Rise School's in Houston!

Zoo Trip 2010

This spring break I am spending it with my Sister and her family in Houston! My niece's are fortunate enough to go to The Rise School In Houston! I will update you as I spend another Spring Break here in Houston watching my niece's flourish!

Updated Website!

 I updated my Website! make sure you check out my lesson plan using Dragon Naturally Speaking!

Writing in the Classroom!!

This year I have been student teaching in a 3^rd grade classroom. I have noticed that many of my students have such a hard time writing, because of their penmanship, spelling, or simply because they don’t like it to the point where a student begins to hyperventilate. Writing should not be that stressful, there are many ways to make writing more fun and easier for students. I want to use a technology that students can use to express what they have to say but don’t exactly have to write it. I have explored Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 10.1.

My goals for my lesson are to have students use this technology to express themselves without the constraints of a pen. I want to use this to show my 3^rd graders that writing does not have to be stressful and there are other ways that they can get what they need to say or want to say on paper. My objective and goal of my lesson is to make writing and self-expression in class and also give students who have a hard time writing a tool to help in their education so they can strive like every student should. I feel like many people believe that text-to-speech programs are expensive and are hard to use. But this one is FREE! So what is better than that? I cannot wait to use this technology in the classroom and watch my students flourish!

Digital Story

This week in my class we were asked to make a digital story and how it might be useful in our teaching. It took me a while to think about what I wanted to do, what could I do that would be useful in my teaching? In this class and my other class we are talking heavily about technology and how it can impact our students. Then I was thinking about my project that I did on Glogster and how I showed it to my 3^rd grade students and had them write their own “Where I Am From” poems, so I thought about what else is important to me that would also be important and fun to my future students. I instantly thought of Friends and Friendship. I decided to make a Slide to demonstration my digital story.

It felt extremely fitting since my friends are my foundation. I have been lucky to have a wonderful group of 8 best friends. Some of us have been friends since we were born, elementary and middle school.  I created a slide show of pictures of my best friends. It is called “Why We’re Best Friends” with each caption a different word. At the end of the slide show, I created my own picture and a map of the United States and put a picture of our faces where we go to school or live currently.

 I thought this would be useful in my classroom because my students can pick any topic and write a story only using a couple of words. I think that this is extremely useful because it allows students to showcase what they are proud of, and that they can create their own pictures and use their computer skills and incorporate it in their project. I really liked working with this program, it was simple and easy to use.  Any  grade who had access to the internet and pictures could use this. There are also so many different features that it is very versatile which is extremely nice! The one thing that I did not like was that it wouldn’t let me save it once and I had to create an account to save it, but that was not that big of a deal. However for younger students who might not have e-mails it might be more difficult.
This program was really fun to use and easy and I hope that I can use this in a future lesson to my my future students create a digital story!

Are you sick of highly paid teachers?

     Teachers' hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or10 months a year! It's time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do - babysit!
We can get that for less than minimum wage.

     That's right. Let's give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan-- that equals 6 1/2 hours).

     Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day...maybe 30? So that's $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day.
However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.
LET'S SEE....
That's $585 X 180= $105,300
per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).

     What about those special
education teachers and the ones with Master's degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an
hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.
Wait a minute -- there's
something wrong here! There sure is!
The average teacher's salary
(nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days
= $277.77/per day/30
students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student--a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) WHAT A DEAL!!!!

Make a teacher smile; re-post this to show appreciation for all educators.

** I am not the original author.  I received this as an anonymous chain letter email, and I wanted to share it to support the public workers of Wisconsin.**

Glogster!

As I continue in my education in my online class. We are learning about how technology is a good way to connect, help and assist students! I was thinking about a technology which I could use in my classroom and at home, one to help my students. I have used a website called Glogster. This website has pages that students can make and use for anything. Glogster is used to create pages that students can share and use for information. I created a Glogster (this is my glogster) for my class and have used it multiple times in my student teaching. I used it to write "Where I am from" poem with my 3rd graders. The fact that I was able to create this at home, use it in a school and have other students use a safe website for students is really important. With using a technology there is always a con, that the technology cannot be used at home because the student may not have access to the computer, which is why it is important to use a .edu website that can be used at school, so that all the work can be done at school.

In my technology class we are looking at TPACK, Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge. As I look at Glogster, and the many uses it is important that the teacher or educator is familiar with the technology so that the lesson can be scaffolded to their students. The reason that I picked Glogster is because the content can always change, the students and teachers can use this technology for multiple content areas, and depending on what the content area is that teacher will be able to use this which is good for the PK. I think that if the teacher has a good understanding of how to use Glogster and can teach their students, then this is a really good TPACK technology because it allows for all the different parts of TPACK.

What other uses can you think of that Glogster can be used for?

Creative Commons

In this weeks lab we had to learn how to play around and work with pictures, It was not an easy task. It look me a while to understand what to do and how to do but, but after I did it was a great success. One part of our lab was to license a picture to Creative Commons. I did not understand the point at first, but after reading and learning about it. I see how important it is to have things licensed. As we all know, plagiarize is a huge issue at college today, and "copying" but we never think about it in an elementary school setting. It's really important that us as future teachers give our students the best education possible, but what happens when you run into an issue with copy right laws? An assignment that can be done at school, cannot be done at home? Or any other issues that may occur. It's hard to say "this way is right" because there will always be two sides to every story. Is there a way that schools can get rights to certain things and have access codes for students to work with them at home. It is important to respect the rights and wishes of the creator of the project or image.

“This is a photo I licensed with Creative Commons"

Attribution:

Image: 'kola and lily ice skating pairs'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11108455@N00/430279864

This is the image that I used from Flickr, I chose this image because I wanted to pick an image that I could use in my classroom that would not be considered a common picture in a classroom. I chose this image for multiple reasons, the first reason was because I love Huskies. But after I looked at the image I noticed a a lot of similarities in the dog and the cat. The way they were walking, the seriousness on their faces. I thought this would be a great picture to have in my classroom to show that regardless if someone is bigger, or stronger that anyone can be a leader. The dog can also be considered to protecting the cat, and watching the cats back. The image also portrays the leadership role, and the expectation of being a good role model and looking out for your fellow students. I feel that this picture can be used in many situations and many school with the right "heading" on it, it is very fitting for all classrooms and can be changed to fit the theme or mood of the day!

 This is my slide show of 4 pictures, The first image is a picture of shoes in color, the second picture I removed all the color, the third picture was a screen shot that I cropped and added text to, and the forth picture is the picture that I licensed in Creative Commons. I hope you enjoyed this and are looking forward to the next posts!

Who Can Watch the Super Bowl Alone?!?!?!?!

On Wednesday, I chatted with my online teacher via Skype, at first, I was hesitant about what is the point. It's an online class, no face to face required. But then I realized the importance after the meeting ended. Life and school is not in solitude, we as humans need to be social and interact with others. It came to my attention also today while I was watching the Super Bowl and a friend left my house because his roommate was home watching the game alone, and he said, "You can't watch the super bowl alone. That's just depressing!" I thought to myself, why? Why is this football game that much bigger than any other football game. (clearly I know the answer as I am a HUGE Chicago Bears fan and sports fan). But it got me thinking in terms of education, why do we want our students to do assignments alone, do homework alone, read alone, study alone. Everything in solitude but then we are told to teach our students how to interact. How can the technology that we are given enhance this? If a person cannot watch the super bowl alone. What makes us think that students should be doing work all alone.
For this class, a friend and I decided we would get together on Monday's and do the work together to make sure we are both on track with this online class, and to make sure that we both understand the assignments since there is no "formal" instruction from a teacher while I am sitting in a class. It made me come to realize how important social interactions are in every aspect of life, even our online classes where we think we don't have to interact with anyone else but the computer. Online classes may be a great way for people who are on the run, need to hold down jobs and such, but are they good for our education regards to our social learning?
I think online classes are great, and a great way for people to have their cake and eat it too, but it's also important for online professors to have a connection with their students, because at the end of the day we are all students who need that social interaction.
So, I want to thank my online professor for making it a priority of hers to make it important to keep the socialization alive in the technology based class. To show us, that regardless of where you are and type of classes one is taking the basic needs of socialization are always there!
Thank You!

Digital Denizens

As I read the “Digital Denizens” I discovered that I am a Digital native – A person in this category uses technology in executing a wide variety of tasks and readily adapts to changes in the tools that s/he uses. S/he may have grown up with technology or may have adopted technology as an adult. My dad works for a company that is purely based on technology and is always bringing the newest and coolest gadgets home and would always ask me to figure out how to use them. Technology has been a crucial part of my life. I see how technology is the new wave of education, just based on my classes this past year. Out of my 6 classes, 3 are based on technology and 1 technology was heavily integrated into the course. Whereas I look at my classes freshman year, and many of the teachers didn’t even use angel. The dramatic shift in technology is apparent in schools and in early education.

While reading Tompkins Literacy for the 21st Century, an emergent literacy is defined as “children’s early reading and writing development before conventional reading and writing” At the emergent stage children are at the beginning of their literacy journey. As emergent learners children “notice environmental print, show interest in books, pretend to read, use picture cures and predictable patterns, reread familiar books with predictable patterns, identify some letter names, recognize 5-20 familiar or high frequency words. Distinguish between writing and drawing, write letters and letter like forms or scribble, develop an understanding of directionality, show interest in writing, write their first and last names, write 5-20 familiar or high- frequency words, use sentence frames to write a sentence” (118). These are the developments of an emergent learner in reading and writing.

While children are emergent learners in literacy, we are emergent learners in technology. As we all began somewhere in technology whether it was from a young age or now, we are all still learning how to use technology to our advantage and to aid in our education. Our future students, and current students are a head step above us, since they are growing up with technology as part of their daily lives whereas we need to go about to learn and sometimes relearn what we know. This wave of education is important to notice and comprehend to help better our students education, because not only is technology there to enhance education but it also gives students who have a hard time in school a leg up in education. Technology in education and special education is reaching new heights and helping more students above and beyond. 

Technology is helping general education students, special education students and also English Language Learners. In Scaffolding language Scaffolding learning by Pauline Gibbons, discusses how ELL students learn. Technology can be comparable to another language that a student is learning. As an ELL student needs the assistance of learning by doing, so does a student or adult with technology. As we learn technology, we need to think about how difficult what we are learning in our own language (somewhat) and apply that to our teaching, especially with ELL students!

Behavior

Sunday at breakfast, I was sitting with a bunch of my friends; two computer engineers, one med students and one social worker. They were talking about how it’s so simple to reward of punish students to get their work done. If they do it, then they get a sticker if they don’t do it, then they get scolded. I kept my mouth shut, there are times in these conversations where I do not say anything because as a future educator my beliefs are “not important or I don’t know what I’m talking about” not that I am studying and going into the field of special education or anything. I was shocked by the conversation, but finally, I was asked, “Brenda, what do you think?” I said, of course I’d reward a student for doing their homework, they tried didn’t they? How can you say because a student didn’t do it 100% right that they didn’t try?

Going into special education I feel as if I have a different look on most things regarding education then a med student does. I was listening to their conversation, “I got detention and got calls at home because I never turned in my homework, it was done but I never turned it in” said the Computer Engineer. “I was bored in school, so I acted out”, here are classic cries for help by students who are considered “above grade level”. What did the teacher do in these situations? Shouldn’t we as teachers notice this as a need for more work or more challenging work? Or on the opposite end, look at a student who never does their work and doesn’t engage as a cry for help? It sounds so simple, but behavior is rarely seen as a way into the student’s brain, it’s just chalked down to, “she’s a bad student”.  As I read blogs about education and read blogs about special education I have found some very educational and useful information in my everyday life, and in my schooling.  I only hope they will learn that education is not cut and dry.