Reflection

• What are some things that you have learned about effective teaching strategies when integrating technology?
During this course, I learned about a lot of technologies that I was not familiar with before. The teaching strategy that really helped me to understand these technologies was having time to explore them on my own. I liked how we were introduced and given background knowledge about them but then were given activities where we could “check them out” on our own. This helped me to have a deep understanding of the different technologies. I learned that giving tasks related to the technology would help students understand and be successful in using the technology. I have also learned that different forms of technology are very effective at creatively getting students attention, which will help them to be engaged in the lesson. These are the teaching strategies that I learned about how to effectively integrate technology into the classroom.

• How did integrating the Internet help you think about and evaluate uses of technology?
Integrating the Internet helped me to explore the different forms of technology in order to get a good understanding what how they could actually be used. Also the Internet allowed me to research the different technologies more in-depth and find answers to any questions that I had. The Internet was also a key mode of communication between my peers in the class and also the instructors.

• Which of the assignments that you turned in do you feel really exemplifies good teaching with technology and why?
I think the assignment that I turned in that exemplified good teaching with technology would be my groups SIG project. We created a presentation about interactive whiteboards using the program of Prezi. The presentation was clear and easy to understand. It had a great deal of useful information but was not overwhelming in the presentation. I think our presentation kept peoples attention and also taught them a lot of information about interactive whiteboards and how to use them in their classroom.
• How have you met your goals established in your Personal Growth Plan?
I was able to accomplish two of the goals that I set for myself at the beginning of the semester. The first one that I accomplished was becoming familiar and learning about creating a blog. I was interested in creating a blog for my classroom to communicate with parents. This course had given me the opportunity to have practice at creating a blog and also posting to it often. The next goal that I accomplished was learning about SmartBoards. During the research I completed for my SIG project, I learned a great deal about SmartBoards. I can’t wait to use everything that I have learned about SmartBoards in my daily teaching. I am excited that I was able to successfully accomplish the goals that I set for myself at the beginning of the semester.

• Do you have any new goals? What are your plans for reaching your new goals and your long-term goals after this course is over?
One of my goals that I hope to accomplish next school year is applying everything that I have learned about interactive whiteboards into my teaching. I will have an interactive whiteboard in my classroom next year and I can’t wait to put everything into practice that I have researched and learned through my SIG project.

Another goal that I am still working on is to investigate and explore technologies to aid in my daily communication with parents. I have learned about blogs and think that they would be a great mode of communication but I would still like to explore webpage making and wiki’s. I hope that future courses will address these technologies.

Learning Style

After taking the Multiple Intelligences test based on Howard Garder’s Model I found out that my two main learning styles include interpersonal and bodily-kinesthetic. One teaching strategy that is effective for my learning style is group work. I learn best by being able to cooperate with others. I am able to understand other people and enjoy helping others learn along with them helping me learn. I have always enjoyed working with others and find it helpful to have contact with others while learning. I also learn best by being able to touch things and move around. I learn by being able to “do” things instead of just watching or listening. I have found that during my schooling the way that is least effective for my learning is just by listening. I need to have something visual in front of my in order to keep me focused. Since this is my weakest learning style, I always try to incorporate other things such as visuals and manipulatives when I am using the teaching method of “talking”.

As a teacher you have a classroom full of 25 students who have all different learning styles. It is very difficult for each lesson to focus on every learning style. At the beginning of the year I am able to notice the different types of learning styles that each child in my classroom has. After learning about each student, it is my job to plan my teaching and lessons around their needs and how they learn best. I have found that one of the best ways for me to meet each students needs and how they learn best is by using the workshop approach. The workshop approach includes a lot of individual and small group learning. By using this I am able to group students together based on their needs and also their learning styles. Instead of teaching to only one learning style whole group I am able to teach using a variety of learning styles in small groups. I think as a teacher it is important to introduce our students to a variety of different types of learning. Giving them exposure will help them to realize how they learn best and what they can do for themselves to be self-motivated learners.

Creative Commons

Photo Attribution:
Original image: "Butterfly and Chrysalises"
http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6139/5931303869_f9a9485eff_m.jpg
by: Julia Folsom

Released under an Attribution Share Alike License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en


Part of the first grade science curriculum that I teach is the Life Cycle of a Butterfly. The image that I found shows part of the Life Cycle. This would be an excellent photograph to show the students because they could get a close up look at a few of the different stages. It shows what the different stages look like next to each other. The students will be able to compare the different stages and tell what is happening then each of the stages. This would be a useful image to use when teaching the life cycle of a butterfly.

Here is a link to my Flickr.

RSS feeds

Before this class session I did not know what a RSS feed was or what they were used for. After creating an RSS feed, I have learned how beneficial and useful they are. I explored and tried a few different programs available to create a RSS feed. After exploring them, I choose to use the website of Netvibes. I found this site to be very easy to use and navigate. After I created an account I added the four required feeds. Then I thought about what other types of feeds that I would want to add to my page. I find it very interesting and helpful to read other teachers blogs. I thought this would be a great way to keep track of when the teachers update their blogs with new post. I searched for blogs that are written by First Grade teachers. I found 4 blogs by teachers to add to my RSS feed.



After I added the teacher’s blogs to my feeds it was very easy to keep track of new blog post. I could just log on to my RSS feeds and all the blog updates would be in one place. When there was a new post I could just click on the post and it would take me right to that blog post. It told what the post was called and me when the blog was updated. This allowed me to not have to search all over to see the new blog post. Also, when checking my feeds I noticed that some blogs were updated more often then others. Some blogs were updated every few days where as others were updated once and month.




I have really enjoyed following other first grade teachers blogs. Many teachers post awesome ideas that I have adapted to use in my classroom. I have found blogs to be a great place to find math games, literacy activities, and activities to use on different holidays. I love how teachers not only post ideas that they use in their classroom but many times they post worksheets or things that you can print to use in your own classroom. This makes it very convenient because you do not have to spend all the time recreating worksheets or games. Using the RSS feed keeps me consonantly updated on what activities and ideas that the other teachers are posting.

One blog that I follow is called The First Grade Parade the teacher gave a great idea that I am excited to try in my classroom. The lesson that was being taught was contractions. She had the kids participate in “contraction surgery”. The kids had to cut the words apart to make the contraction. After I read this post I immediately thought it was a great idea that would work well with my students to teach the concept of contractions. I then commented on the post to let the author know that I was excited to try it in my classroom and how creative of an idea it was.

After exploring RSS feeds I have thought of a few ways that I can use them in my professional life. The first way is I plan to use the contents of my RSS feeds in my daily teaching. One of the best ways to improve teaching is by learning from other teachers. Blogs are a great way for teachers to share ideas of things that they are doing in their classrooms. I plan to continue to gain teaching ideas, activities, and teaching strategies to use in my classroom by frequently checking my RSS feeds for updates. The other way that I think RSS feeds will be useful is as a resource to parents. I could create a public RSS feed where I can add websites and blogs to keep parents updated about different ways they can support their children at home. This will be a resource that parents can use to find new ways to extend and support learning at home. I think RSS feeds are a very helpful resource for a teacher to use.

PC Maintenance and Security

There were many tutorials to choose from within the PC Maintenance and Security workshop. The three that I choose to learn from were Making Email Safer, Organizing Computers, and Tips for Safer Web Browsing. I thought that learning more about these three things would help me with my daily use of computers.

By watching each of the tutorials I learned tips to keep my computer more safe. Here are the tips that I learned:

Making Email Safer- I learned how to set up filters for Gmail. This will help to control the emails that I receive to my account. This will also help make sure that some emails do not accidently get put into my spam folder.

Organizing Computer- I learned about this program called Roboform. This program is a password manager. It becomes very difficult when you have to create a different password for all of the different sites you join. This program can help generate a password, it can manager passwords, and it can also assist in filling out forms that ask for your basic information. This is a very neat tool that I think will be very helpful to use.

Tips for Web Browsing- When learning about different tips for web browsing the one thing that stuck out to me that I didn’t know before was a program called Sandboxie. One of the main uses of Sandboxie is that when you go on a webpage that has spyware the spyware is trapped in sandbox and does not go back to your computer. This makes it so that viruses are not spread to your computer they are trapped on this sandbox on the program Sandboxie.
I hope that these tips help others as much as they have helped me to learn about Internet and computer security.

Social Networking

I have become very familiar with social networks during my time in college. I was introduced to Facebook when I began college and have used it ever since to keep in contact with friends and family. I have also found Facebook to be a great tool when looking for a job. Many teachers would post openings that they have heard about or openings that they had at their school. This helped me to be aware of what was available. I have also used Facebook to keep in touch with others teachers who I went to MSU with. I am able to communicate with them about ideas, questions, and problems that I am having in my classroom and they are able to do the same.

Another part of social networking that I have found to be very useful as a teacher is joining groups about education and teaching. In these groups many ideas are shared that I can adapt to use in my classroom. This is also a place where you can ask other teachers questions and get advice from teachers.

I think that young students can also benefit from social networking. This week I was just introduced to Edmodo. Edmodo is a place where student and teachers can interact. Edmodo does not share any personal information. This would be helpful for students to be able to use at home when they have a question or are unsure of something that they need to accomplish for class. I am excited to learn more about Edmodo and see how I can integrate and introduce it to my students and parents.

I really enjoy using social networks to keep in touch with friends and family. I also enjoy using them to benefit my career.

Getting Things Done Reflection

I consider myself to be a very organized person. I always have a to-do list of what I need to accomplish at work and also for my course work. I find that if I do not have a list of what I must accomplish it is much more difficult to prioritize and to keep myself focused on what needs to be done. I was very excited to try the GTD process to see if it would be helpful to me.

When I first thought about trying GTD I had to think of what I would use to organize the process. I thought of the different options that I had to choose from. I could use my phone, paper and pencil, or my computer. I have found before that I am not very good about updating list and things that I need to do in my phone. In the past I have found that paper and pencil is the most effective way for me to organize what I need to accomplish. I decided that I would use paper and pencil to organize this process.

This process helped me to put what I needed to accomplish into prospective. One of the major differences in the process and what I have used before is the collect portion. Being able to just list everything that needs to get done in one place without prioritizing. I have noticed that before I tried GTD I would try to prioritize right when I starting writing my to-do list, this became overwhelming.

Overall, I found that GTD really helped to focus me on what I needed to accomplish and when it needed to be accomplished by. Along with the collect step, I also found the review step helped me to see what I had accomplished and what still needed to get done. The five steps were easy to follow and have become part of my routine when planning out my week. I plan on using this process in the future to help me to stay organized with my very busy schedule.