Summary of Learning

End of the semester!! To sum up most of all that we learned this semester I used a concept map called Coggle.  I choose to use this tool because it was easy to layout all the different aspects that I wanted to talk about.  The coggle has an open display of the different main topics of the course, that I thought were most important.  My summary of learning is a display of all main topics, and then what I learned and thought was most valuable in each topic.  Using this artifact help me to have an array and show the main concepts and then details of each of them.  This was an easy way to make sure all my thoughts were visible.

In this class I learned a lot about different aspects that technology can make an impact in the classroom.  My biggest takeaway would be that of the formative assessments and usage of technology to understand that and for grading.  I am a very personal person, who likes that individual time with student, so being able to have technology that gets me to have more time with my students will be great!  Since formative assessment should be done everyday, it opened my eyes to all the different options there are to assessing my students.  Using online programs and tool that will help with assessments are improving and will help to gain an even better grasp of what my student are and are not understanding.  Having my students use technology will not only benefit me as teacher but also them as students.  Technology is making it better for students to share, collaborate, and even learn.  Students have more opportunities for expanding their learning to more than just the classroom.  I plan on using technology in a mainly student centered classroom to make sure that my students are getting a good understanding of the content.  With technology constantly changing, it is giving students more options and more ways to learn something.  There are more tools that can assist students with specific content and specific ways of learning it.

This class was an interesting class, that opened my eyes to many things that I thought technology was not the best for.  Adding techonlogy into the classroom in today's society seems to be the best way to improve my teaching and also to improve my classes learning.  It helps to relate to students and helps students to relate to each other, and not just within a certain class but all across the world!!

Check out my Summary of Learning Project!

Good luck to everyone on their finals!! 

Final Flipbook

Time has come for my final flipbook to be finished! This week I finished putting all the final little details on my pictures for my flipbook.

In the end, my book is not perfect but it is a lot better than any other flipbook attempt I have made.  To make a decent looking book takes time and a plan.  The steps to making a flipbook are simple and have simple little details that make a moving picture out of several pages of still pictures.  My progress throughout these past couple weeks on have made my book more realistic in a way of having a picture move.  This is a fun thing to do, and it is simple but can take some time and planning to make it look good.  In this process I did not just learn how to make a flipbook, but I also learned how to navigate and use YouTube as well as a movie making program! I had a lot of fun editing and making my videos for youtube!!

Check out my youtube page to see all my progression videos as well as my final Major Project video!

Finishing Up!!

As we come to almost the end of the semester, but even closer to the end of working on our Major Projects I have started to bring my FlipBook to its finishing touches.

This week I started to finish my drawings of the mountains and zooming in to get to the end of ideas.  I worked on combining both the plane and the mountains into one idea.  The transition was a little difficult, I do not think I completely have a good transition but for my first major flipbook I think it looks okay.  So my idea of this week was just to have all my ideas down on the pages and to have all the sketches done from start to finish of the book.  Check out the finial touches I put on my book this week on my YouTube channel!

Next week, to actually finish up my book- I plan on going back through all my pages and just touch up out lines and make sure all the lines and simple details are visible.  Can not wait to see how it really does turn out!!

Technology Lending a Helping Hand

Technology is really starting to become a major part of our everyday educational settings.  Each new advancement is a gateway to new ways of teaching and new ways of learning.  Technology is helping teachers help students.



In my personal experience I have used so many different sites and tools in my educational and personal life to help make learning and sharing easier.  As I am learning to become a teacher, there are certain aspects with in each of our classes that implements different teaching aspects.  So in these classes certain technology tools in the Professional Learning Networks (PLN) help to share, show, and learn.  Technology can be a very helpful tool in sharing with your students information about a topic in class, just classwork information, and even just things that may be helpful to the students.  To be a productive teacher in this new growing technological age, we have to be able to use all kinds of sources and ways to help our students stay connected to the lesson and to their education.  Taking advantage and using different technological tools will only help you as a teacher to reach more students, and it can also help to make a topic or lesson more personal with individual students.  With technology it can make it easier for teachers to get more personal time with students during class with having technology tools that help to grade, keep students on track, and to also push them along in their learning.  But for a teacher it will also be helpful in many case to use PLN's in communicating with other school teachers, administrators, and even teachers in other counties/states/ even countries.  There are so many different examples and tools for teachers to use, and Jake Miller touches on a couple tools that could be very useful for teachers in his PowerPoint presentation. 

Growing up in a time when technology was just beginning to be a big impact in education there have been a lot of advancement in helping teachers and schools solve problems using technology.  I plan on using technology tools to help grade so that I can spend more time with my students and their learning and not so much with their grades.  To helps get on an individual basis with my students can also be done using technology, with having assignments and in class work done on tablets/ipads/computers it can help to see what students need more help and what areas certain students may need the extra attention.  But with solving problems, technology can also be a big help.  If you are having troubles with maybe a lesson plan or with a certain activity you can open a site or tool that could lead to help.  Have the resources of other teachers and technology people is much easier and more convenient now.  If we are having difficulties we can start a group chat with outside teachers using a technology tool that enables to have free flowing chat and others input and ideas.  With technology comes the ideas of having more students being able to help each other.  If you are having a problem with one site or tool in a day you can always have a change of plan and use another tool and it would be a simple problem fix.  Technology can be used as a mediator between the knowledge of some kids and others, if you are not able to give one kid enough attention and they are really struggling you can either give them a tablet that has certain activities on them to help that student or you could give the class an assignment on the tablets while you help that one student.



Personally, with technology it makes sharing information with others easier, communicating ideas in a simple manor that can easily change, and also it helps my learning as well.  Many times I find myself distracted by things on the internet or I am feeling that I have no time to do things, but with technology it helps to make myself more productive and focused on the task at hand.  Here are some tools that I find to be interesting and helpful in a personal teaching setting.  But for me technology is helping to benefit my individual time to organize my thoughts by having tools that help me with lists and task managing.  By having lists and task managment it helps me to have more time focusing on what needs to be done and then what I can do to make it better.  I am a very personal kind of person, and as a teacher I want to be able to connect with students and then to help students with everything, and technology is having an impact where it makes grading easier, personal feedback better, student progression easier to monitor, and then it also helps to plan what is next.  Technology is a wonder in the world and is benefiting each teacher in some ways that you would not even think.

Students have this unique opportunity to be more engaged and active in their education now compared to the old traditional ways of learning.  As a student technology helps to grab your attention and keep you focused on a topic with numerous tools that are all different and new.  With so many different ways of using technology it benefits students in a way that each student will be able to find a certain way of learning that best benefits them and their style.  With technology comes more responiblity on the individual, so now we not only teaching students a subject but also helping the to learn for themselves and push themselves to their  potential.  Students have the opportunity to engage in activities via classroom tablets where they can interact with each other and the teacher in a simple way that is also very beneficial in students helping students.  In this video they talk and show you how easy it is for students and teachers to connect and interact with tablets. Along with students self with technology, in a classroom a teacher can help the students stay active in a video with technology help which then helps the student to learn more from a video. Students are lucky to be in an age of technology that is growing in educational settings and is helping them to grow as an individual and a student.

Parents now can be more engaged in their students learning and their progress in the classroom based off of technology tools.  There are many different ways that a parents can follow a child's work, but all ways are ways that are beneficial for a parent to watch their kid grow.  With all the different technology tools teachers can share their students work with parents via Google apps or various different apps and tools that their students are using as well.  Many of these tools are very simple and straight forward to use, which makes it easy for parents to help their child at home if they need it. So much technology but all pretty much simple in terms of others helping others.

This FlipBook is Flipping to an End

Well time is winding down and the semester is coming to a short end!

This week for my Final project I have actually started working on how my final flipbook will actually look like.  I have started to create a lay out the design and the ideas of the final creation.  

Last week I did not have an update on my project, due to the lack of creative juices I was having.  So this week I did double the work. I not only came up with the ideas and lay out of it, I started to draw and plan as I drew.  I have just a couple more steps to learn and put together before completeing my project.  For the section of my book this week, I added put together background usage as well and a moving object across the course of several pages.  So far this is exciting and looking well in my eyes.

Check out my progress on my YouTube channel! 

Next to come is the final progress and development of my FlipBook!

Blend It Together to Get the Best Result

Blended learning... Well it is the new learning.  In today's society we are surrounded by technology with computers, smartphones, and even now smart-boards in classrooms.  Walking around today we look around at all the different generations and you can physically see the difference technology has impacted the generations.  Many kids now can use an smartphone before they can talk, so it makes the most sense to be able to incorporate technology into learning to keep kids engaged.  In this video they talk about how it is important to understand that kids are coming from homes that they are now surrounded by technology and then how teachers are using that to their advantage and making their classrooms a more productive and engaged environment. 

Educational Technology, this class has been a very good way to not only follow the course work weekly but it also opens up a lot of ideas for what we, as future teachers, can use and should incorporate into our classrooms.  This class has effectively used the blended learning idea most effectively at the start of the semester.  In the physical classroom we were taught first hand and were able to see what all we should be doing and what it should look like, then as time went on it transitioned to mainly time on our own.  Even though we started to be mainly online based, we still had a very sound blend for we had the opportunity to go in and ask for help if we need it.  Now we are mostly just an online learning classroom, but it is still part of the blended learning idea.  This class gives you a good amount of time for you to be able to pace yourself, since we have an entire week to complete the assignments, but then we also had almost all semester to be able to figure out our projects.  In all this course has effectively used the blended learning model to create a good environment for us students to learn and grow while using a technology based course.  Though this class is great with having so much time to pace yourself, it directs the information pushing you to one path of instruction, and it also allows you to do your assignments anywhere, the class has a downfall of not having a larger amount of face-to-face interaction.  For the Major Project, we briefly went over the idea of the project, but in a face-to-face interaction as the timeline grows shorter it would have been nice to have that face-to-face interaction just to get a feel of what the project should really be and look like.  Also the grades for our blogs are not received as quickly as I would have thought, and even with the grades there is no real feedback with the grades.  In this class, the feedback is ineffective in my learning process. 

Blended learning has now become a necessity for today's schools and education. In today's society we are surrounded by so many people and kids knowing all about technology and how to interact via social media.  But in a classroom, it will be the most productive and effective way to keep kids engaged and motivated.  Blended learning is becoming something that every classroom and subject should be using, it helps to give teachers a better way to see the progression of their students.  Like the teachers talked about in this video, it helps the teachers to get a more personal connection with the individual students.  Blended learning needs to something that I am comfortable with in order for it too work in the classroom, each progression and step in blended learning will be a new learning experience for me.  Along with this helping the students to be able to grow and get immediate feedback it is also a continuous learning experience for teachers.  To be a teacher in today's every changing world you need to be able to adapt to the new technologies and change your teaching style to adapt the way of learning of your students.  When we talk about engaging our students we have to also be able to individualize the lessons and teaching to help each student.  With the blended learning we are able to monitor the students progress and then help those that may need more attention.  It is important to understand that more and more our culture is technology based the more challenging and different teaching has become, with this blended learning it makes teaching easier to find a common ground on which both teachers and students can share.  Many of the ideas that have come to play are well thought out, for they are specialized to helping all students.  Having students use technology to take formative assessments daily makes it easier to understand what the kids are retaining and what they are struggling with.  Blended learning helps to have that immediate feedback for both you and your students.  Like last week talking about formative assessments, blended learning should be incorporated daily into the lessons.  With using formative assessments online it gives you the chance to have some students keep pushing on if they understand the lesson and then also gives your the chance to specialize and individualize a lesson for a small group that may be struggling.  Blended learning is something you can not get away from, and really why would you?  It will be one of the biggest tools for you as a teacher to really help your students to grow and for you to be the most productive.

Stacy Hawthorne is one of the founders and biggest members of promoting blended learning in today's schools.  She is a big part of the Medina School systems blended learning team.  She was talking about how big of an influence that blended learning has become and without it in the classroom it is becoming harder to keeps attention but also that it makes it easier.  The most shocking thing that Stacy talked about was how her kids had computers and laptops of their own being in high school and middle school.  My living style during high school and middle school was my family had one home computer and one laptop to share.  It is just amazing at how big of difference less than 10 years can make in the advancement of kids having their own technology.  This is the most shocking to me for the reason that is scares me... As a student myself I hated having homework that had to be done online but now that we are changing to a blended learning society where it is almost always required.  Going home use to be my freedom, where I would go play outside for a couple hours then do my homework with no big distractions and go to bed. Whereas now with the blended learning we are have kids have to have a computer at home or at least access, also the internet, but then also they have to be able to sit there and focus without getting side tract on other sites and social media.  For me this is a problem mainly for the idea that I myself get overly distracted constantly being on the internet but then we have younger kids that are forced to focus at home instead of being outside.  This was shocking for the fact that this is also one of the main reason that we are switching to the more blended learning.  

How Do You Assess?!

When you think of an assessment what do you think? 

Well as a student when I hear assessment I automatically have the fight or flight feeling come.  For most students that hear assessment it means they have to take some big test that they will either cram for the night before, or just say "screw it" and not even study for it.  That is the fight or flight feeling that most students feel when they hear assessments. 

As a teacher though we are told that assessments are our friend.  They help us to help our students, and from a teacher or someone of powers point of view it is the best tool we can use to help students to keep improving.  There are many ways to assess students, and I think that by using various methods to assess them is only going to benefit you as a teacher to then help your students even more.  When looking at a philosophy for assessment of students it is a "necessary evil" for the growth in students.  We need to be able to assess where the students are with their learning and see what they may not comprehend.  Assessments are the means to truly get the students to learn.  We can use these assessments for not only our benefits but also to challenge the kids to see what they really do understand.  It gives the students a tool to help them to see what they understand, and then with feedback from us it helps to understand what they might not understand.  Assessments are a circle for comprehension of the students learning and a helping aid for teachers.  In my mind, I do not think that assessment strategies should be used as a way to punish kids or to lower their self confidence.  In turn I think that assessments should be fully explained to the point where kids understand that the point of the assessment is to literally assess what they understand and is not to be used a way of punishment for those that do not understand.  For teachers we should be able to help our kids by using a lot formative assessments, they can be easily implemented into any lesson.  Since each student is an idividual and all are different each student will learn in a different way and therefore will also test differently.  So each formative assessment should be a little different, they can vary from small quizzes to just going around the room to have kids answer certain questions, to even doing a small project.  Ways to assess should be different to make sure you are not just separating certain kids.

Rick Wormeli is someone that has high knowledge and a very compassionate view of formative and summative assessments. In his youtube video of him talking about these assessments he brings in some very good points about how important they are, and more importantly how important formative assessments are. Every day teachers should be using some kind of way to check to see if the students are truly taking in all that was covered in a lesson.  Wormeli talks about how each teacher should incorporate check for understands in every lesson, and then also have ways for other students to express that they understand as well.

In a video by Scott Kinkoph, he talked about how each new system of teaching will not be growing or expanding the students minds or horizons if they are not introduced to different formative assessments.  In his lecture he talks mainly about two different assessment tools: one is PearDeck, and the other is EduCanon. 

PearDeck is a very simple and easy way to get the kids involved. According to Scott, PearDeck is a super simple and easy way to check to see if the students are understanding and comprehending what he is teaching.  In this tool, there are several different ways you can assess your students.  Many of the different options for this site have an easy way to not only yourself see what your students are understanding, but then also giving students peer feedback for each other.  Each response from the viewer can only been seen once the teacher gives permission, but at the same time once the responses are then shared it gives the students direct and immediate feedback for each other.  Because the responses can be private at first it helps to  make the kids think for themselves and to really see if they understand it before getting help from classmates.

 EduCanon is the other tool/site that Scott talks about in his lecture.  This site is a very good demonstration of using different online resources as a real classroom setting.  In this tool, the teacher sets up a video for the kids to watch and participate in.  Then after/during the video the kids have activities to complete.  But these are not just worksheet type activities, they are more interactive and connected actives for understanding and comprehension.  I did not like this one as much as Scott was showing and presenting it, it did not have the same hands on feel as the PearDeck did.  It was a good idea to have incorporated video and live feed to make the connection to the teacher more concrete and defined but at the same time, it did not have the same appeal to me.  

In my thoughts, I think the most interesting and stricking thing to me about Scott's lecture was the amount he put into perspective that the formative assessments are really the tool and idea that make or breaks a teacher and the students learning.  Scott was able to make the comparison of how much a student can really learning by having these formative assessments to push them, and challenge them that actually makes a big impact.  This is the idea that will be most valuable in my classroom, for it brings in a wide load of ideas to check my students for full understanding and comprehension of a lesson.  This idea will impact my classroom by influencing me to constantly have simple and quick assessments of the students to help them in their learning.  To be the best teacher I can be requires constant understanding of my students and their knowledge base, and according to Scott this is the best way to help my students. 

Cool Tools For You & more!!

Last week for cool tools... Well for many of you, you use YouTube almost everyday to watch crazy funny videos, when you are bored you just look up random things, to listen to music, and to even find that song that is stuck in your head but you cannot think of the name of it.  We use YouTube as an everyday tool for the most part just for entertainment.  Well this week I thought I would really look through it and see what all it really does have to offer!

YouTube it has the ability to upload videos, songs, create your own videos, you can upload movies, watch anything on the site.  On YouTube you have the chance to create your channel as well, in the channel you can upload videos, and if you have a lot of videos you have crate different stations for different videos.  If you are just a viewer on YouTube you can subscribe to different people or channels.  If you are a constant  viewer of a channel, the station will keep track of the different videos that you have already watched.  YouTube has a program that tracks the videos that you have watched and then will recommend other videos that you may also enjoy watching.  This site really does have a lot to offer, you can search different videos based off of creators, title, subject matter, or even part of a phrase.  This tool can be used in so many different ways and a lot more ways than we use on a daily basis'.

This tool can be used in a classroom for several great reasons.  It is not only an entertainment site but it also a good educational tool.  YouTube can be used for doing demo tutorials of a new subject material, In the classroom YouTube could help to introduce a new topic with a song or video that relates both the old and new topic together.  YouTube is a good source to connect other subjects to each other as well, each video on the site has more than one piece to it and each piece of it connects to another.

For students this would be a good tool for them to not only use as entertainment but also as another viewpoint for them to get.  Each student learns differently and with that being said YouTube can be a great tool that each student can learn from.  Because there are so many different movies on it there are so many different ways that something can be said.  If a student learns more from doing, then they could find a video that gives them several problems and then goes through the problems to make sure you did it correctly.  If a student is a visual learner then they could find a video that goes through the subject matter by showing examples and explaining each step.  Or even if the student is a audio learner they have the opportunity to find a song that explains how to so something.  Their are so many different ways to learn and YouTube has the advantage of having all these ways availible at the touch of a finger.  You can even have your students create videos, it is simple but you need to be careful with showing faces and such on the web.  It could be a great tool if a student wants to share with others a good way to maybe do a problem or to teach a lesson but in other terms that they might understand better.

 You can look at different videos by going to YouTube and then to create your own account and upload videos just go to the right hand upper corner and click to start!

For this review I also wanted to play around with it and created my own station and channel for my Major Project. As I have stated I am doing a FlipBook for my major project and this week I decided to start uploading my different steps onto YouTube into my own station that then also has its own playlist just for my major project.
This week I started to come up with what I actually wanted to start drawing for my subject of my flipbook. I have decided to start with mountains that fade in and with a plane that fly's over top and then moves into a person snowboarding.
Here is a video that I started for my topic!

Learning in Spaces

Learning spaces are constantly changing due to the constant evolution's of the world around us.  We experience change starting all the way from technology in education to foods we eat at home.  With the constant changes in technology comes all the changes in the learning spaces that we use in educational settings.

With the constant changes and advancements with technology we are able to create new designs of chairs, furniture, tables, desks, computers, and even the idea of board usages.  With all these advancements it is becoming a new learning environment for the students.  In the new learning spaces we are making it easier for kids to be able to be engaged in a class and learning by learning to adapt to what the kids actually need.  Learning spaces are adapting to the student behaviors and actions and also how they learn.  By having learning spaces it provides students with a controlled and stable environment and opportunity to enhance their learning.  Learning spaces provides kids with the opportunity to engage in topics and subject matter better than just trying to lecture kids.  Learning spaces are now providing students with the ability to be more active with each other by having easier ways to move around and be comfortable.  One of the main examples with the learning spaces is that they are creating kids with a better sense of closeness with each other, and making it easier to then engage with each other as well as the conversation of topic.  Having chairs that fit kids needs better for movement are a big part of making these spaces more advanced and better for learning.  When the kids are able to quick just roll a chair, or slide a chair it makes group work better engaging the kids into the subject matter faster and with more ease.  That is just talking some PHYSICAL learning space things, we also have the idea of online learning spaces.  In this article they talk about how everything is changing and how we can adjust to them, check it out to see what your thoughts are.



For the most part many school systems, university, colleges, and outside educational places are starting to use the idea of Google in a lot more aspects of learning.  Google is becoming a very big part of our everyday lives, many places are using it to be able connect and share with students via all their new and different apps they now have.  In many cases these apps are making it easier to contact kids, hold assignments, share documents, and even just share more information.  Google Apps are starting to play a much bigger role in how we are learning and teaching kids.  Because of the ever changing world, we are relying more and more on technology of the internet and now we have created so many different learning spaces online.  Google Apps plays the role of now being a central hub for all the information within a learning space.  It creates the different abilities for accessing the information as well as creating and sharing. Learning spaces such as Google Apps is now what we consider to be a very big impact on how students are learning and also how teachers are teaching.

For the future the learning spaces will continuously change and be redesigned based on the new kinds of technology that is being invented and used by children and teachers.  In the future though we need to be taking on the idea that learning cannot all be just online, so we need to challenge the facts and be able to keep a balance between face to face and technology based learning spaces. As we become more and more advanced in the field of technology we will want to keep the idea that technology is the BEST way for kids to learn.  But that will not and should not be the case, creating learning spaces in the future there will have to be a line drawn for the fact of human interaction and group based learning. These learning centers need to be well adjusted to the new forms of technology but also then adaptive only incorporating them not be solely based around them.  This will be a major challenge as we look to the future for education and learning spaces. Many schools have different ideas and many different ways of being able to add in numerous kids of learning spaces, the future is here and changing.  This school Woorana understands that and is already looking to the future for education for kids with different learning spaces.

Being part of the University of Akron, and as an active student we have the learning spaces of very traditional based classrooms, as well as library based traditions.  We use online sites such as springboard as a center for learning in a very informal way, where it is just based on information and no real interaction between student and teacher.  I personally hate how much that our courses and teachers depend on springboard to get us through the semesters.  My attention span is some what small, and having all these assignments that have to be computer based, I get super side tracked with all the other things that are online. So I personally prefer to be in a traditional setting, even though these learning spaces could be adjusted, they are still better than so much online.  We use Google to share all kinds of information and to keep in contact with our professors and classmates.  This is a good way to keep everyone engaged in project, you do not necessarily have to meet up anymore, due to google docs, several people can be updating and changing the doc at the same time making group work a lot more do able.  There are so many different things that are changing in the ways of learning that adapting and learning how to change the learning spaces is going to be a constant challenge no matter what.

Flip-book Fun

New week, more progress!!

For my major project I have decided I am going to learn how to create a flip-book, and not just your "I am bored in class lets doodle flip-book".  I have looked up several ways to start to create a real flip-book using several different websites
wikiHow
Student Resources

So far I have done a very simple example of what I could do before I started the project last week.  This week I started actually working on how to make things look like they are moving from frame to frame.

I have always enjoyed doing little artistic things, and flip-books I have always found interesting to me.  Even though I was never good at them, so I have decided that I would give this a try.  In reality using a flip-book could also be helpful and different in a classroom, and it does not have to be contained into an art classroom.  More and more we see the arts being cut out of schools, this would be a cool creative way to keep it in the mix...

Here is what I have learned and done as an update with my Flip-book Project

Cool Tools for you #4

Cool Tool for this week I choose to do Word Tagul Clouds.  This is a word association Tool, that takes a list of words of your choosing and combines them into one shape.

 For my creation I just incorporated four words that had to do with this class, I used Educational Technology, Major Project, Flip-book, and Moving Animation.  I chose just four words to keep it simple.  Once you choose the words you want to work with you can choose different colors for each words, fonts, angles, and even size.  Once you have all the words you select a shape that you want your words to take the form of.  Last step is to import the words and make it animated.  In this Tool, you can actually make the words Animated, one you have created the animation you can go over each word and it will get highlighted in which you can then click on it to go to another web page.  Once you have created your word animation you can then download and share what you have created, or you can print it on to a t-shirt or other things.

As a teacher this would be a good source of technology to incorporate with any word based lesson.  For the classroom this would be good to use for getting kids to associate vocabulary words with each other and even definitions.  Because you can actually incorporate a link to each of the words it could also be beneficial for things other then just vocabulary words.  In association with words, you could put in different dates, people, theories, etc.  and then have them all connect to each other and also some outside source.  This would be a very cool to use with any subject since you can incorporate almost any different background to the words.

For teaching it would be interesting to have in order to keep your students engaged, by having them pull the cloud up on a computer and use it for worksheets or research for homework or a project.  Because it is a word association tool, if put together well then it could be a good source for students to use to study with.  In order to be a good study tool tho, the teacher must be well versed in their subject matter to have all the necessary aspects in the cloud.

As a teacher there are many ways to help kids learn and even study.  Tagul Clouds would be a good way to have students use what they know and make a cloud to show that they understand the connection between certain words and definitions, dates and events, or even person and what they did.  As a teacher it would be a good way to have students use it to present what they know to the class as a study for them.  It is an easy way to get students to be engaged in the way they should be learning and making connections to material.

Go to Word Tagul Clouds to start your own now!

I Book, You Book, and E-Books?

My self I was never that into reading and writing in school, I was much more interested in coloring and doing my own thing.  Though at home and in my free time I like to write because I had the freedom to write how I wanted about whatever I wanted.


With eBooks becoming such a big influence in our everyday life and also in schools I can see the use of eBooks having a major influence on how students are learning to write.  With eBooks students now have the freedom to write what they feel and have it shared with the world.  Since it is being shared with the world it helps with the writing process for students to know what is good and bad writing.  Letting the world know what they are doing is a big step, but it gives students an end goal for wanting to improve their writing to be able to impress the world with what they can do.  Writing is a skill that students must learn in order to progress and develop in life and school.  The past and traditional way of teaching kids to learn to write is hard when the students have no interest in writing about any topics they are given, which leads to the notation of not wanting to write at all.  With that line of thinking it is hard to teach kids how to be good and effective writers, but now with eBooks we can expand on the horizons of what the kids can write about to spark an interest to get them to focus on how to be effective writers.

It is going to influence how teachers now teach in the classrooms now, since students are finding more interests in what to write about it is going to be a little more challenging to get your kids to have a focused idea of what needs to actually be done.  There is also going to be a more direct and pressure on when and how the kids learn sentence structure and grammar.  In writing an eBook it has the ability to have the autocorrect and spell/grammar check, but you will have to start somewhere before that in order to have the kids form a basic idea of how sentences and grammar should go.  Like Jon Smith talked in his lecture: The World is my Audience, he said said how the kids would write down the material then the teachers would help them put in into the computers.   This is a good form to get the kids to learn the grammar, spelling, and sentence structure before applying it to the actual eBook.

Since it is an eBook it takes into consideration more then just one aspect of learning.  It helps kids understand the ideas of presentation, speech, structure, etc.  One eBook can contain many different sources of ways to look at the topic at hand.  It becomes more than just a typical book, it becomes an interactive piece that helps bring in more than just writing.  An eBook is a great way to help the kids want to learn and be creative creating things they want to get involved in and to get them interested in topics that would normally be boring or students would want to avoid.  The main guy that talks about eBooks in the classroom is Jon Smith, and what he has to say about getting kids involved and creating makes a lot of sense.  We all know that growing up we hated going to school because we knew we would be doing the same boring thing every day, with the idea of eBooks it helps bring what we as teachers are teaching to life! It gets the students to think and be creative with it the subject matter.
 Jon Smith made some interesting points about how a simple idea of creating a book can make such a big impact on almost any student, grade level, and school.  He claimed that almost anyone can get involved and learn by the simple suggestion of creating a book and sharing it with the world.  But the claim that kids learn by creating, sharing, and getting a sense of the world.  This claim was what caught my attention the most, for it makes the most sense.  The idea that kids are bored and will not learn if they are bored means that we need to learn to adjust in the classrooms to help engage the kids.  EBooks are a great way to do this for they introduce new ideas to help kids learn.  It could work in almost any subject, for me going into high school math the concept of creating an eBook would be able to see how the students are actually learning the material and how then how they can apply it, while also bringing in other subjects.

"When children create for the world they make it good. when children create for their teacher they make it good enough." 

                       -Rushton Hurley

Cool Tool #3

Well it is week 3 and I thought I would try and combine my major project into my cool tool this week!

This week I worked with Haiku Deck.  This is a nice and simple way to make a presentation without using the boring old power point.  Here you can use more variations of slides and animation to make presenting a topic a little easier and presentable.  This website is easy to share your ideas in different ways, and also to make the presentation personal to some extent.  You have the freedom to create your own kind of slides and material that you would want to share. For the the free version of the Haiku Deck all your creations are shared to the public, but you have the freedom to put tags on them and share them with specific groups such as a science, art and crafts, etc.  If you pay to upgrade you can put more privacy onto your creations.

For this week I decided to use this to show a little knowledge and create a very simple how to presentation of how to make a simple flip book! Check it out at My Page.  Also check out this super simple diagram of how I started my Major Project...

This would be a fun and creative tool to use in a class room, I remember growing up with a lot of my teachers always using power point to make presentations.  And when we had class projects we would have to use power points to then present our findings and projects to the class.  This was such a boring way to do things, with this tool you can the presentations much better. Add more creativity and the kids own sense of personality to the slides.  It is a super simple and easy way to get kids involved and also keep them connected.  Students can use and create their own, and you can use them to teach in the class room.

Check it out yourself by clicking here and start working on your own presentations now!! Haiku Deck

Flipbook Fun

Hi Guys it is that time in the semester that we start our Final Major Project!!

For my Major Project I plan on learning how to draw a flipbook animation.  I have always wanted to make a flip book, sure we all have done the little ones on the side of our pages. But when did it actually turn out like this? First step is learning about flip books. Here is a little history on flip books that you could read through if you would like to learn a little more about them... History of Flipbook Animation.

Thats all for now, cant wait to keep you guys posted on my progress throughout the time I learn how to do it!

Copy your Rights

In any class we ever had to write any essay for we were always told to cite our sources and no plagiarizing or we could fail.  How often are we told how to actually cite a source or actually taught about copyrights of images or texts?  For me I always only had one class per-year that talked about internet safety, but copyrights were never a topic that really came up in my schools.  

As a teacher we have the responsibility to show and be examples of what copyrights are and how we use them. Teachers have the role to play as not only a teacher of their area content but also much more about becoming an adult. 

In each lesson, we as teachers, try to be creative and use different ways to interest our students. In each slid, poster, creation that we use pictures/images in we need to be able to be a good role model and use proper citation of it. We must know the different kinds of legal actions to take in using an image of someone else's. Teachers have to know the difference between complete copyrights, public domain and creative common license. We have to understand when we can use certain things and what course of action we must take in regards to each category. Every image that you use will more than likely fall into one of these categories, use the the Copyright questions and resources on this website to help determine what course of action to take to ensure that you have all the copyrights to use the image. As a teacher you must follow all the rules and regulations of each of the categories of copyrights. 

It is our job to ensure that the next generations are using citations properly to ensure that they are properly using outside sources. It is our responsibility to teach and show our students what a good citation looks like and how to do it correctly. We must also follow good citations in our teachings to ensure a good role model for the kids. Since determining if the outside content is copyrighted takes a good amount of time to do, we must make sure that our students do it properly and also make sure we are doing the same. We must know how to cite each different kind of source, and how to get copyright rights to each kind of source as well. Teachers can use this simple guideline to check what they are doing, and make sure they are using the proper ways to go about copyrights of different kinds. Many of our students will want to just pull outside stuff off the web from various websites, but we must make sure that they are looking for the copyrights. Many things on the web are for the public, but we should always try and push our students to check and get permission just in case. By checking each source for copyrights, is a good habit to get the students into at such an early age. 

Music and movies are such a big part of today's society. We are constantly listening to music and showing movies in classrooms today. It is hard to tell students, no, they cannot use what they find the internet to do a project or homework when it is so easy and accessible to them. But here lies a problem because kids can use parts of things, but then they end up losing the ability to be creative and wanting to be creative as well. Also the amount in which students use in downloads is also illegal on almost all purposes in which our students use these downloads. This becomes an even bigger issue that then teachers need to address in a way that should help the kids even get away from using them so much. More education about downloads and the issues with illegal content. By making kids more aware of the legal issues and copyright issues we could help students be more understanding of it all. 

Cool Tools for you #2

This is my Cool Tool for the week!

It is week two of looking at Cools Tools online for possible help teaching in classrooms.  This week I looked at the Tool called Storyboardthat, this tool is a comic building tool that you can create just about any scene with people, posters, writing and so much more. Within the Storyboardthat you can create your own comic story, you can view what other people have created as well. This website lets you go in and start creating a story, but once you are done it is super easy to go back in and edit if you ever want too.  Along with just these stories, there are groups you can join such as for teachers and for business, although these would be good to join (especially for future teachers) to join these groups they cost money to join.

This tool would be fun and good to use within a classroom. Storyboardthat would be a good creative way to keep kids interested in the subject by have a variety of ways to look at it. Because these are comics, there is not a lot of reading, they are simple and too the point.  To create a comic you would most definitely have to know your content in which you are teaching so that you can create a simple helpful way of showing kids what to do. In order to use this tool, you must have a clear idea of what you want to show the kids.  Because it is a comic you must be able to simply put some idea into a short and easy to follow way.

If the students started to look bored or overwhelmed with this a particular subject or lesson this would be a good way to show them that it can be simple but also could be a creative way to peck there interest in the subject or lesson. In a classroom you could also use this a good way to introduce a new topic, or a good attention getter at the begin of the class.

This is a very simple way to gets students involved as well. For any presentation project they might have, this could be an easy way to have them create and really show their understanding. This would really test students understanding of the matter if they were to create their own, because this would require them to really think about the material and then apply it to a scenario with dialog and also creativity. This is simple in the means of very straight forward, all the tools you need to create a comic is right there on top of the comic strip. There are so many different options to choose from so you are not just stuck with the same things all the time.

A little trouble may come from having time and patience. In order to create a good comic you need to have the time to put in the effort just to have a good story line and then also to play the all the piece of putting the actual story line together.  This story that I put together took me about 4-5 hours just to create a simple story. So that could potentially be a big challenge.

Make sure to check out Storyboardthat and start creating your own story board!

Citizenship on the Web

 Digital Citizenship is becoming more and more important in today's growing technological society.  Today we have to be careful of what we use, how we use it, and when we are using it.  Digital citizenship to me is about how we represent ourselves on any kind of social media.  In my personal and profession life, the way that I conduct myself is in a way that is in my mind safe for all to see.  The way that we conduct our everyday and every post on social media norms, that is what the major citizenship ways.  We should always take into consideration what is appropriate, even though some people may not think it is offense someone else may.  We have to be careful in all aspects of the digital  age of offending people, as we grow online we must look at more than one aspect of an issue before posting it somewhere.  For me if I want to post something that may be on a controversial issue I will be sure to have some kind of facts to back up my claim, like wise if I post something that I would even remotely consider inappropriate I will not post it.  For me no matter what kind of life we are looking at think about the overall idea about what you are posting before you do post it, remember that almost anyone can see it if they are looking for it.  Be smart about it, digital citizenship is a big thing that more and more people are becoming aware of. Digital citizenship is much more than we sometimes think it can be, this article talks about the digital citizenship and different aspects of it.

I have been hurt by something that was shared on the internet once.  It was almost shocking that someone that I knew and thought of as a personal friend would be so inconsiderate of people around them and post something that could offend people a lot bigger than me.  As part of digital citizenship, taking into consideration what others having feelings for is a big part that many people do not think of.  Being hurt and hurting someone via sharing something is sometimes easier than anticipated due to the fact that we sometimes share things without any real thought to what we are sharing.  Sometimes we use social media as an outlet for our anger and frustration because we do not want to make direct confrontation with the actual issues in our lives. I know I have tried to make a general frustration outlet on social media, and hurt someone by doing that.  Instead of just talking to them I made things worse by sharing my feelings with the general public, for all to see.  By avoiding direct action with that person I made things harder to explain. My actions were my own and if I could I would go back and just be up front with that person.  Digital citizenship also incorporates a big part of this, sharing mindlessly and hurtfully.

Adults I think are sometimes too apprehensive about the internet, and for the most part they have every right to be that way. Many things can happen on the internet that parents and adults have no control over.  It can be scary, but also with out risk there is no accomplishment. With adults trying to limit kids interaction on the internet is also limiting their knowledge and creativity they can be learning.  Using the internet is now a great source to learn to do just about anything, you can also share, post, talk about, read, or watch anything.  By having adults with fears and concerns it hurts the kids to be a big part of the participatory culture.  We live in a time where we interact with each other more over any digital device than any face to face connection.  We need to let kids adventure and seek the far reaches of the internet to be successful and creative in their own minds.  There can be many dangers on the internet, but if we let all our fears get in the way, then we are almost hurting our kids even more.  Digital citizenship is part of growing up now, and by preventing that is holding kids back from a more eventful and expressive future.

Cool tools for you! #1

In today's teaching environments we use the internet on our phones as apps or on a computer as programs or browsers.  There are so many different things we can do with each of these new resources.  For this week I choose to look at an audio tool called audioBoom, in this tool you can create an audio list or playlist with different kinds of things, you can share or save podcasts you have found, create podcasts of your own, listen to different stations/channels.  Each channel correlates to different topics of interest, there is a wide variety from news and business to technology and entertainment. This specific tool you can also create your own station by having a playlist of saved and even audios that you have created.  AudioBoom helps you to create your own recording and post it to the public. This is a free website, but if you pay you can upgrade different features to make things more public and recordings can be longer.

This tool could be easily used in a classroom to help provide a bigger explanation via someone else's perspective as well give students more open minded options for listening to someone else explain the material. As a teacher we could incorporate this into the classroom by having the students get onto your playlist every now and then to listen to you explain something on their own time. In certain classrooms you could even have the students create their own profile and have them create a tutorial of them explaining the course material.  It could be a good way to gauge the students comprehension of the lesson, as well as giving them a little more lean way to look for advice on what could help them to understand that lesson. TPACK is all about how to incorporate the different teaching methods with technology to help students in the classroom. Not only to help students but to help teachers know their content then help to translate that into teaching the students. For teachers you have to know your content in order to use the audioBoom, since  this is an audio recording you have to be able to talk about the particular subject, but also with finding other sources you must be able to make the connection between what they are talking about and then also the subject you are trying to teach.  As a teacher this is a good tool for teaching students since it will not be tool that will not take their full attention. It only incorporates listening, so you can also have them watch you do something on the board as they listen to the audio.

AudioBoom would be great to have your kids listen to a lecture outside of class if you did not cover something in class that you wanted too, or even use when you may not be in class that day.  For in high school you would get a substitute and it would be easy for a sub to pull your audioBoom up and have the kids listen to the lecture before having a worksheet. This would be an ideal situation for students and teachers to connect via none face to face interaction, or further explanations.  You could also even use it to draw student attention to subject matter by finding a news related audio.

 Here is how the record your own is set up. On the left is the first screen looks like and then the right is what it looks like after you have recorded something. Once you publish your recording you can then save and share it with any specific group or just the general public.

This is a good way to get your kids involved, it is so easy to set up and use. Once you have made a recording it is easy to share only with certain people, which makes it safe for use in the classroom. Using this app it would be easy for students to create their own voice, and profiles in here. They could share their thoughts and actually have their voices heard from using this app.  The navigation around the website is easy to use, very straight forward and simple. You could use this to challenge students to find another voice on the matter, or even to just find a podcast that talks about the same subject but maybe another side or different view.

This could be a fun and useful tool in the classroom if used to its full potential! Create your own profile and audioboom and explore all it has to offer you... Check it out: AudioBoom

To Pursue Any Creative Knowledge- TPACK The New Ways of Teaching.

TPACK- Technological, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge are the three main areas for a teacher to become a successful one in today's educational field. In today's way of education we have to become comfortable with incorporating new and improved technology!

Today we are constantly changing our techniques for teaching by adding in new technology and new tools to help aid our lessons and students. Adding new tools into the classroom are good for change and for trying to keep the classroom interesting. Before adding in a new tool you should ask yourself several questions about it: 1) Is this tool going to be easy to use/teach to the kids? 2) Is this a student or teacher based learning tool? 3) Are the techniques for using the tool similar to the ways that you are looking to teach the material? 4) Does this tool seem to have an effective teaching/learning assistance? 5) Can the tool help to assist all levels of students that are in the classroom?  These are just several things that you should consider and ask yourself about a new tool before implementing it into the classroom. All tools can make an impact in a classroom, not necessarily always in a good way, but by asking yourself these questions you can help to navigate the tools and to limit the negative impacts. Most tools now can be modified with certain settings to make them more manageable in a classroom, these is also another consideration to take into account when thinking of adding a new tool. There are so many new tools out there for teachers to use, but as teachers we also need to be smart about how we use these tools and how we can use them to get the most out of them.


Introducing new things into a classroom is always a fun experience for the kids as well as the teachers. When a teacher gets new tools and then shares them with the class there is always a glow of happiness in the teachers face. For teachers it gives hope to make the classroom a new and fun learning environment, by bringing in new tools it gives the teachers a new angle to regain interest from the students. After a while as a teacher you can see the students getting bored of doing the same things over and over again, they lose interest and then they lose focus. By adding new tools into the classroom it gives the students a new opportunity to find the material interesting as well as focusing on it. Though as a teacher, we need to be cautions of when we are adding these new tools that the students don't get to focused on the tool and lose focus on the actual subject. When adding the tool into the classroom you should choose a time that you may have some extra time so that the kids can play around with the tool with out getting overly distracted from what you actually trying to teach that day. You also should give yourself time to make sure that you can research what happens if there is a problem with the tool, this could lead to a big problem if you are not careful. There will always be challenges with adding new things into the classroom, but it is also a great way to keep helping the kids grow. In this article they are talk about how different tools have different impacts on kids in the schools.

In my classroom I am hoping that I will be able to make it enjoyable for all my students. Adding new tools into my classroom I am hoping will always be a fun and growing experience. Like we have discussed in the online chats technology is becoming a big part of the classroom, and now the best teachers follow the TPACK formation. In becoming a teacher today, we are fortunate to be able to learn about this stuff before actually going into the real world without it. For me personally, I would want to try my own way with certain things and then start off by using the tools that I am most comfortable with. When thinking about adding a new tool, I would first ask my fellow teachers what they have used or are using in their classrooms and see how they like using it. I would also go onto other teacher blogs and see if I could find any other suggestions. After finding several suggestions I would then do some research on these particular technological tools, too see if they would be at all helpful with my lesson. I would hope to narrow it down to 2-3 different tools, that I would then actually try to use myself. After self testing I would rank the tools in order of how effective I thought each of them were. I would then ask my fellow teachers to give my number one choice a try, if that passes the test I would use it in my class to help the students to enhance their learning and understanding of the lesson. I would even go to websites that have list of technology that teacher should have in their classrooms to get ideas,.. Click here to take a look at one website I might look at to gain some ideas of what to add.

TPACK is the present and future of teaching. Using these aspects will only help you grow as teacher and in turn will help your kids grow as students.

Open Minded and the Impacts

Capturing a spirit, well that can be taken in several different ways. But for the sake of this blog we are talking about the spirit of open, networked, and participatory communities in our leaning environments. We capture the spirit of these different things by having the ability to share and not be constantly criticized for it. We have the ability to share and gather information using the internet, books, and each other. We can use these sources to learn via videos, what people tweet, share on blogs, talk to each other, even what teachers send to other teachers that then share it with there students. As teachers we can capture the spirit of open, networked, and participatory communitites in our leaning environments, by doing what we do best, sharing with the world what we have thought of to see if could help someone else.

For teachers we tend to use the classroom as a place of sharing and experimentation. We can use the classroom as a place to try new ideas, adjust someone else's idea to see if it works better, and also to just test someones idea on a different set of kids. Open access in a classroom now would be having the ability to search the internet for information, More importantly, because the free access and how easy it is to access the web, it is becoming easier to have open access anywhere, anytime. For in a classroom we are now starting to expand how students can get in touch with it. We can also direct students in the classroom to interact with each other, right there is a good source of information. By self interaction we can learn a lot, what one person knows another person may not. We depend on the internet for open access but sometimes the best open access is right in front of us by means of another person. For teachers it is always a good idea to share our thoughts and ideas with others, like in this video they talk about how one idea can influence things all across the world.


Teaching has become an art of learning to constantly readjust with the advancements of technology in the world around us. I think that the future really is unpredictable in the ways of teaching as well as in technology.  Right now, we rely on technology in everyday life, we use it to find out anything we really want to know. We use it to communicate and to educate, even in the field of education we use technology everyday. We use it to share information, to save, learn, teach, and even to just use as entertainment. The future of education I think is going to depend on where the direction of technology goes. Right now we already get learning information from the web, and we can also teach via the web. I think this is not necessarily a good thing that we use the internet so much... Personal interaction is becoming less and less in my mind, the future is us with our heads down in some device. To be truly successful in education I think that education should be about that face to face interaction. The internet cannot help motivate you when you are down or stumped on a problem.  The internet isn't a teacher that can help guide you through some problem, it is good from helping to maybe find additional help though. Teaching and education should have a good balance between the open access of the internet and the face to face interaction in the classroom. The future of education is up to this new generation of teachers to keep a good balance between everything going on in the world of technology and the original way of teachings.

Textbooks... The most expensive, heaviest, boring thing you will ever have to buy or carry around. Now with any answer at the touch of a button text books are becoming less of a physical being and becoming more of an idea for the class. For me personally, I would much rather have a physical text book. For one it makes you search for the answer which forces me to read, I can touch it and don't need to be staring at a small screen for hours on end to read something, I can physically mark up the text, if I need to make a note or highlight something it is easily done. But for many students they hate their text books, for grade school kids it is a hassle to carry around this big book that just sits in their locker all year and maybe open it once or twice, and they can not write in it or anything. I think for grade schools purposes access to technology will have a big impact in order to help students from complaining about carrying around this big useless book. So in that sense I do think that textbooks are becoming obsolete. For college students, IT IS A HUGE WASTE OF MONEY (for the most part)!! I personally like to have certain textbooks for certain classes, especially ones for my main core classes. But in general we spend $200+ on textbooks per semester, why? We hardly use them, I don't open half of my books, yet we are REQUIRED to have them for the course for that ONE time we need it. I think that so many students are refusing to by traditional textbooks because so many are online and are much cheaper, so for the most part these books will slowly become more obsolete as well.