My PLN

2014-03-30T18:36:00.000-07:00

Smart Notebook

This week I watched three videos on the different functions of Smart Notebook. These videos included:

New Features for Smart Notebook 14: This video was posted by SMARTclassrooms and it focused on demonstrating the new features of Smart Notebook 14. One feature that was especially beneficial for my classroom was the new text function. This function allows the user to write text on the screen and then it converts the words into actual text instead of their own handwriting. If the user strikes through a word, Smart Notebook will delete that word and if the user draws a vertical line through a word, Smart Notebook will create a space where that line is. This would be very beneficial for students when doing any type of grammar practice on the board. Watch This Video!
Notebook 11: This video was posted by SMARTclassrooms as well and it focused on the features of Smart Notebook 11. My favorite feature that this video pointed out was the fact that you could embed webpages into your lesson plans. The user can change aspects about the webpage and even put the pictures from the cite into their lesson plan by dragging them from the toolbar and dropping it onto the desired page. Watch This Video!
Smart Notebook - How to Make a "Vortex Sort" Activity: This video was posted by Caleb Lee and went over the action of making a vortex activity in Smart Notebook. To find this tool, click on the gallery, then in the folder "Lesson Activity Tools 2.0" click the vortex sort activity. Pick the image and then insert it onto your notebook page. Click the edit button in the top left hand corner and fill in the columns. After it's completed, there will be a list of words at the bottom and then the two vortexes will be labeled by their categories. Drag and drop a word to the proper vortex (or category); if it's a correct match up then the word will fade into the vortex and if it is wrong, they will bounce out. Watch This Video!

2014-03-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

Reflections:

It was very beneficial to read the posts that my fellow classmates wrote in their blogs. I got a lot of ideas that I can use in my future classroom. For instance, I really like the idea of the 5 W's that Chelsea brought up in her blog: http://ashchelsea.blogspot.com, I also enjoyed other peoples post on technology in the classroom because some brought up points and examples I hadn't thought about before. Danielle M brought up to the question of whether movement in the classroom is a good thing which was an extremely interesting read.

Connection to teaching:

Everything I read in my classmates blogs was extremely helpful and could be easily implemented into my future classroom. The one thing that I will definitely implement into my future classroom is from Chelsea's post about the 5 W's. One section she went over was tests created by the students. I think this is a really good idea and from personal experience, it is very helpful in learning the material. I will most likely leave at least a few questions on every test up to the students to collaborate and come up with.

Tablets in the Classroom

2014-02-14T17:23:00.000-08:00

Emerging Ed. Tech created a blog just yesterday about the seven potential issues posed by allowing tablets into your classroom. Some were obvious, such as stealing, damage being done to the device, and threat of malware. However, the major issue that I would be concerned about, as a teacher, would be the excessive gaming and/or social media access that the students will inevitably have while using the device in class. These are the things that concern me the most because in all of my college classes, it is normal to have about half the class on electronic devices "taking notes." I put this in quotations because that is not all that these students are doing. If you sit in the back row of any given college classroom, it is justly assumed that at least 2 or 3 out of 20 students are doing other things on their devices than taking notes or looking up helpful information about what the professor is lecturing about.

In this blog by Ken Myers, he states that teachers can use an address filter found in the firewall settings of the device. This will deny students access to whichever sites that are deemed inappropriate for the learning environment. However, a problem with this is that sometimes the firewall denies access to educational and beneficial sites. For instance, if a student is doing a research project on breast cancer awareness and the firewall doesn't allow them to retrieve any information because their search contained the word "breast."

I believe that any technology in the classroom can be beneficial to the learning environment only if it is used properly. As a teacher, if I were to use tablets in the classroom, I would definitely have a firewall up to limit the students access to distracting or inappropriate sites. In addition to this, I would also be in constant movement around the room to proactively make sure that the students were on task.

Using RSA-Animated Style Movies in the Classroom

2014-02-14T17:07:00.000-08:00

I read a blog post this week from Jordan Collier on using animated style movies in the classroom. His main point was that using this type of technology with the students allows them to organize, synthesize content, and create new ideas. This caught my attention. I believe that students today have a difficult time synthesizing information in order to better understand it. For instance, I am a college senior and just learned this technique last semester. After asking around the campus, I have learned that most people in college still do not know how to do so.

By making this movie, students are forced to synthesize the information because it's simply not practical to smash all 3,000 words of the assigned chapter into a two minute animated film. After students recognize this issue and realize they need to condense the information, they then need to organize it in such a way that makes sense to them. Each of these steps allows them to process and learn the presented material in a more efficient way than just simply memorizing it. The final step in this process is to create new ideas based on the knowledge attained from the assigned source (i.e. textbook or novel).

The application that Collier used to make his animated movie was ShowMe. It is available in the Apple Application Store on iPhone's and/or iPad's.