Journal Post 5

Chapter 5

Researching and Evaluating Internet Information

 What are search engines and how do they work?

             Do you remember life before Google? It was difficult. We had to use paper maps, learn languages and even own a dictionary. Scary, I know! Search engines have become a staple to our everyday lives because they’re practical, easy to navigate, and just overall convenient. But apart from being a touch screen away, do you ever think about the underground dynamics of a search engine; how it all comes together? Well, a search engine is a software program that uses networks of computers to access information about a topic from its database. Knowing how to locate and analyze information from the internet can get a little tricky. Sure you can just type a word or phrase and get an infinity amount of web pages pretending to the topic being searched. To limit your research, focus on a specific topic category, narrowing and simplifying the subject area. For example, when exploring the history of African Americans baseball players, you might list “baseball history”, “Jackie Robinson”, or “sports history”. Any of these terms would be a great starting point for using a search engine.

Photo Credit to Jinho Jung

            As valuable as Google and Ask can be in locating information, teachers and students benefit from search tools that focus more directly on academics topics, educational standards and learning materials. Educationally specialized search resources are often more time efficient than typing keywords onto a general search engine.  Some examples are like the Internet Public Library, Voice of Shuttle, and Artcyclopedia. Teachers and students can benefit from these specialized search engines. My school offers its own research database. It comes in handy when I have to write a research paper for my class. The best part of all, it is free! Some of these educational search engines are not available for everyone. They require a fee. So take advantage of the free ones out there. They contain a wealth of information.

Flickr
            Thanks to my awesome Professor, I discovered Flickr. Flickr is an online photo managing and sharing tool that lets you search photos, organize them, and even send them. I use Flickr to find photos that I can incorporate into my blogs I have been writing. Apart from that, you can use Flickr as a learning tech tool to your curriculum. You can divide your photos into sets based on a theme you are teaching. Discussion boards are also included for online talking as well as for picture sharing among colleagues and students.  

Summary
             Chapter five explores how teachers and students can research and evaluate the internet as a teaching and learning environment. It talks about search engines, how they work, and offer a variety of great educational sites to use. It also addresses the problem of student plagiarism and how teachers can address the issue. Teachers can reduce or even avoid situations where students plagiarize by structuring their school assignments better. Finally, teaching students how to find quality and valuable information in the web. According to the American Library Association, high quality online information meets five criteria: accuracy, authority, objectively, currency, and coverage. Paying attention to URL extensions, using a lesson plan site selectively, and giving clear web research guidelines are important strategies for teachers to use in teaching Internet information evaluation to students. Overall, the main goal of the chapter was teaching students how to access and asses information in the web.   

Journal Post 3

Chapter 3

Developing Lessons with Technology

What is meant by “lesson development using technology”?

                Lesson development is central to the work of every teacher. Lesson development refers to all the activities that teachers do as they create, teach, and evaluate lessons with students. It involves a teacher’s decisions about three elements of teaching lessons: academic content (what to teach), teaching goals, methods and procedures (how to teach), and finally learning assessments (how to know what students have learned). School system guidelines and state national curriculum framework the bases on “what to teach”. However, because no national standard spells out everything to teach about any given topic, classroom teachers must make choices about what will be explored to students each day. Technology plays an essential role on helping teachers with their lesson plans. We have access to powerful new ways to research and retrieve information like blogs, internet search engines and wikis.

Photo Credit to the tartanpodcast

                Teachers combine goals, methods and procedures into formats for daily learning. Goals are the reason why a lesson is being taught. Methods are the instructional strategies. Large or small groups, discussion, lectures, role play, case studies are just a few of the examples teachers use to convey academic content to students. Procedures are the scheduling and grouping of students by teachers during a lesson, including time management. The goals, methods, and procedure all mutually support each other in the process of lesson development, which is where technology comes as a great use. Technology does best in enhancing the understanding of goals. It gets you to that higher order of thinking; it gets you to understand that goal.

Photo Credit to woodleywonderworks 

PBS Teachers

                PBS Teachers features thousands of lesson plans, professional development opportunities, videos, and blogs. You will notice that many of these sources are based on the award winning programming that is broadcast on PBS stations. You will also see that many are tied back to state standards and there are recommendations on how to study a topic beyond what is shown at the site. It contains a sufficient amount of appropriate use of school technology, to enhance what the teacher is already teaching. The PBS Teacher makes finding online lessons and activities so much easier!

Summary

                 Chapter three discusses how teachers plan, deliver, and assess lessons that engage students and teach academic content while integrating technology into the lesson plans. Two types of lesson planning are explained. Sample lessons are developed step by step in the chapter so you can see ways to use technology throughout the development process. It also mentions how teachers should evaluate their students. Prime examples are using teaching performances assessments to measure the knowledge of students before, during, and after teaching lessons. Technology offers multiple ways to conduct test and performances such as quizzes, portfolios, and student writing. It provides tools on how to develop and evaluate learning experiences for students.

Journal Post 2

Chapter Two                                                                                                                                                 Transforming Learning with Unique, Powerful Technology

How does technology create student engagement and collaboration?

                Engagement and collaboration refer to teaching and learning situations where students work together on academic activities thoughtfully and willingly. Now a days, students outside of school are more involved with technology than ever before. They watch television, surf the net, and send emails, texts, instant messaging, just about anything! These are all forms of communication and collaboration. Teachers have it made when it comes to use students’ technology-centered behaviors to promote learning in school. Some ways to promote active engagement and collaboration include: student conducted online polls and surveys, digital storytelling, digital games for learning, online publishing, discussion boards, and Wikipedia. Engaging students is at the heart of teaching. John Dewey, a philosopher, observed teachers and found out something very interesting. Most of the educators neglected the inner attention and focused more on the outer attention. However, the inner attention is where learning happens. This is when you get students involved to think deeply and actually consume information about the topic being discussed.

Photo Credit to Scott McLeod

                In addition to promoting attentive engagement, technology creates settings where students can work productively together. One way we can make students collaborate together is by groupwork. Group work lets students work together in pairs or even in quarters. In my opinion is has been quite effective as a student. Since we are put into groups, not one student feels left out. Everyone brings their strengths to the table and we all collaborate as a team. Cooperative learning is another highly effective way to promote active learning in classrooms.  Each student has a role while working together. Some examples are like having a note taker, an artist, researcher, and even a presenter. When students work together, they acquire skills and knowledge in ways that create and sustain lasting learning.

Web Scrapbook

                Web scrapbook is one of the website resources for engagement and collaboration I explored. It allows individual students or classroom groups to place electronic information in an online folder. Think of it as a clipping file for the Internet. Into that file you can place images, excerpts, and whole web pages that you find while you surf the web or that reside on your computer. In addition, the Web Scrapbook is a collaborative environment. A class working on a project together could place all of the items they wish to discuss or annotate into one shared folder. Groups with a common interest could collaboratively build, sort, and annotate a list of relevant web pages, images, and passages. This reminds me of the discussion board I have in my Introduction to Technology class. It helps us engage with one another and include information and insights we have.

Summary

                In this chapter it talks about how technology makes unique, powerful, and transformative learning through visual learning. It also mentions ways on how to create collaborative activities for students, rapid feedback, and imaginative and creative self-expression.  It focuses on metacognitive thinking to build what has been called a student-centered or knowledge approach to teaching. It emphasizes how computers can redefine and change how teaching is conducted in schools. It offers many examples of multimedia software that can be used to teach and access much information. Using technology, teachers create opportunities for students to generate new ideas, original work, and use models to explore systems and issues.

Journal Post 4

Chapter 4

Integrating Technology and Creating Change.

How can teachers integrate technology into their work as educators?

           

            Let’s start with the definition of technology integration and educational change. Technology integration refers to ways that teachers build technology into all aspects of their professional work. Educational change refers to innovations by teachers that create new patterns of teaching and learning in school. Together they make technology a central part of education, enabling the unique, powerful, and transforming impacts of computers and other tools to be part of every student’s daily experience in schools.

           

            Technology integration doesn't mean computer technologies replace nonelectric resources in every teaching situation. You have to be creative with it! This way, together with your students, discover the power of computer technologies. The use of technology can be subsided in three primary ways. One way is inside-the-classroom teaching tools. Teachers use technology to present academic material and create interactive learning experiences for students in the classroom.  An example is like the infamous PowerPoint presentations we have all used at least once in our life. I personally love it because I've grown accustom to using it. A second way technology can be used is outside-the-classroom as a professional resource. By this I mean, using technology to manage the administrative demands they face in school. One common example is keeping their grades and attendance recorded. Technology can come in handy when trying to do recordkeeping. Teachers have slowly change their ways and have come more dependent on the programs that computer offer to make their jobs a little easier. Finally, the third primary way is inside- and outside-the-classroom learning resources for the students. In this category teachers ask students to use technology in academic learning during class time as well as outside of school. Group projects, internet research, and creative writing are some great examples of this.

Photo Credit to James F Clay

At the end of the day, the goal is to help technology become a daily part of learning. It can extend the time that teachers may spend with students, making it possible for teachers to individualize instruction for students who need the extra help. Let’s face it; we all know there will be always those students who need the extra help, who need that extra attention. In today’s time, we have the opportunity to have computers that have different learning tool programs, at different levels, for every individual student. We need to take advantage of it! It has also given teachers the chance to organize and manage their work electrically. Duties can be conducted using multiple forms of information technology—from word processing, email, record-keeping software to manage attendance, etc. Just an endless amount of opportunities are given with technology and why not use it!

Edutopia

            

            Edutopia, is one of the websites of Tech Tool links that I explored. It had a tremendous amount of information and inspiration on how to successfully integrate technology into the classroom. It offered a variety of different links to articles, blogs, guides, and even videos for insights on what you were looking for. I explored around the integration of technology because that is what I mainly focused on in this chapter. The guidelines they have are very useful and appropriate for a classroom teacher. Overall, I consumed a great amount of information that will come in handy when I become a teacher.

Summary

            

          Chapter overall focuses on technology integration and educational change to help teachers introduce technology into both classroom instruction and professional work outside the work force. Of course, issues and strategies were brought upon with ways for teachers to address the problems of the digital inequality and participation gap. Unwillingness to change a favorite lesson to include technology was probably the one I was must familiar with. After many years of being a student, I have witnessed this with my own eyes. Many of the teachers had all these new gadgets in their rooms and never once used them to their ability! They were afraid it would change the way they taught. Change is good. And if technology can be used to improve your teaching, why not use it? The chapter also introduced new concepts such as, ‘informing” and ‘automating”, and there were also strategies for using whatever technology teachers had to promote a way into teaching and learning. 

Journal Post 4

Integrating Technology and Creating Change.

How can teachers integrate technology into their work as educators? 

           

            Let’s start with the definition of technology integration and educational change. Technology integration refers to ways that teachers build technology into all aspects of their professional work. Educational change refers to innovations by teachers that create new patterns of teaching and learning in school. Together they make technology a central part of education, enabling the unique, powerful, and transforming impacts of computers and other tools to be part of every student’s daily experience in schools.

            

            Technology integration doesn’t mean computer technologies replace nonelectric resources in every teaching situation. You have to be creative with it! This way, together with your students, discover the power of computer technologies. The use of technology can be subsided in three primary ways. One way is inside-the-classroom teaching tools. Teachers use technology to present academic material and create interactive learning experiences for students in the classroom.  An example is like the infamous PowerPoint presentations we have all used at least once in our life. I personally love it because I’ve grown accustom to using it. A second way technology can be used is outside-the-classroom as a professional resource. By this I mean, using technology to manage the administrative demands they face in school. One common example is keeping their grades and attendance recorded. Technology can come in handy when trying to do recordkeeping. Teachers have slowly change their ways and have come more dependent on the programs that computer offer to make their jobs a little easier. Finally, the third primary way is inside- and outside-the-classroom learning resources for the students. In this category teachers ask students to use technology in academic learning during class time as well as outside of school. Group projects, internet research, and creative writing are some great examples of this.

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

At the end of the day, the goal is to help technology become a daily part of learning. It can extend the time that teachers may spend with students, making it possible for teachers to individualize instruction for students who need the extra help. Let’s face it; we all know there will be always those students who need the extra help, who need that extra attention. In today’s time, we have the opportunity to have computers that have different learning tool programs, at different levels, for every individual student. We need to take advantage of it! It has also given teachers the chance to organize and manage their work electrically. Duties can be conducted using multiple forms of information technology—from word processing, email, recordkeeping software to manage attendance, etc. Just an endless amount of opportunities are given with technology and why not use it!

Edutopia

            

            Edutopia, is one of the websites of Tech Tool links that I explored. It had a tremendous amount of information and inspiration on how to successfully integrate technology into the classroom. It offered a variety of different links to articles, blogs, guides, and even videos for insights on what you were looking for. I explored around the integration of technology because that is what I mainly focused on in this chapter. The guidelines they have are very useful and appropriate for a classroom teacher. Overall, I consumed a great amount of information that will come in handy when I become a teacher.

Summary  

            

            Chapter four overall focuses on technology integration and educational change to help teachers introduce technology into both classroom instruction and professional work outside the work force. Of course, issues and strategies were brought upon with ways for teachers to address the problems of the digital inequality and participation gap. Unwillingness to change a favorite lesson to include technology was probably the one I was must familiar with. After many years of being a student, I have witnessed this with my own eyes. Many of the teachers had all these new gadgets in their rooms and never once used them to their ability! They were afraid it would change the way they taught. Change is good. And if technology can be used to improve your teaching, why not use it? The chapter also introduced new concepts such as, ‘informing” and ‘automating”, and there were also strategies for using whatever technology teachers had to promote a way into teaching and learning.