Exit Slip 10-28

During today's lab I really liked learning about elluminate! I find this to be very interesting and gave me a new way of learning.  Before today I had never really thought much about having online classrooms, and when I have thought about this, I have only really considered Sype, but this software seems very beneficial and helpful when doing online learning or classrooms.  I am actually excited to hopefully use this sometime soon because I think it is a new way of learning all in itself. 

Chapter 7 of Rethinking

In this reading we learned about how technology is changing our entire society as a whole.  I found it extremely interesting to learn what the book talked about as being the gains and set backs of technology in the schools.  Some of these I agree with and others I don’t.  One of the losses they talked about is that the gap between students academically will become wider than before, especially for students of different financial standings.  Some say that students who come from a wealthier family may have a higher advantage because they will have more opportunities to buy newer technologies, whereas those students who come from poorer families may not have the same opportunities and will therefore be left behind in the dust.  Another negative to allowing so much technology in the classroom is that students will loose the healthy interaction between two people.  It is said that students might become too use to being behind a computer screen that they will miss out on person to person interaction with peers and others. It were these and some of the other negatives to technology that I focused on during this reading because it was something new to think about.  Before this reading we mostly focused on all of the pros of technology and virtual classrooms. 

As a future teacher, I found it helpful to really consider both sides, the negatives and the pros of this new way of teaching and the impacts it will have on our students and our society.  And although I have not yet made up my mind on how I feel about this yet, I know that I will continue to ponder this idea so that I can make the best educated decision so that I may become the best teacher I can be. 

Blogs, Wikis, Chapter 8

I really liked learning about podcasts in this chapter because I never really knew much about them.  I was kind of nervous about the whole idea of bringing podcasts into the classrooms, mostly because I didn't really know what it was about and how much it could help in the everyday classroom.  I really liked how the book gave different sites that anyone can go to to get examples and listen to some of the great ideas that are out there. 
After reading this I plan to try to incorporate podcasts into my classroom by having my students create their own podcasts to share with eachother or maybe even students in other schools.  I think this will help them develop better technology skills, share ideas and learning and much more.  For starting out a skeptic, I am definetly sold on the idea of putting podcasts in the classroom. 

Exit slip 10/21

Today in class we started class by participating in the chapter 6 discussion. Today’s discussion went really well.  I felt like the group did a great job of facilitating this discussion and was very organized and knowledgeable.  Plus the obvious fact that they gave us suckers was a great advantage.  After the discussion, Dr. Boyer talked about different ways to facilitate a discussion, giving an example of what he called a jigsaw.  This seemed very interesting and something that I would love to try in maybe one of my other classes. 

What I really liked about today’s class is how we went over the SMART board a little better and talked about Skype which is something that is really great! I love using Skype and I am very excited that Dr. Boyer is willing to incorporate it into our learning.  I feel that this will be very helpful to me and with my peers because it will give us easier access to Dr. Boyer and we might be willing to ask more questions.  I love using Skype and I really hope to incorporate into my future classrooms. 

Chapter 6 of Rethinking

I found this chapter be sort of boring at first just talking about the history and how immigration changed how viewed and conducted education.  But as I started to think about this more in depth, I realized that this change in the way we educated our students during immigration is a lot like the change we are going through now with technology.  Again we are changing how we educate our students, letting them agian have a bit of a choice in what they learn and how they learn. 
This affects my future teaching because it has helped me to realize that I should be more accepting of this new way of teaching.  I sometimes find myself feeling a bit anti technology, because sometimes I don't always agree with the ways we use technology in the classroom.  Reading and thinking about this, I realized how important it is for me to get on board with this new way of thinking so that I can educate my future students to the highest ability I can. 

Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts Chapter 7

For today's reading we learned a lot about the site Flickr.  I have heard of flickr before, but I never really gave it much thought.  I mostly just thought that it was a website where you could personally upload pictures and edit them.  I didnt even know you could share them with others.  In this chapter, I liked how the book gave directions on how to use flickr, which makes it more appealing and easy to use.  If it didnt have these esasy directions, I would probably never use it because I would be worried that it would too hard to work.  I loved how it also gave many different ways and examples that you could use this in a classroom.  My favorite thing about flickr that I read about is probably the fact that you can annotate certain parts of a picture, so that you can direct a disccussion for people who are looking at your photos.  This I think will be very helpful in a classroom, especially a younger aged classroom. 
In my future teaching, I plan to use Flickr to facilitate different discussions about pictures, and to also allow my students to post pictures we take in and outside of the classroom.  The one major concern I would possibly have about Flickr, is whether students' faces should be allowed in any of the pictures.  Although I think it would be cool at times to have their faces,  it might not be a good idea because of safety of the children, and because maybe their parents/gaurdian wouldn't want them to.  But even then, I still believe Flickr will be a great asset to my classroom someday. 

Exit Slip 10/14

Today in class, we spent most of the time discussing our iRLo assignment, mostly focusing on how to work scratch and design a model of what we want to do our assignment on.  I found this to be very helpful because before this class I was very scared and nervous about doing this assignment and using Scratch.  After this class, I am still nervous about doing this on my own, but I feel better about working on this independently.  I now have the feeling that I might actually be able to accomplish and complete this task, whereas before I was afraid this task would be impossible for me to do.