I read the article on Assessment/Technology in Physical Education. I really enjoyed reading about this article. Some of the things it talked about was different apps, PE standards, and teacherKit app. Some of the apps that can be used in a physical education class would be “Plickers”- this app can be used to assist in cognitive assessments without the need for paper and pencils in the gymnasium. In my physical education courses, when we did paper and pencil worksheets it would sometimes be a hassle for students and teachers. This can relieve that headache and give students an easy way to be cognitively tested. Another app was “Coaches eye” it can be used to video students performing skills and later you can watch and analyze movements. “Hudl technique”- this app is used on an iPad or iPhone and it is free. Free is always nice to hear for teachers. This app allows you to do the same as coach’s eye. It can also be used to create skill videos to show your class or team. I am a basketball coach, after reading about this app I will implement the “hudl” app to use to critique my players with certain skills and drills. This will be an awesome tool to show them certain skills or drills they are doing right and things I want them to improve on. Being able to stop and start this app and go in slow motion is a nice tool to help students/players improve on their skill sets. “TeacherKit” is an awesome tool for teachers. It can make classroom management a joy, and not a chore. Routine tasks become simple, such as- taking attendance, student behavior reports, student level reporting, and recording grades. This app will help you be able to analyze and share information that is easy to use and will free up time for other tasks you need to finish up. Teachers are always trying to find ways to improve themselves and make their work easier to achieve. This app will give them that freedom to do just that. Instead of having to write down grades and keep track of attendance in a book, this app will free teachers up to be able to put it all into one app and display all of this information on one page for anyone to look at to assess progress of a student.
Citations: TeacherKit. (n.d.). Retrieved April 19, 2017, from http://teacherkit.net/ T. (n.d.). Coach's Eye Video App. Retrieved April 19, 2017, from https://www.coachseye.com/
0 Comments
Global collaboration projects allow students to work with peers across state and national boundaries are fun and creative for students. They can also teach valuable skills like digital citizenship, communication and collaboration, and research and information fluency, which are among the ISTE Standards for Students. Global collaboration uses technology in a number of great ways which include: email, digital stories, instant messaging, and podcasts. When it comes to email, students can communicate with partner groups. Using digital stories, Students can create videos of the environment in which they live, work, learn and play as well as scenes from their community. Then, those digital documentaries can be exchanged with partner schools. Podcasts are a great way for students to create them and share them globally. Photos and videos can be combined with audio files and distributed through podcasting, and the information can be viewed on any computer or easily downloaded to an iPad for viewing.
The Global collaboration I found was ePals Corporation Educational Collaboration. This is a free learning network that connects students and educators in 200 countries and territories. If a teacher is looking for collaborative projects, they are able to obtain instant access to community forums that let them join in on discussions while interacting with thousands of other people online. One of the biggest ePals initiatives is the Spark! Lab Invent it Challenge, which is an annual collaborative competition that encourages K-12 students all over the globe to solve and identify world problems. That seems like an awesome way to get students involved and thinking at high levels. Since its inception three years ago, the Challenge has honored students in a number of categories who have invented technologies like: a “turbo scraper” for vehicle snow and ice removal; a portable transport vehicle for children and elderly refugees fleeing conflict and famine; a water conservation device; and a “sand sleeve” wrist guard to steady the hands of the elderly. EPals is successful because it creates an easy and fun learning environment for both students and teachers. It has content rich materials that challenge students and their teachers to research smartly, collaborate with others, think beyond, and problem solve. This is something that would be useful in any classroom to get your students thinking outside the box and giving them high-learning opportunities to better themselves as students and learners. This site is an awesome source for teachers because it gives them a lot of innovative concepts aligned with the common core standards that are great for new teachers as well as teachers with more experience. EPals is extremely safe and can be monitored by both ePlas and teachers. I think this is a great plus to have because when students are working online, teachers are always worried about how safe students are being when they are online. Overall, giving students opportunities to collaborate and share ideas is a great way for them to learn and become better students. Citations: 2017 Spark!Lab Invent It Challenge. (n.d.). Retrieved April 10, 2017, from http://challenges.epals.com/inventit2017/student-resources/ Education is a large topic among people. Education is something that creates jobs for people in the future. Being an educator can sometimes be a tough job because the world around us is changing all the time. Education is becoming more and more different as the years pass. If we look at the world 25 years from now it will be a much different place than it is now. When it comes to teaching young students, I think our education systems lose a sense of the creative side of students. They do not take into consideration how important creativity is among people. Young students have so much creativity and we need to recognize this part of each student. Some students excel at math and drawing while others are skilled in the area of music and dance. I think schools need to focus on what children excel at rather than following a curriculum which does not have guidelines in it to dive into the creative parts of students. The one example that I really liked from the “Do Schools Kill Creativity “video, was the example of the little girl who was being looked at for symptoms of ADHD. This story was taking place in the 1930’s when ADHD was not heard of yet. The doctor told the mother to look at her daughter and what they discovered was she loved to dance. She was a person who didn’t want to sit still. She beams when she is moving and doing something that she loves. This doctor told the mother to send her daughter to a school for dancing. This was the first time this young girl saw people who were just like her and had the same interest as she did. The thing I really got from this story was that everyone is different and excels in different ways. Giving people avenues to be successful in what they are good at is the driving force for this world to become an even better place. Just because someone’s creativity doesn’t meet the “norm” doesn’t mean that person will not be successful in the area they chose to go into. When we look at schools the hierchary are all the same. The math, science, and English are at the top and the arts and music are at the bottom and not really focused on. When I was in school, we had very little music classes and art classes. We would have music and art about once a week for about 50 minutes each. When you compare this to having math every day for an hour and having homework on top of that they really don’t compare. The school is telling you these certain aspects are more important than these other aspects. I had the privilege of going to a private school with smaller classroom sizes and a place where creativity was more accepted. I have friends who never had the exposure to a lot of music or arts in the public schools. The public schools in my area didn’t offer many of those aspects to their curriculum. Also, at the private school we had a Religion class in which we learned about God and went to mass every Thursday. In the public schools, this is not part of the curriculum. Currently, schools don’t have music for certain ages and have non-certified teachers teaching art and music to students. An example of this is at my old private school because of budget costs they have a certified PE teacher teaching art and music.
I read the article about the Maker Model. This is a good model because it gives students more opportunities to develop confidence, creativity, and learning as a whole in all of the subject areas. The key to the explosion of the maker movement is accessibility. Today new inventions are affordable and often free. Anyone can find and share tools, instructions and ideas online. These new tools and technology include 3D printing, robotics, microprocessors, wearable computing, e-textiles, “smart” materials, and new programming languages are being invented at an unprecedented pace. Classrooms that will use the process of design and making, which includes overcoming challenges, produce students who start to believe they can solve any problem. Students will learn to trust themselves as problem solvers who don’t need to be told what to do next. This stance can be a crucial change for children who are used to getting directions every minute of every day from teachers and other staff members. The Maker Movement values the intensity of the learning experience with endless options and choices about what a person might find interesting or totally enjoy. Giving kids the opportunity to learn about what they love means they will love what they learn. I am a person who becomes really involved in coursework which is interesting to me. It is hard for me to really love what I am doing if it is something that I am not interested in. I think a lot of students find certain materials and ways teachers teach them boring and not useful to them. Giving students different options to go about assignments will be awesome in the learning process. An example of this could be having students make a reflection on a book that was just read to the class. Giving the students options such as writing, drawing/painting, or creating a poem about it can reach all learners and give them options to control their learning and keep them interested in all aspects. Citations: Martinez, S. (n.d.). Lessons from the Maker Movement for K-12 Educators. Retrieved April 03, 2017, from http://inventtolearn.com/lessons-from-the-maker-movement/ I chose to read the section about personalized learning in the significant changes article. The term personalized learning to me refers to a variety of educational programs, learning experiences, instructional approaches, and academic-support strategies that are intended to address the distinct learning needs, interests, aspirations, or cultural backgrounds of individual students. The ways in which I would go about confronting this challenge is in a number of ways. I would deliver instruction through multiple forms of media and give students many different options through those forms of media. This could include: different games, variety of websites, smart boards, and instructional videos. I think offering students options in what they want to achieve is a nice way for them to learn and grow as students. It will make them think and gain valuable skills on how to use different forms of technology and use their thought processes to form different opinions.
As an educator, we will need to tap into our student’s thoughts and find out their interests as learners. In my ED 311/316 placement class, I am in a classroom with 2nd grade students that love a “math wizard” game they play during math hour. This game is similar to the Pokémon game, but it involves math skills and they battle with other characters to move to different levels. This is an awesome display of technology use in the classroom that all of the students enjoy. But there are other ways that could be done to go about this math game without the use of technology. Students could battle or compete with each other in the classroom. Each student could be a different character or trainer of their choosing. A math problem would be put onto the blackboard and the first student to answer the question correctly would be able to use an attack on the other person. Each student would have three lives and a person receiving a correct answer and attacking you can result in that person losing a life. This could be a fun interactive game for students instead of having a boring math lesson in which students are not motivated or enthused about class. This game could also be played non-competitively among students and integrate something meaningful for them to do. This will be something that the students will enjoy doing and gain knowledge during the process of it. I think being open minded to the processes of learning is really important. This can involve talking and collaborating with other instructors about new ideas and approaches. Learning new concepts can help guide your students while empowering them in their own learning processes. I think letting students take control of their own learning processes is an important part of learning. An example could be by giving students a full lesson at the start or right away, instead of bits and chunks of it, this would give those students time management skills to be able to complete assignments. Finally, I believe putting this all together to create a better learning environment for students that has a variety of different approaches within it will be an effective approach. Integrating all of these processes will give everyone an awesome experience for the learning within the classroom. Each student that we encounter will have different ways of learning. Having videos of lectures, online notes, group collaborations, screenshots, and other processes to look back at are valuable resources for students to have. The process of being ready to be able to handle this with students can be looked at in a variety of ways. I am confident that I can handle certain situations and integrate interactive processes that students will like will be key. I will be able to talk with teachers who have had a lot of experience within the classroom using technologies and other integrations that will be a valuable tool. There are so many ways in which a teacher can make their classroom meet the needs of their students. Overall, I am confident that I am ready to face challenges of personalized learning for students. By being able to understand the interests, cultures, and overall character of your students, will make this process a lot easier for myself and all teachers. Citations: http://cdn.nmc.org/media/2016-nmc-cosn-horizon-report-k12-EN.pdf It hit home for me when I read about the topic on visual literacy. I am very much a visual learner. If I see something in its visual form, I immediately can remember what that particular item was used for and form some relation to it. If I am sitting in a classroom looking a bunch of text or trying to listen to an instructor talk, it is not processed the same in the learning process in my head and I may forget about topics discussed. I would prefer to look at a book with all pictures and make the story up in my head of what is going on. I struggle sitting down and reading a book with numerous words and pages for any length of time. I really like the message from the article I read and I am able to connect with the visual learning side of it. I think this is a great message about the visual learning experience. Visual learning is a set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively locate, understand, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media. Visual literacy skills equip a learner to understand and analyze the contextual, cultural, ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, and technical components involved in the production and use of visual materials. Dating back thousands of years ago people communicated what they went through by visual literacy. They told stories through visual representations that have so much detail it really boggles the minds of most people today.
The video with ELL Instructor Leslie Pulé is a video I enjoyed. I have worked with students who are low in literacy and have a hard time gaining concepts in the regular classroom. The second you give these students some technology or some visual aspect to an assignment they become engaged in what we are trying to get across to them. An example of this was I had a student who did not want to write down on paper about what he experienced at the zoo that day. So I told the student to visual represent what he liked and learned about at the zoo that day, he could go that route and hand that in for his grade for that assignment. The picture that he drew of the animals and the details he displayed in the picture was truly amazing. Also, I think using storyboards is an effective way to help students who are struggling with writing text or word meaning. This gives them a different avenue for being able to express what they are talking about. Some students feel uncomfortable with writing on the board. They may feel like they cannot spell certain words or phrases. Using pictures can help them explain what they are trying to convey. In the world we live in today, we are exposed to so much visual literacy. Every place we try and eat at is trying to appease us by putting out juicy burgers and french fries to gain our attention. Other companies put famous athletes in pop commercials, car commercials, and fast food restaurant commercials. These companies know what they are doing with the colors, lines, shapes, and displays they use. They touch on a good point in the video that 70 percent of our brain is used to interpret visual media. Schools need to use more visual processes for students to learn. The media uses so much visual materials to both manipulate and gain our attention towards a certain topic. I would like to see schools use this in a variety of different ways. Visual thinking strategies can be effective. An example of this would be asking students individually or as a group what they think about a certain visual artifact. Asking them questions such as what is going on in this picture, how does this picture make you feel, and what you see that makes you feel this way. This is a great way to get your students thinking about things through visual aspects. Each student will have a different way of thinking. They will look at body language, facial expressions, shapes of figures and different reasoning’s of why certain things are in certain spots. Another way is the step-by step working with images that matter process. This starts off with the literal observation phase. This phase will give students an amount of time to view an image and draw what they view followed by writing. Next is the interpretation phase which is when students will interpret other work that is collaboratively put together with theirs. Students will talk and ask questions among each other and summarize their findings. Finally, there will be the evaluation phase. During this phase you can show students a video and see if they interpret the original photo differently. I think visual literacy is a great representation for student learning. If schools can move to using more visual techniques, this will make our school systems more effective and a better place to learn. Citations: Finley, T. (2014, February 19). Common Core in Action: 10 Visual Literacy Strategies. Retrieved March 11, 2017, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/ccia-10-visual-literacy-strategies-todd-finley Impact of Visual Literacy Education on Learners. (n.d.). Retrieved March 11, 2017, from http://literacyandschoollibraries.wikispaces.com/Impact of Visual Literacy Education on Learners Technology should be used to enhance assessment and feedback practices and not replace them. As someone who uses a lot of technology, you do not want to take out the face to face interactions with students that is replacing something that is real and engaging. “For technology to enhance assessment and feedback, it must add value to current practices, for example by making the experience of assessment more authentic or appropriate, by enabling learners to more effectively monitor and correct their own learning, by increasing the validity and efficiency of assessments or by improving the quality and timeliness of feedback”(digital age). There are some areas that will benefit from this which includes: dialogue and communication, immediacy and contingency, authenticity, speed and ease of processing, self-evaluation, and Additionality.
Adaptive assessment is a powerful tool for improving educational assessment. This can produce tests that take less time, can be enjoyable for students, and can enhance and pick test questions. Student questions will be put into a pool of questions. They will consist of questions that are not too hard and not too easy for the student. Those questions will be chosen based on how the student is performing. Questions will not overwhelm students and will give them a more enjoyable test session. The test is split into two segments: question selection and score estimation. This cycle between the two will keep filtering together until the student reaches desired scored. Performance based assessment is typically meaning that students will take what they have learned from a lesson and use that in the form of short responses or complex proposals. Although most performance based assessments vary, they all share close characteristics. These assessments are complex, authentic, product oriented, open-ended, and time-bound. This article also touched base on how to create a performance based assessment. This was done by first identifying the goals to get their students thinking, Using common core to develop standards, finding learning gaps for the students where they might struggle or shine, gathering materials will be getting an understanding of information that is presented, and developing a learning plan which is hitting that gap between teaching them the content and getting students ready for the task. Citations: Hilliard, P. P. (2015, December 07). Performance-Based Assessment: Reviewing the Basics. Retrieved February 27, 2017, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/performance-based-assessment-reviewing-basics-patricia-hilliard https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20140614115719/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearning/digiassass_eada.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E98xi9ynm_s “Digital Literacy is the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.” Digital literacy in a classroom can promote high-order thinking skills. It can be a tool that can be built upon to promote already established literacy. Having technology in your classroom in my opinion helps your students enjoy what they are doing, create a design projects they have made, and helps them explore certain avenues of technology that can help them in future jobs. Using technology is a great tool, I think the teachers who use it help their students benefit from it. A teacher who just uses a chalk board and lectures would not be very successful with their students. If my students want to learn more about a topic we are discussing or something that is of interest to them. I would tell them to do some research online. There is so much information on topics on the internet, it is a great resource to have. Technology is an endless tool with so many capabilities within its structures. I would try and integrate it in every lesson and tell my students to not be afraid to use it for constructive use. An example would be just letting students play a quick math game on the computer and after 5 minutes they will get free time. This will only cause them to rush through the math material causing them to not learn anything concreate. If you can give the math game some structure, it will give students more learning capabilities.
Definitions for Digital literacy. (n.d.). Retrieved February 13, 2017, from http://www.definitions.net/definition/Digital%20literacy Digital Literacy Definition. (n.d.). Retrieved February 13, 2017, from http://connect.ala.org/node/181197 Professional Learning Networks A PLN is a network that connects a group of people who are interested in the same types of topics. An example of this would be a group of teachers. They can collaborate with one another and bounce ideas back and forth about different topics, ideas, questions, and reflections. As a member you are in control. You can control what you want to do within the PLN. If you want to lurk you can lurk, if you want to be engaged with your peers you can do that too. I looked at some pretty awesome PLN sites from the website I have listed below. “The Educator’s PLN is a Ning site (or online platform for creating your own social network) that facilitates connections between educators. It features a slew of resources such as downloadable podcasts with education leaders as guest speakers, discussion groups with specific purposes like exploring the iPad’s use in the classroom, and links to relevant blogs, videos, resource lists, and events.” “EdWeb.net is a free online social network that lets educators connect with colleagues, collaborate on goals and projects, form their own professional learning communities, mentor one another, and practice using a slew of new technologies. Specific initiatives within the network include a game-based learning forum that will bring teachers together with game developers to explore best practices and further the discussion — and the field.” http://home.edweb.net/ http://edupln.ning.com/ https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/05/19/5-personal-learning-networks-plns-for-educators/ The SAMR model provides a technique for moving through degrees of technology adoption to find more meaningful uses of technology in teaching and move away from simply using “tech for tech’s sake”(Emerging Education Technologies).
The SAMR model is used to show how technology can be used to influence teaching and learning. My example of when I used a SAMR model was when we read a book in class in high school. The original assessment would be reading the original text in its original format. The substitution to the original lesson would be if we chose to, that we could read the text in an online version. The augmentation of the story would be reading online study guides, dictionaries, and historical sites to gather information as an outside resource to gauge better understanding. We used the website called spark notes. This gained information on the chapters before we would read them. The modification that was used was the teacher asked us to create a power point. In our power point, we would need some sort of text and audio that would construct student learning about a particular character in the book. We would modify this in different ways that we chose to do. The redefinition is that groups would collaborate with each other. We would bounce back and forth ideas of what used to create our power point. We could than modify what we had using the knowledge we gained from each other. It will be our goal to integrate this into our classrooms. The way we can go about doing this is by first, exploring the new technologies and become familiar with them. Great teachers seek out others for help. They do not just use their own ideas. Second, teachers should not use just one type of app or website, but should have variety in their classroom. This will create a lot of collaboration among students. Thirdly, keeping a nice medium of technology use will be beneficial. Not every lesson needs to include technology. Select which works best for you. I always think that if a lesson can benefit from technology than you should integrate it into the lesson. The T- PACK model is a framework that integrates three knowledge areas: pedagogical, content, and technological. It will look at how technology is used, how it will be taught, and what the teacher knows. T-PACK reminds us that technology is just a part of the content, pedagogy, and technology. We must not lose sight of goals we are trying to achieve with students by using too much technology in place of real content. Content knowledge- Is what we will be teaching. This includes Art, Math, Science, etc. This is the facts, concepts and theories. Pedagogical knowledge- This is the how. Will teachers be using an inquiry based teaching, direct instruction, or whole group activity. Technical knowledge- is the smart boards, I-pads, and google apps. Using them to enhance your learning. The t-pack overlaps: TC knowledge- the paring of technology and content. TP knowledge- how we can make content more accessible. PC knowledge- pairing of appropriate pedagogies with the content. Deeping the understanding of the students. Citations: Emerging Education Technologies. (n.d.). Retrieved February 05, 2017, from http://www.emergingedtech.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBce25r8vto Introduction to the TPACK Model. (n.d.). Retrieved February 05, 2017, from https://www.commonsensemedia.org/videos/introduction-to-the-tpack-model# Educational Technology- Is the integration of technology in your classroom that will aid in the student learning process through different techniques and processes. Technology has a big and important role in student learning. It is a great tool for fact-based learning. It is a great tool to research questions and concerns about a topic quick and accurately. Technology is great way to test critical thinking and literacy skills. Smart boards and having access to a lab top in your classroom can give you endless opportunities of learning outcomes for your classroom. You can integrate so many different aspects from technology use into your lesson plans. Another great aspect of technology is you can be so creative with it in your classroom. Some examples would be audio content, videos, and animations. Some challenges faced with using technology is that some schools simply cannot afford technology. It is a very expensive tool to have in your school. Some schools will be updated with the top technology and some schools are not. It will be up to you to find ways to integrate technology into your classroom with what you our given from the school you are teaching in. The one thing we have to know as teachers is that technology is something to aid us in lesson plans and not something to substitute real content. Teachers can rely on technology so much that it affects the learning process of their students and affect the way in which they teach. Using technology integration is an endless tool to have in your classroom. In the four-minute video we watched I really liked the quote used that states. “If you can do a lesson without technology. That is great, but if you can do it better with technology then that is why you use it”. (Technology Integration) There is so many unique ways we can integrate technology into our classrooms. It will be up to us as educators to use the technology given to us and integrate it in the best ways for our students. Finally, the role for technology in my classroom will be one of making learning enjoyable for all of my students. They will learn a great deal about technology and how to integrate into different lessons. Citations: 'An Introduction to Technology Integration' on ViewPure. (2010). Retrieved January 28, 2017, from http://viewpure.com/d59eG1_Tt-Q?start=0&end=0 |
Archives
May 2017
Categories |