Online Education?

The other day when I was checking my email, an ad at the top of my Gmail account said "Tired of mediocre K-12 education?" and next to it there was a link for k12.com. I clicked on the link (because I couldn't believe that this ad said this!) and it took me to a website that is an online public or private school for students in grades K-12. Parents can sign their kids up, and can pay a fee, for their students to receive schooling that has an "interactive curriculum" and "interactive online and offline hands-on learning."  Parents have the choice to select what they want their students to learn, and when they want them to learn it. I really couldn't believe that this existed! 


But this made me wonder...with the growing dependency on technology that we all have, will this be a threat to our jobs some years down the road? I know that this could be another way that parents could homeschool students, but with the technology age growing, it makes me wonder if more "schools" like this will appear and if they will be a threat. What do you think? 

Integrating Technology

While thinking about ways to integrate technology into specific lessons, and also integrating TPACK, I think using Google Earth Lit Trips would be a great way to use technology in the classroom. I learned about these last year in my TE 401 class, where we explored the book Fever 1793. Lit trips allow you to take a journey through the setting of a certain book, where you get to see what a certain town or village looks like. Lit trips can also be very helpful to use as an overview or review of a book because at each stop in the trip, you can have students answer questions that pertain to the book. 


In regards to TPACK, I think Google Earth Lit Trips are very useful for this model. When you use a lit trip in the classroom, students are able to use what they have learned from the book and apply it while using the lit trip, whether it be answering questions during the trip, identifying certain aspects of the setting of the book, or even making their own trip. You can even make a lit trip to be specific to one city or town mentioned in the book. Google Earth Lit Trips are very versatile, easy to use, and can be used for books at any grade level. I think that I will definitely use this resource in my own classroom!


Check out this video to see an example of a Google Earth Lit Trip for the picture book Make Way For Ducklings!

Thoughts on Twitter, so far

Since we have been using Twitter a little more within the last few weeks, I think I am getting the hang of some things. My friends who use Twitter frequently have definitely helped me learn some things about Twitter that I probably wouldn't have known before. I think Twitter can be helpful if you follow the right people. Some very informational things are tweeted and can be very helpful with keeping up with current events! However, I am still not quite sure of how I would be able to use this in the classroom. I could maybe see how we could have a class Twitter where we could follow certain people or news groups and look at their tweets everyday, but I don't think that I would benefit from having a class hashtag (like we do for CEP416) and having my students tweet with that hashtag. This could possibly be useful for teaching in high school, but for elementary school, I'm not so sure yet. Hopefully within the next few weeks I will come up with some more creative ways of how to use Twitter in the classroom!

Photoshop.com Album: Image Slideshow

Here is a slideshow I created using my edited images. Check it out! 

Photoshop Express

I just learned about this amazing (and free) tool called Photoshop Express! You can edit and customize your own photos!

Here is a photo that I edited using Photoshop Express

Copyright

Copyright is a very important and can be a very useful resource, especially for students. However, copyrighting can also be a huge pain to deal with, at the same time. As a student, I am aware of how citing something can be a huge pain, especially at 3 in the morning when you have your paper done, and you just want to get it printed. But at the same time, I understand why we need to copyright things. If there weren't copyrights, anyone could say that someone else's work was theirs, and there would be no argument. People should have the right to their own work and be proud to claim their work. However, even though there are copyright laws, there are some people who break these laws and do steal other people's work and claim it as their own. But just like any other law, there are consequences to breaking these laws. I think that copyright laws are very useful and should be monitored by everyone. I know that I wouldn't want someone taking my work, so why would you take someone else's? 

Licensing

IMG_0052, originally uploaded by wellma19.

This is a photo I licensed with Creative Commons

Creative Commons

Below is an image that I think would be a great resource to use in my classroom. The picture is an ariel view of Michigan's great lakes, which would be a great tool to use when teaching a lesson on Michigan. This image is an actual photograph of all five of the great lakes, which is unique because most pictures in textbooks only show Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. This picture is also a great tool for teaching students about other attributes of Michigan and the great lakes, such as identifying the major cities and most populated areas in Michigan, major highways and roads, the depth of the great lakes, etc. I think that this picture is really a great picture and shows a view of Michigan that many of us have not ever seen!

Copyright © NASA Images 2010

By NASA Goddard Photo and Video

CC Photo

Great Lakes, No Clouds

Fonts

An assignment for one of my classes is to redesign the lyrics to a song by reformatting the text of the words. We can only use text, no pictures and no color, so it is a bit challenging, but pretty interesting. Through this assignment, I found a great resource that could be useful in the classroom. The resource is called dafont.com, which is a website that has hundreds of free fonts that you can download and use in Word documents. I think that this would be a really great resource to use in the classroom when creating newsletters, posters, name cards or anything that involves text! It is really easy to use and install fonts on your computer and you can use them in any application. I am really glad that I found this resource and I plan to use it in my classroom!!


I also tagged this website on my Delicious account if you would like to browse there too!

Delicious

With regards to my last post, I can really see how I could use Delicious as a resource for my classroom! I am really glad that I learned about this because it really is a very useful tool. I think that the two greatest things about it are that you can easily tag something (in your own lingo, or way that you remember things) and that you can share your tags and saved webpages with other people. This would be a great thing to use if you were team teaching or had to work with other teachers on a unit. I am definitely going to keep this in mind next year and years to come so that I can save time when I am planning!

Learning to use technology

This is just a short blurb of what I am thinking thus far about technology we are using in this class... I am excited to learn how to incorporate technology in the classroom so that I can use it in the future. I have not seen much technology being used in the classrooms that I have been in during my time at MSU, so I am interested to learn how to use a variety of resources. The only technology that I have seen is the use of the Elmo projector. which is just an advancement of the overhead projector. Right now, I am really unsure of how I will use Twitter and blogging for my classroom, but I am sure it is a great resource. Another thing that I hope to gain from this class is learning how to use all of these different technologies simultaneously and not feeling overwhelmed because right now, I feel very overwhelmed with all of these different technologies!!! As of right now, I am having the hardest time with Twitter because I am very new to it, but I'm sure within time, I'll be a pro!


This is an article I found about the use of Twitter in the classroom. Even though I wouldn't be able to use Twitter in this way in my elementary classroom, it gave me an idea of how Twitter can be used in a classroom.


http://mashable.com/2010/03/01/twitter-classroom/

ESL Teaching

This week, I began co-teaching an ESL class on campus. The students that I teach are students who have just came over to the U.S. and they want to study at MSU, but have to pass the TOEFL test before they can be admitted. I also have students who are very close to passing the TOEFL test, and have been conditionally accepted to MSU, but they have to be enrolled in this class because they need to get their test scores up. These two groups of students are the majority of my students. There are also students who are the husbands or wives of MSU professors, who have came over to live in the U.S. and want to learn English. There are only a few of these students in my classes, but it is so interesting to see the wide variety of students that I have. Through all of my students, 10 countries are represented, so I'm sure you can imagine the variety of languages that are in the classroom. So far, I am really enjoying these students and this opportunity because I haven't ever had experience with teaching English as a second language before.


In this class, the students use a program called DynEd, which is a program that is entirely computer based. The nice thing about it is that when planning lessons, there are so many things you can do with DynEd, unlike some other computer based programs that only have one way that you can teach the lesson. I have not had too much experience with it yet because their classes actually started this week, but as I become more familiar with the program, I'm sure I will post some more about this wonderful program.


Here is a short (and boring) video that introduces you to the program, if you're interested. This was the best one that I could find!