process of this whole presentation. 

Inspiration

The first example that I found was a timeline of women's suffrage in America, the timeline has pictures of important people, maps, logos and drawings that are significant to suffrage, along with all the important dates that go along with it. While, I probably wouldn't use this exact timeline, or one with the same subject, I definitely could see myself using something like Inspiration to make a timeline. If I was incorporating it into my unit, I could use it for the lesson that I have about the events leading up to the Holocaust, and have students use Inspiration to make their timelines, although, if I were to use this in my classroom, I would probably add another technology element, like a Prezi or a PowePoint to the timeline, or students could use the presentation element of Inspiration. Adding the timeline and the presentation together, I would say that this would probably fall under the modification level, as it goes beyond just a regular presentation or timeline and combines the two to make a more interactive project.

Another example that I found was a video on how to make diagrams. Diagrams start with one idea near the top and just keep connecting ideas as you go down the diagram. Keeping in my unit, I could see myself using the diagram feature of Inspiration to make diagrams of the division of power among the Nazis, or the concentration camps,  or if I wanted to step outside of my unit, I could use the diagrams to show the royal family of Britain or another country. I could definitely see myself using this aspect of Inspiration in my classroom to have my students make diagrams. I would put the diagrams at more of a Augmentation level as opposed of a higher level, unless you were to have students use the presentation or outline features as well.

Show and Tell

I really liked what Wes Fryer had to say in this chapter about how show and tell doesn't end after kindergarten and first grade. I personally think it's importation for students to have an opportunity to share their learning and their interests, not only with the teacher, but also with their classmates. While homework might be the easiest and most efficient way to have students "show and tell" their learning, I think it's extremely important to encourage them to have other ways to explore their interests. Student progress is the most important thing, in my opinion, and somethings homework might not be the best way to explore that for every student.

I think technology is a great way to have students display their learning and their progress, without the pressure that homework might add. I definitely know that when I have my own classroom, I'm going to encourage all my students to use blogs to talk about their experience in the classroom. Giving students an outlet to talk about their own learning and go deeper into their progress as a learner is something that I find extremely important as a future educator, so whether it be using Blogger or Tumblr, or another free blogging website, I want to make blogs a regular activity in my classroom.

Online portfolios are another thing that Wes Fryer talked about that I really enjoyed. Through my experience with practicum, I've found that having an online resource like Wikispaces to store all the things that I've done over the course of the semester is extremely useful, especially if I want to go back and reread something, or have someone else look at something that I've done. Having a place where all student work can be displayed, will not only make things easier for me as a teacher, but will make the students feel accomplished once all their work is in one place and they can see all the hard work that they've done.

Digital Text

While, through the experience of practicum, a lot of information covered in this chapter of Wes Fryer I already knew, I learned a lot through what he had to say, especially on the discussion of blog vs. wiki. We as practicum students have had a chance to work with both blog and wiki, I know that personally, I never had a chance to work with them before practicum, in the classroom. My favorite part of what Wes Fryer was saying, is that blogs are more like newspaper, they compile a bunch of information into simple, easy to read posts, that the original poster can edit, and is timestamped and shown in chronological order, while a wiki is more like an encyclopedia, with multiple pages and changes to the pages are archived. One of the suggestions that Wes Fryer makes that I really agree with is minimal clicking, students are going to get confused if they are required to click a bunch of different links and have to find multiple different pages, so making all their information easy and accessible will make the blog and wiki experience in the classroom run a lot smoother.

The first link that I explored was Tumblr, which is a free blogging site that allows for plenty of customization and freedom to post whatever you please. While this site is easy to navigate and all it's features are free, there is room for distraction if using it in the classroom and hardly anything is blocked or regularly looked at for inappropriate content. There are pros to it though, as tagging is an available feature and the customization feature might be desirable feature to more visual learners who want to be able to control how the resource they're using looks like. Tumblr is supposed to function as more of a personal blogging site, but with the correct monitoring and instruction could easily be fit into the classroom.

The second link I explored was EduBlogs, which is also a free blogging site, that unlike Tumblr is geared completely towards educators and students. When you first get to the home page, it asks you whether you are a student or a teacher, so this website could easily be integrated into the classroom. Like Tumblr, this site offers many different options and allows for outreach to many other different bloggers, but all those fellow bloggers would be fellow teacher or other students from different schools. One of my favorite things about EduBlogs, is that right on the front page if gives you plenty of suggestions on how to use the site and make it valuable in your classroom, with options for student blogging, integration of video, or class discussion, and the fact that it's completely geared towards schools, makes it ideal for a classroom setting.

The final link that I explored was Class Blogmeister, which differs from both Tumblr and EduBlogs. This website is a compilation of different resources put out by other teachers. There is a plethora of different links and resources that are available on Class Blogmeister that it would be quite easy to find resources to use in the classroom. The biggest downside to this website is that it seems geared mostly towards teachers, and might be hard to be interactive with your students on, which would be something that as a teacher, I would be interested in doing.

Final Fires Reflection

I really enjoyed reading Fires in the Bathroom, not only did I think it was a useful tool to my learning about classroom management, but I thought it was really interesting to read. As someone who's only ever gotten the words from fellow classmates who grew up in similar environments, getting to hear about students from a completely different part of the country was a nice change, and one that I really loved reading. Getting to read personal, first hand experiences from students is something that I think you get very little of from other resources, so being able to read them and understand what kids are really going through both in and out of the classroom is something that I think is very valuable to Fires as an overall resource. I don't think I would have loved this book as much as I did had it not been for the multiple first hand accounts and students that were interviewed throughout the book.

Personally, though, I don't think this book really changed my opinion or my views on classroom management. It made me think about how not all classrooms are going to be managed the same way, but nothing really in this book made me stop in my tracks and completely change how I saw a certain aspect of classroom management. My time in the field has been the most valuable classroom management learning experience for me. While, personally, this book brought nothing life changing into my perspective of classroom management, I still think it's a valuable resource and am very glad that I got to read it.

Chapter 10: Going Beyond the Classroom

In the final chapter of Fires talks about how to take all this learning and motivation of students and bring it outside the classroom, so it has a meaningful place in the real world. Students want to make those connections to the world outside, because it will make the entire learning experience mean more to them and help them actually retain the information and take something out of it. This chapter also talks about things that teachers can do to encourage further learning.

One thing that stood out to me is that so many students want their teachers to continue teaching them even after the class is over. I know that there are so many teachers who I would want to continue teaching me, even when the school year is over, so hearing all this different kids talk about having amazing learning experiences was really nice to read.