Using Glogster for Presentations

I wanted to share with you this amazing website. As I was going through the websites that my group came up with for interactivity #3, I found this one and was amazed at the wonderful things that people can create with glogs. This is just an example of how a student made a glog/poster, but also incorporated a youtube video/song and animations. The example below was created for an English class that was studying Shakespeare's play "The Taming of the Shrew." I think this is a great activity to do with students and a great way to allow students to be creative.

CURR 316 Final Project

Technology Integration Matrix

For this project, I used a lesson plan that I had previously created for my CURR 310 class (Inclusion in Middle and Secondary Schools). This lessons are created for three blocks, meaning each lesson is 80 minutes long. Because I had to make modifications to my lesson in order to accommodate a hearing impaired student, I provided a lot of visuals and group work to make that student feel comfortable with the lesson. In fact, there is little to no teacher talk in this lesson because I feel like it will aid this auditory impaired student to perform better in the class and understand the lesson in a more profound way.

                As soon as the students come into the classroom, they are given a KWL chart, which will be completed individually on a graphic organizer found in the computers. Because realistically speaking, an English classroom will not have desktop computers for every student, most likely they will be using either laptops, or the classes will be held in the media center. After the students complete the first activity on the computers, they will be asked to set that information aside and turn to the Smartboard where the teacher has put up a PowerPoint presentation where she has incorporated the stories “The Three Little Pigs” and “The True Story of The Three Little Pigs.” The reason for using the PowerPoint presentation instead of the actual books for this lesson is because the PowerPoint is adapted for the hearing impaired student. The story is completely pasted into the PowerPoint in large font and pictures have been incorporated for the student to visually and orally see and hear the stories. After this is done, the students will discuss in small groups the differences between both stories, paying special attention to how the story changes when the point of view or person telling the story changes also. Then, the teacher will hand out the point of view graphic organizer and will discuss the three different types of point of views that they will concentrate on (First Person, Third Person Limited, and Third Person Omniscient). After, the students will be given a short fable and they have to re-write the fable from a different character’s point of view and post it on the classroom wiki. This will also serve as an assessment for the day. Lastly, to close the lesson, the students will go back to their KWL charts and will type up what they learned about the lesson.

                On day three, as soon as the students walk in, they will be broken up into groups of 7 and they will be told that they are going to play a point of view game. In this game, the teacher will put up a quote from a story, book, or novel on the Smartboard and the group will have one minute to decide if this passage is told in First Person, Third Person Limited or Third Person Omniscient. If the group fails to answer correctly, the passage will go on to the next group, which can decide to pass to a different passage, or give an answer to the one before. After the game is finished, the teacher will give the students the correct answers and together they will discuss why this answer is correct.  Then, the students will go to their computers and they will create a brainstorming web on Mindmeister that explores Harper Lee’s use of Scout’s perspective in the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which they are reading in class. After they have finished their web, they will discuss their findings in their cooperative learning groups of 3 or 4 students and then discussion will be brought into a class discussion.

                On day three, the students will be broken up into groups of 2 and will be given a passage from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which they must turn into another character’s point of view. After, they are to use Glogster to make a glog, using big font and decorations, which will be presented to the class. The students will be given 40 minutes of class time to work on their glog. After they have finished it, they must upload it to the classroom Dropbox. Once time is up, teacher will pull out one glog at a time and the two students will present to the class how their character reacted differently to a situation in the novel and why they chose to decorate it the way they did. The assessment for this day is the actual updated passage, the multimedia production and the way they present their product to the class. After all groups have presented, students are to take 5 minutes and write 3 things they learned, 2 questions they had, and 1 thing that was hard for them on the classroom wiki. Hopefully, by the end of the lesson, the students, including my hearing impaired student, will be able to see the huge impact that the author’s chosen point of view can have on a story.  

Dropbox and DropitTome in the Classroom

One of the big negative effects of being a teacher is the amount of paperwork that a teacher has to deal with and at times, it is hard to be organized with so many papers on top of their desks. However, nowadays, this lack of organization does not need to be a problem anymore. Teachers can now use Dropbox to store and access their files from any device that is connected to the Internet. Although it may seem like Dropbox is for those teachers that are very good with technology, even those less tech-savvy teachers can use this easy tool. If you download the Dropbox client to your device, you can just create, upload and delete files and folders, and as soon as your device connects to the Internet, it will automatically synchronize your updated content into all of your other devices.

Pros:

• Store all of your lesson plans and handouts into a folder that can be private or shared.
• Share a folder with your classroom by having them create an account. Then, they can have access to the content of those folders and also be able to add their own documents to it.
• Students can share research documents and turn in assignments. 
• If you want to show the students what another student did another year, then you can just print the document from Dropbox instead of having to type it, or store it in file cabinets.

Cons:

• You might not want every student to create a Dropbox account.
• You might feel like students can see each other's work and therefore copy off each other.

 

How to solve cons:

• If you do not want every student to create a Dropbox account, you can use a service called DropitTome. This service provides the students with a web address for students to access with a password to upload files to their teacher's Dropbox. This makes the sharing a bit more secure because students cannot see other files within the folder.

Teaching Shakespeare through Technology

As I was doing some research on how to incorporate technology in a lesson plan that I am creating in my Methods course, I came upon this video that I thought would be very good to share. It is amazing how this classroom teacher used technology to help the students understand Shakespeare's play, "Macbeth." As it is, it is very hard for students to understand Shakespeare, but I feel that by creating this rap song, the students had to really do in depth research about the play and make sure that they were summarizing the events in a chronological and clear way. For this reason, I think this would definitely be an addition to my Shakespeare lesson plan.

Note: This was part of an assignment in a Shakespeare lesson, in a public school. These kids went above and beyond to create this wonderful video and I was just shocked at the way in which they related Shakespeare to modern life. It it is definitely true that if taught well, Shakespeare can be timeless.

Interactivity #5

The teacher I interviewed is a 9^th grade English teacher in the Hackensack School District. Although her school is considered to be public, it is also a magnet school for kids who are particularly talented in the Arts. In order to get into this school, the students need to apply, be tested on their abilities and then accepted or rejected, depending on their scores. Hackensack is part of Bergen County and therefore the province that I am particularly studying in this interactivity is Bergen.

Based on the responses to the eight survey questions, I noticed that the teacher I interviewed was extremely knowledgeable about NETS. According to her, technology standards have been implemented in the Hackensack School District for a few years already and NETS is one of those initiatives that the school district reinforces. In order to increase the students’ technological awareness and media literacy, her school district has posted the National Educational Technology Standards for teachers and for students on teachers’ online curriculums. In addition, every teacher is evaluated on their observations according to those standards. In order to increase the use of these new technology standards, her district also includes training as part of professional development and teacher workshops.

I was extremely surprised at my interviewee’s responses because I did not expect this teacher to be so familiar with NETS. As a matter of fact, she was surprised about the questions I was asking her. My interviewee explained to me that NETS are standards that all teachers in her school are extremely familiar with and that it is natural for her to include them in her lessons. Also, I did not think that this school district worried so much about their students’ technological awareness. In fact, what surprised me the most was the fact that in order to help the teachers implement NETS, this particular school’s English Department bought 40 IPads that were to be used within regular lessons. Moreover, according to my interviewee, most English classrooms have Smartboards that teachers use to make the lesson more interactive.

As a future educator, I would definitely implement NETS in my own classroom. Truly, NETS can enhance any lesson because the use of technology facilitates and maximizes content learning. Furthermore, if the teacher uses NETS for Students, she/he is conscious of using some of those standards within his/her lesson and in that way, there is a higher possibility of technology being part of the lesson. Also, as a future educator, I would speak to my colleagues about the many advantages that NETS has to offer. Lastly, I would also seek technological help from more knowledgeable faculty about different and more innovative ways of using NETS in my own classroom. 

Interactivity #4 SpreadSheet 

Using Google Earth to Enhance Your Lessons

As many of you have already read in my previous posts, I received an Ipad for Valentine's Day/Birthday. Therefore, since I received this wonderful tool, I have began a quest to finding applications that help me come up with better lessons. Today, through reading some of the newest articles in Education World, I was introduced to the fact that Google Earth has been given a 5 star rating from users and critics. Therefore, I started to do some research about what I could do with Google Earth in an English classroom and these are some of the stuff I came up with.

1. Set the scene for literature
2. Show the students where a story takes place, by pointing at the location in the map.
3. Show the students the passage or trail that the characters in the story have to travel/ have travelled
4. Create postcards comparing places from the past and how they are today.
5. Fun ways of students keep track of the different parts of the world where they have read novels from and trying to fill in the whole world map with books written by people from those countries, or books set in those specific countries.
6.  Show places where authors were born, lived, and died, which can also show all the places they were in in a lifetime (great for teaching Mark Twain).

If you can think of other ways to use Google Earth in the English classroom, or anything that can relate to English, please feel free to add to this post.

Facebook as an Instructional Tool

Although many of us continue thinking that Facebook and many other technologies can be considered to be effective technological tools for the classroom, we hardly ever think about why and how to use these tools to promote effective learning. Through doing some research on Facebook, I came upon several articles that explained how to use Facebook in the classroom. However, one particular story that caught my attention was that of a student, whose teacher had created a classroom Facebook account, where the students had to post responses to the readings.

Something that particularly struck my attention was the way in which this student defended the real usefulness of Facebook in the classroom. She understood that these things like posting responses online could certainly be done in Moodle or Blackboard; however, she saw Facebook as being more effective because of the obvious familiarity that students already have with it. This first-hand account from a student on how Facebook can be used in the classroom really made me change my perspective on the many different ways in which I can use it in my own classroom. Of course, I understand that to make this tool safe for my students, their accounts and private information need to be hidden from the other followers. Yet, once this minor obstacle is resolved, the teacher and students have the opportunity to disembark on a journey that will guide the students towards learning.

Interactivity #4

Creating a Persuasive Podcast

Click Here to See Spreadsheet

As part of my Fieldwork semester, I was asked by my cooperating teacher to give a lesson on persuasive writing. For this reason, when I found this lesson plan, I was amazed about the different ways of using technology to introduce persuasive writing.

As I was examining my chosen lesson plan, I thought that the strategies were great and really needed no change. The teacher went in depth in modeling how to persuade somebody through a podcast found in the internet, her modeled persuasive map and her own podcast. However, I did notice a gap between the strategies and the curriculum goals. This lesson used two different standards to show how the students should speak; yet, did not use any standards to show how the students needed to evaluate the teacher’s podcast, as well as their fellow students’ and to show how they had to write a good argument in their persuasive map first, before creating their podcast. I found this to be two essential goals that should have been highlighted in the lesson plan. In addition, there are many smart board interactivities in the internet that can be used to teach about podcasts and persuasive writing that would have gone great with the lesson, as well as smart board tools that could have made the modeling of the persuasive map more interactive for the students.

            Overall, I think that the technologies are definitely more effective than just plain lectures and group work. I really loved the idea of creating a persuasive podcast particularly because the students not only have the chance to improve their presentation skills, but they also create something that they can then share with their peers. Therefore, these technologies are necessary to engage the students in the lesson.

Using the Ipad in the Classroom

I wanted to share this slideshare presentation on ways of using the Ipad in the classroom. As I posted in an earlier post, I received an Ipad for my birthday/Valentine's Day and I have been looking for different ways of using it in my classroom. I thought that this was one of the best presentations on ways to use it in not only English, but also other content areas. I hope that you find this useful and that you can comment on other ways you think this tool can be used in the classroom.

How to use iPads in the classroom

View more PowerPoint from Lebarone

Using the Smartboard

Through this Fieldwork semester, I have noticed how useful the Smartboard can be in the classroom. In fact, I have noticed how much students can learn by using this interactive tool. To help my cooperative teacher, I was looking for some Smartboard interactive lessons and I found this list of useful ideas that I thought would be great to share with you.

Book Cover Creator – The Book Cover Creator is designed to allow users to type and illustrate front book covers, front and back covers, and full dust jackets. Students can use the tool to create new covers for books that they read as well as to create covers for books they write individually or as a class.
Book Cover Guide – Students can use the tool to review the parts of a book cover before analyzing how book covers work or creating their own book covers.
Writing an Acrostic Poem – Students can learn about and write acrostic poems. An acrostic poem uses the letters in a word to begin each line of the poem.
Get started writing with Myths Brainstorming Machine – The Brainstorming Machine will help students get started when they need writing ideas for a myth. They can select the setting, the characters, and other effects.
Poetry Idea Engine – The interactive Poetry Idea Engine helps students identify and write different types of poetry.
Increase Your Reading Comprehension – Students read a passage and select the word(s) needed to complete the sentence correctly. They must use context clues and comprehension in order to be able to answer correctly.
Create Your Own Diamante Poem – Students interactively create a diamante poem. The computer interactively guides them through the writing process.
Clean Up Your Grammar – Students “clean up their grammar” as they toss trash from the beach into the correct bin. Immediate reinforcement and level selection keep students learning and practicing.
Character Scrapbook – Students will use this interactive activity to determine character traits of a character in a book. Students will think critically about characters in the books they are reading.
Pick the Perfect Word Game – Students practice identifying the parts of speech in this game.  The characters and words are based on the popular story of Charlotte’s Web.
Story Starters – This is a quick writing activity that can be used daily or whenever students have time.  They generate story starter then decide if they want to write on a notebook, a letter, newspaper, or postcard.  Finally, they may print their story for a cool surprise!
Space Station Syllabication – Students practice dividing words into syllables in this game.  Each correct response earns another piece for the space station.
Synonym Challenge – Players race against the clock to select a synonym for the word given.  Green bar climbs on the screen to encourage players to “think quick.”

Interactivity #3

When starting this activity, I was a bit skeptic about the group work that it involved; however, now that I take a look at the outcome, I am glad that this was a group activity. At first, I found myself struggling to understand what kind of technologies were the ones required; therefore, I began by putting those that I definitely would use myself in my classroom and that I have been advised by my teachers to use. Through research, I was also reminded of some technologies that at first may seem obvious or familiar, but that as future teachers, we rarely think about using. However, after looking into my group’s findings, I realized how many of the technologies that they contributed with, I have myself used as a student and as a student teacher. They also provided technologies that I was instantly enthusiastic about using, like Slideshare and Mindmeister. 

The technologies that I am most thankful for from the list that we came up with are Google Documents and Evernote. Although, I did not think of Evernote at first, this weekend I decided to give it a try. I used Evernote to type an essay for READ 411 on my Ipad and then print it out on the computer. Evernote saves a lot of time because it does not require internet to type your notes, but then when you are at home, the upload is automatic. As we all know, the best technology out there and the one used for this specific project is Google Documents. We are all busy in our daily routines, but Google Document offers us the possibility of doing group work without all of us being present in the process because everyone contributes with their own ideas and just updates the document as they go. 

Integrating Computers in my Everyday Lessons

Through doing research on handouts in the Teachers Network website, I found many articles on how to integrate technology in the classroom. However, the one that caught my attention the most was one called "Differentiated Learning Using the Computers" by Ann Stephenson. Stephenson writes about many ways in which we can ask students to use the computer, to reinforce learned material, to expand their knowledge on computers and to make sure they are engaged in the lesson. Nevertheless, the strategies that pertain to my subject area are those of making a classroom newsletter every week, making databases on student information like emails and phone numbers, tracking attendance and making bar graphs of it. The above stated activities will not only serve them as practice for English, but will also serve them as practice in math and computers, while also providing the teacher with documents that could be hanged around the classroom and shown to parents in parent/teacher conferences. Because my second certification is in ESL, I also liked the idea of making pictographs in the computer and asking the students to write a word that explains what each picture stands for, like in the picture below.

 Activities like these, will allow the students to develop good and useful vocabulary that will eventually be used in other classes. These pictographs can be used in my classroom, not only to reinforce vocabulary for ELL, but also for monolingual kids who are learning specific vocabulary words, or are learning about a specific time period, author, or novel. I do not think that things like this can be done every day; however, through substituting it has been my experience, that it is very hard to engage kids when it is a Friday and they are thinking of things to do on the weekend. However, things like these can be great things to make the classroom environment less tense and to reward those students who are trying hard and completing the work, while also giving me time to talk to individual students about their performance during that week.

Interactivity #2

     Through watching the video on the visual history of technology, reading chapter 2 on  “Rethinking Technology in Schools” and through the supplemental reading, I found myself struggling to decide whether my chosen technology had impacted my content area for the better or for the worse. Through this historical context, I have come to the realization that film has been the communication technology that has impacted English the most. Like many other technologies, film seems to have made a crucial impact on English for the better. Through reading about Grace , her experiences with film and those of her mother and grandmother, it is obvious that in some aspects film has had a negative impact in education. First of all, in some ways, principals and other administrators believed that films were less boring substitutes for teachers and that they were more lively ways for students to really learn (Domine 44). However, films were also used in Language Arts and other classes to illustrate correct lip and tongue move­ment for pronouncing words (Domine 45). This could have been especially helpful to English teachers because they could enhance the pronunciation of difficult vocabulary words, while also teaching simple, basic words to newcomers who were learning English.

In the video, I also saw that some of the small clips they made and showed the students were on how to build your vocabulary. Lessons like those can be very helpful to students and can serve as a reinforcement of something already taught. However, like Grace’s grandmother states, it is better to study “film and radio programs as texts to be critically analyzed rather than celebra[te] the machines themselves (Domine 44). In these situations, when films served as supplementary materials to the lesson and not as substitutes for the teachers, I believe they served as beneficial inventions and that the only time when films were negative, was when the administrators tried to substitute the knowledge of a real human for that of a machine. In every other case, like in the creation of programs like Sesame Street, film has had a beneficial impact on technology and on the English classroom. For all this, I believe that as a result of the creation of film, we can now show movies that were created from books like Beowulf, The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter and its modern version Easy A, etc… These movies do not teach the students the complete story, but serve to reiterate the plot and as visual forms of what they have learned through reading the original books.

 

 Every good book, must then become a good movie 






Works Cited

Domine, Vanessa. "A Social History of Media, Technology and Schooling." The National Association for Media Literacy Education’s Journal of Media Literacy Education 1 (2009): 42-52. JMLE. Web.

 

Domine, Vanessa. "Rethinking Technology in Schools Primer." New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Print.

Technology: A tool of improvement

Today my husband and my sister in law gave me the most amazing present I could have wished for. Knowing that I am entering a system that is greatly influenced by technology, I have been wishing to have an Ipad for a long time, and today, I was finally surprised with one for Valentine's Day and for my coming birthday. As soon as I got it, I began to explore the immense amount of applications that this gadget has for education. First of all, I added gradebooks, whiteboards, attendance sheets, and other applications that would be fun to use to teach literature. Although I wished I could add many more, I stopped myself because I do not yet know what grade level I will be teaching. However, having this technological tool has opened a lot of possibilities for me.

                           
This is when I realized that our world is entering a new time in which whoever does not know about technology is missing out on a valuable tool. In fact, nowadays, technology has a very important role in our lives as future teachers. Almost every school is now employing the use of smart boards, MACS, Ipads and many other technological tools that will aid the teacher at engaging the students in the lesson. This week, I realized how important it really is to keep up with all of these gadgets because if not, we will be missing out on a lot of wonderful things.

Moreover, in one of my education classes, we were talking about how fast new technological gadgets are coming out to the market and how technology is getting its way into our lives, making it far more simple to do many things. For instance, back when I started college, we all had to buy books for our classes, and there was no other choice but to carry those books around all day. However, nowadays, students can buy a tablet, or an Ipad and get the books online. Every day, new books are becoming available as e-books and someday, as we predicted in my class, everyone will have the option of buying all of their books online and reading them in their Ipads or tablets. To me, this is simply amazing and wonderful for those students who take advantage of this tool.

On the other hand, like I have stated in many of my blog responses, if this tools are not used to our advantage, then we are harming ourselves. I have known of people who tell their teachers they are looking at their computers because they are reading the books or readings for the class, and in reality they are signed onto Facebook, chatting, doing other homework, and even shopping. Like anything else, technology, as helpful as it may be, needs to be used for the right reasons and at times may also become a dangerous tool for teachers. When dealing with technology, our eyes have to be really opened and always aware that our students may in fact be doing things on the computer than are not school related.

Interactivity #1

                            My Experience with Technology

 My entire life, I have been exposed to new technology and although at times I have used it for entertainment, I have also used technology for educational purposes. The three most influential communication technologies in my life are my cell phone, my laptop, and my fax machine. All three technological devices have helped me learn new material in different ways. In fact, I do not know where I would be if it was not for these three devices. The first device that I am constantly thankful for is my cell phone because at times, when I have been absent to a class, I have been able to call a classmate, put him/her on speaker, open the note taker in my phone, and copy down the things that the class worked on on that day. I could use my cell phone anywhere and anytime, as long as I have wi-fi connection. Also, during my college career, I have taken a couple of online classes. One of them (Women Gender Studies) required us to hear the professor’s pre-recorded lectures posted on blackboard and then answer a set of questions. I had to work a lot during that time, so my cellphone was the tool I used in order to complete these assignments and to listen to the lectures. I found myself downloading the lectures to my cell phone and listening to them while in the car, bus, at lunch, on my break, etc...Also, I would then open the note where I copied down the questions and answer them on my phone. I have also used my cell phone to take pictures of class notes that were covered on days when I was absent, teacher notes that were written on the board, but which I did not have time to copy down, and other related notes that would take me too long to copy. After, I would simply send the pictures to my email, print them out and I miraculously had all the notes that I needed without too much effort.

The other device that would be very hard to live without is my laptop. I write all of my essays there and read all of the online teacher assigned readings in it. Moreover,  every semester, I make an online notebook using Microsoft One Note and I keep all of my class information in there. Furthermore, I use programs like Outlook to constantly check my emails and set reminders of  things  I have to do, which are connected to my phone and email. In addition, I have used my laptop to have video and audio conferences with classmates about a project when we are not able to meet in person because all our schedules are different. Also, I have had video conferences instead of a class meeting on snow days, when my professor did not want us to show up to class, but did not want to cancel class either. Lastly, I also use my computer to write my thoughts, homework, due dates and a lot of other things that I would lose if they were on paper.

Lastly, I also use my fax machine a lot. At times, when I have not been able to buy my books for class, yet have assigned homework due that same week or the following,  my fax machine allows other classmates to send me a copy of the pages due for homework from their houses. Also, I have used my fax machine to correct my group members’ papers and to send them mine for them to check. Lastly, I constantly use my fax machine to send class notes and at times also receive class notes from students in my class through fax.

In comparison, the students in the two videos and I use computers to read, to work together within our groups and to figure out what we can do with what we have through the use of computers, and we also use our cell phones to take pictures of projects. However, one thing that astonished me and that made me want to try was an idea that another student in the second video mentioned, about learning a new language in your computer. Also, the devices that they use are mostly like mine, but they do not use the fax machine as a way to communicate through technology. Overall, it was very interesting to see how these young adults use technology to their benefit, just like I do every day.

About Myself

Anaís V. Rodríguez

 

Hello, my name is Anaís and I am an English major with a second certification in ESL. I really love teaching and therefore I am really looking forward to this semester because I am finally doing my Fieldwork. I have taught a number of students of different ages, from 3 to 15 and I really enjoy doing it. I am currently a piano teacher and a substitute; however, I have also tutored and worked in daycares. I am really looking forward to this course because I love technology; since I was a little girl, I used to play around with graphics and computers and make the most beautiful banners and other graphics. I think that besides reading and writing, one of my favorite things to do is learning about new technological gadgets and I will be having a lot of fun using technology in my lesson plans.