What I have learned

At the beginning of the semester, we took a survey and was asked to rate what we believe our
technology skills were. I gave myself an intermediate. I felt fairly comfortable with my use of technology but I knew there was a lot that I didn't know how to do. I now feel much more competent in my ability to use many different types of technology including programs like ActivInspire, Inspire, and iMovie and websites like PBWorks and Picasa web albums. I also feel much more confident in how to incorporate these types of technology into the classroom. At the beginning of the semester, I was unsure how many of the programs we used would work well in the classroom. I also was not sure in the ability of the students to use this type of technology on their own. However, I now know there are many different ways for both teachers and students to use technology for educational purposes, and while, some of the younger children cannot use as many different types of technology on their own, they can still use some and use it with teacher aid. Overall, I feel that my technology skills and understanding of how technology can be very successful in the classroom has increased greatly. Now I can't wait to see how I can incorporate these new skills into my internship classroom next year!

Creating a Website

Prior to this technology class, I had never created a website and I was very intimidated at the thought of creating one. However, I found the process to be much easier and fun than I was expecting. The use of web 2.0 tools helped smoothly create a website. I used many of the tools such as Google presentation, Picasa web albums, and PBWorks to easily add content to my website. The website I created was a part of Google sites. I found it worked very well and was complimentary to other Google programs.

When creating a successful website, I think the key is to be organized and consistent. With these two things, viewers can easily find their way throughout your website and not become confused on where to look for certain information or how to get back to a page. If the you have good content but the website is not organized, the content will not make as much sense to the viewer.

I now feel very confident in my ability to create a website for my future classroom. I think it is a great way to keep both the students and their parents informed about their teacher, what they need for class, school events, and assignment due dates.

Blogging in the Classroom

I think blogging definitely has a place for classroom use. If your students are old enough (at least upper elementary) I think it is a great place to have them share their ideas and thoughts about what they are studying in the class. It can be a safe place for them to express themselves. Blogs can be used in a similar way as journals are typically used; however, now other students can read and comment on what their classmates think about something. Also, blogs have 24/7 access unlike journals that typically stay in the classroom. Classroom blogs can also be used for teachers to update parents on what their children are learning in class. Teachers and students can work together to create posts that inform parents on projects and units the class has worked hard on.

Picasa and Google Presentation

Earlier in the semester, as we were learning about digital images, we had to collect images off of the internet and put them into a Google Presentation. I located and formed my collection of pictures on the website http://www.pics4learning.com/. I had never used this website or other websites similar to this one that provide copyright-friendly images to use. Prior to this class, I just took pictures off of Google images. However, I now know that you can easily run into copyright images when you only use Google. After I had all my pictures, I organized them using Picasa web albums. This is also a new website for me. It is a very easy way to organize and share your pictures. Picasa allows you to add tags to your picture. By adding decriptive tags, you and others can easily locate your pictures. You can also turn your pictures into slideshows by placing them all in an album and placing comments on each picture that provide the viewer a description of the picture. You can view my slideshow I created with Picasa web albums here, Yosemite photo collection.

Digital Stories

I have never experience creating a digital story. I have used iMovie to do simple editing like cutting a video down. However, as far as the more advanced editing like adding captions, transitions, and music, I have never done up until now. I now feel very comfortable creating a digital story using the iMovie program. I discovered it is very simple and self-explanatory to use. Even if I were to try something more advanced than editing still pictures into a movie, I feel competent in my abilities to do that. I really like the idea of using digital stories in the classroom. I will be teaching in a deaf classroom, and I feel the deaf kids would really benefit from this technology. Obviously, the music added to the digital stories may not add as much as it would for a hearing student listening to it. However, having short captions paired with pictures or video is very beneficial for them. Also, it would be helpful to include a voice over. That way, students with more mild forms of hearing loss would have the auditory and written language. Here is my digital story that I created about visiting aquariums. Recently, I went to the Chattanooga aquarium and took these pictures. Many of my students have not been to the aquarium before so I think this would be a great way to build their background knowledge before reading or studying sea life or aquariums.

Digital Diagrams

This week's assignment was to create a digital diagram. In the current deaf classroom I am in, we use diagrams often. So, I was excited to learn about digital diagrams. I see some of the benefits of using digital diagrams. They are easy to save and retrieve later, hyperlinks can be included to provide more information, and pictures can be easily added to enhance understanding of the topic. However, this was not my favorite technology skill we have covered in this class. It was very easy and a quicker process than other skills, but I still feel like it is better for students to be able to draw out diagrams on their own. When I was working with the Inspiration technology, I found myself getting frustrated with it because I couldn't get the format just how I wanted it. I think the same thing can be achieved with paper and pencil in a much more efficient and faster way. The picture provided is the digital diagram I created for a 3rd grade classroom on the topic of rocks. There are two notes provided under the rock and sediment headings.

Interactive White Board

I had never worked with IWB or ActivInspire software prior to this class. I was somewhat skeptical of its benefits when I was first introduced to the technology. I was having trouble envisioning elementary kids using it in the classroom. However, once I started my own flipchart, I immediately saw all the possibilities IWB has in the classroom, especially for deaf students. ActivInspire flipcharts provide students with the content in an interactive way. It helps for the teacher to not have to only rely on expository teaching for providing a lot of content information. Deaf students receive very little from straight lecturing; they need a way to interact with the content and be hands-on. With the IWB, they can be interactive because it is very student led. It is also very visual, which any visual aid is extremely helpful when presenting new information to deaf children.

The directions provided in the packets were very helpful when creating my own flipchart. When I was using an interactive tool that was provided in the packet, the directions were very clear and step-by-step. I think there are many more ways to include interactivity with the flipcharts that were not discussed in the packet or class. I think it would be very beneficial to provide additional ideas and examples for interactive tools for those who would like to experiment more with the ActivInspire technology.

Here is a screen shot of my flipchart on the water cycle.

Flipcharts

Flipchart is a very new idea for me. Prior to this technology class, I had never heard about or seen a flipchart. I have always found PowerPoints to be lacking in something. They almost seem one dimensional to me unless teachers use them in a more creative way. Flipcharts fill in what Powerpoints lack, and that is the ability for students to interact with the lecture/presentation. I love how interactive flipcharts are. I can see how students would be very excited to use them and learn the information they provide. Flipcharts turns the focus back onto students rather than the teacher being the only one talking and presenting. For deaf eduation I think they would be very useful. Deaf students really benefit from hands-on, visual activities. I think flipcharts can be designed in a very visually aided way that deaf students could respond well to.

Scavenger Hunt and Digital Images

I thought I knew a lot about digital images before this course, however, I have realized that I actually knew very little. When I have posted pictures onto the internet in the past, I have always just taken them from my camera and put them directly on the web or taken them off of one website and moved them to another. I did not realize that the resolution was so important. To become more familiar with working with digital images, our class was separated into small groups to go on a scavenger hunt. We were given a list of shapes that we must find around campus. With our phones, we took pictures of items that were one of the shapes listed. Once we found all the pictures, we had to upload them to the computer and change the size and resolution. We also had to rename the pictures using all lower case letters and an underscore to separate the words. This was for easy retrieval and organization. Once we had all our photos resized and renamed in a folder, we used Google presentation to put all our photos in a slideshow and share with on our website. Now I know that for pictures to be the best quality on the internet, they need to be set to 72. If not, it can take a very long time to load because the picture is so big. I have always wondered when I am on certain websites why it takes so long for some pictures to load. I become frustrated because I have to wait. Now I know how to fix this so when people come look at websites I create they will not get so frustrated.

Resource Wiki

The past couple of weeks I have had the opportunity to collaborate with other classmates on a resource wiki. It was a new experience for me, working working together via the internet rather than face-to-face. I can definitely see the benefits of interacting through the internet. You all have access to everyone's work. In other words, you do not have to worry about making copies or copying down notes. Also, you have the freedom of working on your own time. I found communication to be more difficult. While you can leave comments to one another, some things are more difficult to explain through only text. Therefore, I felt that there were some communication breakdowns that occurred because we are not all used to using this type of communication. Once, we are all acclimated to collaborating through wikis, I definitely feel communication will improve and group wikis will become more preferable to use with groups.

Also, I felt much more comfortable using a wiki than I had at the beginning of the semester. Now that we have had quite a bit of practice with them, I was more confident in what I was doing and had very little trouble maneuvering around and editing the wiki.

Educational Wiki Summary

When I was searching for an educational wiki to review, I had difficulty finding one I liked. I wanted to find one that I could get ideas for my future class. However, many were for older students like high school age and the ones for elementary age were never quite right. Many times they were too disorganized and confusing. The wiki I settled on was Mrs. Anderson's 2nd grade class. While 2nd grade is probably younger than I will be teaching, I really like the overall idea of the wiki. This wiki was designed as a way for parents and other family members to view their child's work. Each child had their own personal page that was a showcase for all their projects. Not only does this make the parents feel included in their child's class, but it also gives the child a since of ownership and pride in their hard work. While I liked the idea, the only thing I have to criticize is the front page. It had a lot of great resources on it, but it was too cluttered. You had to scroll all the way down to find the links to each student's page. When I create my own wiki for my classroom, I will take this into consideration and possibly have those resources on an entirely different page. Overall I loved the idea of having a classroom wiki as a way to exhibit the students' work.

Inquiry Based Activities

This past week I had the opportunity to create and research inquiry based activities. I think inquiry based activities are very good introduction activities to units. It gains the student's interest as well as build prior knowledge. It is very important for inquiry based activities not to be used very frequently. I feel that some teachers may use it as a way to get out of teaching and let the worksheet and computer do the job. However, if not overdone, I can see how inquiry based activities are a great tool to incorporate into the classroom.

I found it difficult to create an inquiry based activity for a deaf classroom. As I was creating my activity I was searching for websites that did not have an overwhelming amount of words and had more images and pictures to support the text. Deaf children can get very overwhelmed with a large text and have difficulty sifting through the text to find key facts. Their language level tends to be somewhat lower because English is not their native language. I also had difficulty creating the worksheet for the activity. Again here, I did not want to overwhelm the children with words. Therefore, I had to be very considerate with the directions. There are two parts of my activity. For a young deaf student, it would be very challenging if I had put the two sets of directions all together at the beginning. They would most likely find this confusing. Therefore, I separated my directions and the websites they were to go to into the order I wanted the students to complete the worksheet. I had a set of directions, the websites and the questions that went along with the website. Then, I included the next set of directions, website, and questions that went directly with that website.

All about WebQuests

This week was my first experience with WebQuests. I had heard about them but had never actually seen one. I had the opportunity to evaluate five WebQuests this week. After evaluating each WebQuests on the criteria of technology, type of questions asked and group work involved, I felt like I had a stronger understanding of what makes a good WebQuest. In my opinion, the most important factor of a good WebQuest is the easiness for kids to use. A WebQuest can have require higher order thinking and be a very original lesson, but without the students being able to easily go from one page to the next and understanding the organization of the website, they will get nothing out of the quest. Overall, I think webquests are a great way to do group work in the classroom. However, I do not think they should be overused. They should be a special activity to keep kids excited about. Also, WebQuests may be difficult to use in certain schools. For example, the school I am at now, does not have class computers. The class has to go to a separate computer lab if computers are needed. Therefore, when I create my WebQuest I will need to either create one that can be done in one period or one that has places to stop and pick up another day.

Reflecting on website evaluation

Overall, I thought the website evaluation process was a good way to determine the quality of a website. I think it was very helpful to have criteria to compare the website to determine if the website was credible. However, because it was more of a checklist of criteria, it was difficult to convey the website's quality as a whole. The website may have partially fit one of the criterion. In this case, I had difficulty deciding whether to say "yes, it had it" or "no, it did not." While there was space to provide comments, I sometimes felt like it was difficult to state specifically why a certain criterion was not met. Also, not all of the criteria was relevant to the website. For example, my website's author and publisher were the same so it made that part seem repetitive. The activity did help me find a great website to use and did confirm it's credibility. A suggestion I have for the next time this activity is given is I would have students share the website they studied. I did this in one of my prior classes in a small group, and instead of only learning about one website, we each learned about five.

How are wikis used in the classroom?

Prior to this class, I had never used a wiki and like many of my classmates, I was having difficulty envisioning how to use a wiki with my students. However, after research ways to use a wiki in the classroom, I realized there are many different ways. I plan on working with upper elementary age students and I was concerned how younger kids could manage a wiki. I think wikis are very easy to use and can be a great way of organizing subject related content. For example, I found that wikis are great for language art purposes. Students can create an annotated virtual library where they have a list of both independent and whole class readings. This is also a great way to do a book share. Students can create an annotated page for their book, including a picture of the cover, information about the author, and a synopsis about the book. Not only can this be used as a visual aid while the students present, but other students can go back and look on the wiki later in the year to find a book to read. Wikis can also act as a class encyclopedia and dictionary. The students can add a word and its definition they learned while reading their book or add an interesting fact in the encyclopedia. Wikis do not have to only be contained to language arts. They can also be used for all other subjects. For math, it can be a place to have all the formulas or key terms the students need to know. Also for science and social studies, key terms and places can be recorded as well as instructions for science experiments. There are so many different ways to introduce wikis to younger students and it will definitely be a tool that I use in my classroom.

Welcome to my blog

Hello! My name is Rebekah Harris and I am currently a senior in the Deaf education program at the University of Tennessee. Next year I will enter graduate school and begin my full year internship. I am very excited to get into the classroom, but I am a little nervous about incorporating technology in my classroom. Technology is becoming more and more apart of the classroom, and I think there are wonderful things you can do with it to enhance learning. While I know the basics of using a computer and can get around the computer and internet fairly well, I am not as familiar with blogs, wikis, and other types of technology that can be used in the classroom. From this technology class, I am hoping to receive more knowledge and confidence on how to use these types of websites for educational purposes. Hopefully you will be able to see my progress in using technology through each of my posts on this blog and by the end I will finally be able to call myself tech savvy!