Journal #8: Communicating and Collaborating for Studnet Success (Nets-5)

McAnear, A. (2010, November). Communicating and collaborating for student success. Learning & Leading with Technology, Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/

This article discusses how the category of communication and collaboration is the easiest of the NETS to meet.  According to the project manager for ISTE’s NETS Seal of Alignment program teachers focus on this NET early in their professional career.  Since students and teachers use these skills in their personal, professional, and academic lives it makes it easier to design learning activities that incorporate this NET than it might be for others.  Studies have shown that schools that implemented applications focused on communication such as administrator blogs, professional learning communities, and online interactive communication systems for parents were more effective in applying innovative technology. In Kannapolis City Schools they model great communication and collaboration. Administrators shared their vision with the teachers and they collaborated to create the lessons. The teachers helped each other create effective lesson plans that modeled the use of digital age tools for communicating and collaborating.  It is also important to keep the communication and collaboration focused on the students desire to learn by finding out what they like and encouraging them to seek that knowledge.

Q1. How can this information be used to better incorporate the other NETS?

Since this research shows how and why teachers are being more successful at incorporating this NET into the lesson planning maybe they can use the same model to help develop ways to incorporate the other NETS.

Q2. How will this information be useful to future teachers?

This will be useful to future teachers because we can be more aware of the NETS that are harder to incorporate in the lesson planning and make a greater effort to accomplish the NETS goals.

Journal #7: My Personal Learning Network (Nets-5)

What is PLN and will it help me as a teacher:

My personal learning network is something that I have created that is web based that will help me get valuable information from other people from around the world that share some of my same interests.  My personal learning network allows me to communicate with other educators, students, and parents.  It is away for me to share my ideas with other people and gives everyone access to whatever I decide I want to have on my PLN.  Having a PLN will help me once I’m a teacher because it gives me access to so many educators throughout the world.  Through my PLN I can easily learn about new and older ways of teaching that can be effective in my classroom.  With all of the tools and resources that are available it is difficult to keep track of everything but with a PLN you constantly have reminders so it is a great way to have fresh ideas for your classroom.  By having a PLN you are constantly learning how to be a better teacher.

Twitter:
I am new to twitter so it’s taking me some time to familiarize myself with this tool but I can already see the resourcefulness of it. I have started following kevcreutz, Ithumann, tonitheisen, smartinez, and jheil65. I chose to follow these people because I took a look at their profile and past tweets and I can see that they share information that is interesting to me as a future educator. I participated on #edchat on November 16^th at 4pm. The topic being discussed was is the education system broken or outdated. Most people believe that our education system is both broken and outdated. One of the major problems is that teachers have to teach inside the box because of having to teach to the test. Even with teachers being limited on how they teach education is slowly seeing improvements. If we are a product of bad education and we managed to continue to go to school then there is hope for students now and in the future. I think the twitter chat was interesting because you get live response from people that have knowledge on the topic being discussed

Delicious:

I am using Delicious to read information about educating so that I can learn to be a more effective teacher.  By adding people to my Delicious network that I find share valuable information gives me access to more resources I can possibly use in my classroom.  I have added these people (Elizabeth Wilson, Jeffery, JendeW, Karlene, & L) to my network because they are interested in education and they share information that is interesting to me.  There were several things that I tagged “PLN”

-Respect Essential In a High Poverty School/Connected Principals

-What is Good Teaching?

-Personal Learning Networks 101

-A Primer on Personal Learning Networks

-23 Resources about Learning Networks

-Jeff Goldstein: The remarkable Power of Twitter

The reason I tagged these is because I think they are either interesting topics to read about in education or they can help me improve my personal learning network.

I joined The Educator’s PLN because it has lots of useful information that should concern everyone involved in education. The blog post I read was about how immigration is an educational issue.  The teacher who posted the blog discussed how one of her students shared his concern about college and scholarship applications because his mother was deported last year.  The student is currently living with siblings and has no money for college.  This is an important topic because as future teachers we will encounter students that are facing these tuff situations, especially here in California where Latino students make up over 50% of student population and raids by ICE continue to separate families.  As future educators we need to be aware of the issues some of our students will be facing.

Journal #6:Change Agent (Nets-5)

Rebora, A. (2010, October 11). Change agent. Education Week, Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/

This article was about Will Richardson a former teacher turned technology expert and his ideas about transforming education.  He has written books on how to integrate Web 2.0 technology in K-12 classrooms.  Richardson argues that schools need to transform their teaching and learning models to meet changes in technology and the world. He believes teachers should be transparent and easily accessible.  To accomplish that he believes all teachers should be “googleable” meaning they can easily be found online.  If teachers build an online presence they can more easily build connections, share your work, share ideas, and become more effective teachers by collaborating with other teaching professionals.  He also believes schools need to take more responsibility for teaching students how to use the internet effectively to find information they need so that students can learn better.  Kids need to learn to collaborate to solve problems, exercise critical thinking skills, and learn how to handle failure instead of memorizing useless facts they can easily look up online.  If kids learn how to use the internet effectively they will know how to find the information they need and they can learn on their own.  He wants to see schools get away from teaching to the test and instead use curriculum that will show students how to solve problems.  Much of the learning going on in schools today is about content and not key traits they will need to be built up to be successful in the real world.

Q 1. How can you incorporate technology into your classroom?

I think a good start is for teachers to be “googleable” because my doing that they give themselves access to the world of education.  As teachers I think it’s important to be an example of what you are trying to accomplish.  By being an active learner teachers can learn from other educators how to effectively incorporate technology in the classroom.

Q2. What is one of the problems with transforming education?

As a teacher there is only so much you can do because you don’t have control over the curriculum in your classroom.  With federal, state, and local policies that require certain material to be covered and tests to be implemented it makes it difficult to make progress in changing education.

Inspiration (Nets-T 3)

For this assignment I used Inspiration an online tool that allowed me to layout my presentation and ideas. I showed my familiarity with the Nets T and how I have met those requirements. I chose some assignments done this semester that reflect the Nets T standards. I also placed pictures on the presentation that correlate with the topics.

Prezi Presentation Assessment (Nets T-2)

This quick questionaire was created through Google Forms as a way to get feed back from classmates after I presented my Prezi to them. It is a really useful tool because you get all of the feedback sent to you in an organized Excel format. You can even choose to share the information with others which makes collaboration on assignments much easier.

Journal # 5 : Twitter for Learning, 55 Great Articles (Nets-5)

Hopkins, D. (2009, May 9). Twitter tips: for teachers & educators [Electronic mailing list message]. Retrieved from http://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/twitter/twitter-tips-for-teachers-educators-2/

This article gave many helpful tips that will help anyone that plans on using twitter. You first need to work out what you want to get out of twitter. Without a purpose twitter will be confusing and useless. You also need to find and follow people that have the same interests. That is one of the reasons it’s important to put relevant and interesting information on your profile so that you find like minded people. When you pass on information it’s important to re-tweet so that you give credit to the originator. It will also be helpful to use a URL shortening service so that you don’t use too many of your 140 available characters. A good way to find good contacts is by looking at the people that follow someone you are already following. Also don’t be afraid to block people you feel won’t be helpful to your purpose on twitter. Another helpful tool twitter offers is Hashtags, they are great for getting people together for a specific topic. If you use twitter to tweet about yourself and you don’t send valuable information to your followers you will quickly lose your network of people. Twitter has the capabilities to enhance your classrooms experience and add value to the contents of your teaching. Twitter allows you to follow people throughout the world which will help you get different ideas and techniques in teaching.
Q 1. What was the most useful tip from this article?
A. I think the most useful tip was to establish a purpose for using twitter. You need to know what you want to get out of it in order for it to have a purpose. I think it might be a good idea to create separate accounts for your professional and social life.
Q 2. How do you think you can use twitter to benefit your classroom?
A. I think I will use twitter to follow other educators so that I can get useful information I can incorporate in my lesson plans and assignments. By following other teachers the tips they offer can be instrumental in becoming a more effective teacher. I think I can also use it with my students by creating a Hashtag so that we can all communicate through twitter.

Nets-S Presentation Assignmnet (Nets-2)

I used a presenation tool called Prezi for this assignment. The Prezi tool helped me organize my description of teaching indicators for grades 9-12. This tool was fun to work with because it is much different than other presentation tools such as Power Point and Google Present. Once my Prezi was complete I presented it to several classmates which later gave me great feed back.