Final Reflection

I have completed my quest in winning an A in my technology class. For my last and final quest I was asked to reflect on the semester. Throughout the semester I have learned so much from the quest for this class! At first I wasn't a big fan of creating all these accounts and posting all over the internet but I took it as a adventure and learned from everything that I accomplished. I have learned about and how to use SOOO many tools for integrating technology into the classroom. Knowing what is out there for teachers to use is important.  I have learned about TPACK and how to repurpose things I may already have and use them to create something completely different. One of my favorite quest that dealt with TPACK was the cooking one which can be found HERE! On a side note, I have also learned how to link pages into my blog post and how to cite images! I also learned about why technology is so important in todays world. Another quest that I really enjoyed was learning about virtual fieldtrips! I have never even thought about this before this class, but a virtual fieldtrip is the perfect way to learn without leaving the classroom, there is so many advantages to these types of field trips! My favorite was the zoo, you can pick a animal and pull up a live camera feed of that animals exhibit which I find so AWESOME and that can be used in so many different ways!!How about this cute little Panda Cam from the Sandiego ZOO?

I also have learned a great deal about how students can work together and teach themselves things most teachers and people would never believe without proof. Sugata Mitra's TED TALK is so impressive and blows my mind! He talks about his experiment and what the future of learning looks like. Throughout the semester I learned how to use certain tools that can be used inside the classroom as well, such as  Digital Storytelling through the Zimmer Twins. I also created a Tellagami to teach a short mini lesson for the flipped classroom. I really like the idea of a flipped classroom because I like the fact that students come to class prepared and there is more time to work on applying the concepts rather than teaching them.
This semester I also created a classroom webpage that I can use for my future classroom through Weebly which is also a very nice, simple and easy to use free tool! In my technology class I have also created a Twitter to use for educational reasons and have found it so helpful to communicate with fellow educators and find ideas and help when I have my own classroom. Although there are way to many tools to list that I have used or learned about this semester, there are so many good tools out there that are free to use and work well! One thing that I really read into this semester was integrating technology into note taking and taking the traditional task of pencil and paper writing into an online task and I really like this idea. Although I am a very organized, color coated note taker, I know and have helped or seen many students with bad writing or those doodlers who can't stay focused. Taking notes on a device can help a lot and most of them you can still draw on, it makes it easy to collaborate  and easy to give feedback. There are a lot of benefits of  taking notes on a device. There is so much to be learned about technology and I truly don't think that I will ever caught up to the fast changing world but after this class I understand the importance of at least trying to stay up to date. If anything staying up to date for the students because they need to be taught in a digital world they need to know and understand how to be good digital citizens and how to keep their digital footprint as clean as possible. It's not about what we know anymore, it's about knowing how to find the information we need at that point and time . And for my future students sake I promise to do my best in guiding them in the right path and helping them as best I can to be prepared for the untold future that they have in store for them.



We are 'Makers'

The Maker Revolution can completely change the ways of teaching. So many times inside of the classroom teachers teach to the test, straight from the textbook. The world is no longer 'how much do I know' it is 'do I know how to get the information that I need'. The upcoming generation needs to know how to solve problems, not facts that they memorized for the test and then soon after forgot. The maker revolution is about becoming makers or inventors. Arts integration and technology integration both become an important part of teaching. A common idea that describes the maker revolution would be "Project-Based Learning" where the students work collaboratively in groups to solve a certain problem or idea.


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We want students to be creative and have an imagination. We want students to be able to navigate the internet and find good reliable resources. In Project-Based Learning students work in groups rather than sitting for a lecture. This idea could completely change my future classroom in a number of ways. I think using this model for teaching will re-structure the classroom. When using this in my classroom I would use this as a way for students to teach each other. When they work together in groups to create something they will become 'pros' in that area and then they can present their information in a million ways to teach the rest of the class about what they learned.







 

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Using this model in my future classroom will help to create a more well rounded group of students. It helps with social skills and team building and also creativity and imagination. There are so many benefits of transforming your classroom they outweigh any cons. Two minds are always better than one and when students work together they can create and learn more than they ever will sitting in a traditional classroom.



Digital Story: Who Am I Online?

My Digital Story was created using the Zimmer Twins! I had fun creating it and I think that it is simple enough for younger grades to use as well. In my digital story I attempted to answer 5 key points or questions. 1. Reflect on your engagement with social media. 2. What characterizes you online? 3. How would you define your digital self? 4. How would peers define your digital self? and 5. How would employers define my digital self? All of those questions are pretty easy to answer because I don't leave much online unless I HAVE to for a class like creating all these sites and blogs or posting pictures of family. I have a pretty clean social media background in my eyes. This is the first time that I have ever created a digital story using this tool so hope it is okay for what it needs to be..

Classroom Webpage

To see My Classroom Webpage! click the link. I tried to create something that I could use as a helpful tool in the next couple of years when I get my own classroom. I posted my name as Mrs. Stone just because by the time I would use my webpage I would be married and my name would change so I just went ahead and put the way that it would be. I put contact sections, assignment turn in spots, a about me, and even a star student of the week where I would post their picture and list the reasons and things that they did to become the student of the week. I would put a slideshow of all the activities and such that we are doing and students work etc. to show it off to all the parents.
I think the classroom webpage is a great way to keep parents up to date with assignments, activities, fieldtrips and pretty much any important information that they may need or want to know.

Gaming in Education

For this quest we watched a couple different videos about gaming and how it can benefit education. I agree with the facts that it is self motivating and has instant gratification when you automatically receive feedback and a score at the end. I couldn't tell you how many times that I have played games over and over again to get a better score because I know that I can do better. Gaming in education is something that I myself have never really messed with. I have played games here and there throughout my schooling but it is never something I have interacted with. One point that Jane McGonigal made in her  TED TALK on how gaming can make a better world, was that students who have social problems or may be uncomfortable when put in certain social situations achieve great things in the game world because its a different reality in a way they can build themselves into someone they can't make themselves in the real world. I have never been much of a gammer by any means the extent of my gaming was Crash Bandicoot on PlayStation 1 after school with my cousin, so I can't speak much for gaming or gammers in that since but I don't mind gaming. I think that there are certain people that will benefit in a classroom more than others, and those students that like video games and are interested by that would be the people that I would target this type of learning towards. Knowing your students is important and while some students may like MindCraft and such some others may not be interested at all.
I played some of the games listed on our quest and found that the Geography games are probably my favorite. Although I did terrible and found out that I really don't know my geography, those games were the ones that I was drawn too. First I played Scribble States! which was pretty fun.

 You have the option of doing 10, 20 or 50 questions and the option to get tested on state names, state capitols or even state nicknames. I picked 10 questions wit state names because that would be the easiest right ? Well, I was wrong, I only scored like a 65% !



The next geography game that I played was ABCya! Capital Toss in this game you have the option to be tested on states or countries. Once again I chose states and still did terrible .  This game is set up lie a carnival game the capitols scroll across the screen and the state or country is at the bottom. you aim and click on the correct answer or in 9 out of 10 of my throws the wrong one and it throws the baseball to hit it and knock it over. 
There are so many free games out there for education that will teach you a lot of things in elementary school, I remember playing on FunBrain ALL the time! I loved it and with that website and some others that I have found it will give the students a code to come back later and not have to start over, which I think it really awesome. Gaming makes learning fun and I could definitely see myself using it in my classroom to work on all kinds of things for many different subjects.

Sugata Mitra's Hole In the Wall TED TALK

Sugata Mitra's did a TED TALK about his ' hole in the wall' experiment from the late 90's early 2000's.

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 What is the future of learning? I find myself asking this question all the time as I am sure many educators do. With technology so rapidly advancing and the fast pace of growth in education, it is growing faster than society can even keep up with. Where did the teaching we know come from?

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 The idea of a teacher at the front of the room, teaching students in rows of desk on the board is practically obsolete already. The idea of thinking outside of the box is gone, there is no box anymore because everyone is already well beyond the box. Mitra's experiment is spectacular proof of where the future is headed.  Mitra placed a 'processer' or computer into the walls of random places all over the world, places that most of the children never would of seen such a thing in their entire life time. Places where the children didn't know a bit of English. How could someone possibly teach themselves to use and learn such topics without a teacher that were in a language they couldn't even read or understand?

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 Education should not be about rich or poor, just because a family has money does not mean that their child is 'gifted'. Money can buy a better education, yes but that doesn't mean that a rich child has more potential than anyone else.
The first experiment outside of his office in Delhi was in a remote village 300 miles away. Mitra learned that the children taught themselves how to use the 'processer' without any teacher of instruction what so ever. How is that possible? How effective are teachers? Could we be moving towards a world where teachers aren't even needed? Children taught themselves English and how to work the processer in just a few short months. Mitra repeated this experiment all over the world in poor underprivileged areas and got the same astonishing results. If they could teach themselves how to work the computer what else could they do? Mitra began experimenting with other subjects, he then gave children a speech-to-text machine. He told them to keep repeating themselves until the machine typed out what they said. The machine would say a phrase in English and then the students had to say it back.
the children flourished. 

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If children could do this, Mitra wanted to know how far this could go. He created a crazy hypothesis "Could Tamil speaking 12 year olds in India learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a street side computer?" After two months the children tested from a 0 to a 30 percent. Mitra then asked the children's friend to 'help them' all she had to do was stand behind them and ask them questions. Questions that cause the children to think about what they were doing. How did you do that? What did you just do? How do you know to do that?
A question he asks is if children could do all of this on their own , could it be that in the future we wont even need to go to school at all? Could it be that knowledge and the need to know is becoming or is already absolute?


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Sugata Mitra came up with the idea of SOLE. Self Organized Learning Environments are easy to move towards and it will redefine the entire world of learning.  The idea of this concept is for the teacher to ask questions. Questions like 'if a meteorite was coming to hit the earth, how would you figure out if it was going to hit the earth or if it wasn't?  Tell the children that the idea is called a tangent angle, and then let them figure it out from there. It is done all by the students without any help from a teacher, the teacher only raises the question.  We all need to come together in creating a "school in the clouds". Where students venture on intellectual adventures, driven by the big questions. 

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Digital Citizenship

Before I start comparing Digital Citizenship and Traditional Citizenship for anyone who may be unclear I would like to define both.
Digital citizenship is defined by the wonderful people who edit Wikipedia  "as a person utilizing information technology (IT) in order to engage in society, politics, and government participation." For example those who use Facebook, Twitter and many others to interact with a digital community.

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A traditional form of citizenship would be defined by Dictionary.com as "the status of being a citizen. If you have citizenship in a country, you have the right to live there, work, vote, and pay taxes"

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In this blog post I want to answer 3 major questions:
1.In what ways is digital citizenship similar to and different from the traditional view of citizenship in the world beyond our devices?
2.How can we apply traditional citizenship ideas to our work in helping students develop digital citizenship?
3.What is the teacher's role in helping students develop digital citizenship?

1. Digital citizenship can be similar to traditional citizenship, but the same time much different. You can be apart of a digital community and be a citizen of a certain app or group, but that doesn't really have the same ideas as a regular citizen. A citizen is a part of a certain location for example I am a U.S citizen because I was born in the United States, therefore I have citizenship in the U.S.A. I have the right to be a productive member of society in the U.S, I can work , pay taxes, vote and live here. The same types of rules apply for being a digital citizen sort of. To be a digital citizen I am still a productive part of society, but my community may be somewhere across the world. People all over the world use Twitter for example. So, I can communicate and participate with others all around the entire world. I can participate in politics through the internet just the same as  I can go somewhere to vote. Using the internet in a smart and productive way, I can build a personal learning network that is beneficial to me as a teacher.
What does it mean to be a good citizen?

What does it mean to be a good digital citizen ?

 

2. I like to look at it as what you can do for others. In a digital community beware of oversharing and never Bully Others! If everyone followed the Golden Rule everyone would be fine. We all know that the internet can be a very un safe environment, so the first rule of a digital anything is to know the rules and to be safe. Know the rules and always be safe!!!!!
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3. The teachers role in helping students build digital citizenship.
On the Teaching Channel there is a great example of teaching digital citizenship in a fifth grade classroom. In Mr, Pane's fifth grade classroom he uses a website that allows his students to create their own Super Digital Hero. The children get to first create a super hero of their own and then they have to write a little scenario that their hero has to come in and redirect them from a un safe situation. He also has the students read the rules out loud together. I love his entire lesson so so much! It is perfect and even though some girls in the class may not be that into comic books, their is a girl superhero that they can create to be more feminine. The teacher is a very important person in the process of teaching interment safety. The video below is a little bit lower in grades so more K-3; between both sites and videos all elementary grades were covered an both ideas are age appropriate and a wonderful way to introduce this topic!