Wordle of My Blog

Take Away Message for April 14

I think what we learned from this class was very important. The first thing would be the essentials for how to write an Email properly since we use Email as the main tool to interact with professors within college and with co-workers or bosses in the work place. The the account of the email address would better be appropriate depending on difference uses. The opening part of the Email will leave the first impression on the person who is going to read our messages, the structure of the whole email, the paragraphs are supposed to be well- organized and clear to read through. The font and format should always be appropriate. Besides, the language we use in the email should be formal. We cannot ignore the closing part to make sure the email is good as a whole. I will remind myself to always have a double check on spelling and the attachments. One point that is easily to forget is the timing, for example, it is good to notice the right timing in the case we send an email to a person who is in another time zone.

I am happy to get to know another awesome website http://exchange.smarttech.com/. I was stunned to see the wonderful powerpoint works, which reminded me that sometimes It's not only about the new technology, but to use old technology in a new way. Voicethread and Prezi are also very interesting tools for both teachers and students to use in and out of classroom.

Blog 6 - Chapter 8&9

In this era of information, technology builds us a platform not only to communicate but to share as well. Chapter 8 concentrates on the various ways that both teachers and students can use computers and other technologies to communicate and share ideas and information in the classroom settings and online learning environment. 

Since this is the last blog for this class, I would like to share my own experience of using blogs and other types of technologies I learned from this class. Keeping online journals as blogs is not only just recording the reflections of what we learned from our textbook, the class and other resources, however, the key is to communicate and share with my peers so that we can learn from each other and grow better. I want to be a teacher in the future and I may teach ESL for my future career, whereas I am an English language learner myself. Thus, in an English learner's perspective, it's very helpful for me to see my classmates who are English native speakers' writing. It's a good way for me to learn how they write, for example, the vocabulary they use. Besides, I spent most of my academic life back in China, I had no access to the school settings in the States, while I was taking courses and doing observations since I came to the States months ago, I started getting to know about the whole school systems here. The huge difference between China and the U.S. in the education field was a shock for me. Thanks to reading through my peers' blogs, which for me is a pass to their world, I can  travel back to see the way they were taught and their educational background in school years by reading them talked about their own learning experiences. Most of my classmates who are already teachers shared their episodes while teaching in their classrooms, for instance, their attitude to the use of technology for teaching and learning, those ideas even gradually changed my view on technology.

In terms of the multimedia technologies in today's classrooms, those things in Chapter 9 really amazed me. According to the observations I did in the schools, I was stunned by the different kinds of technologies being used. The most impressive one was the use of SmartBoard, it can be widely used in content areas, it's easy to support teachers to teach with an easy tap, which students' attention can be attracted by the visual resources. For the students, they learn how to write on the board, pull up images, draw a line connecting the critical parts, etc. I have to say that SmartBoard is actually a very interactive tools in the classroom.  The introduction of the photo taking and movie making by students also provided teachers with different instructions to promote students' collaborative learning appropriately.

Questions:

1. It's undeniable that multimedia provides students a relaxing and interactive learning environment, however,  how can we assist them to take advantage of the skills they learned from the virtual world to reality?

2. How can teachers lead the parents to give our students useful support to the appropriate use of  technology out of the classroom?

Take Away Message for April 7

I saw students' portfolios in almost every classrooms I observed in and I heard portfolio frequently being mentioned in other courses.  I'm glad to get to know more about portfolio in today's class. Thanks for Rebecca who pointed out the importance of being "professional" in our portfolio. I used to think that portfolio was like a bunch of stuffs one have done in a certain field. However, there are more than it could be. It's meaningful when it's more like a self-reflection process. Articulate goals can also be presented to help you set goals for the future. The examples of the previous students' work help me to have a more complete overview on the digital portfolio. It's meaning for me to reflect, select and to have a review and a preview as well to build up my own portfolio.

Take Away Message for March 31

In today's class, we spent most of time on discussing about our group video project. Once I heard about this assignment, honestly, I felt anxious more than excited. However, after the brainstorming and our group discussion, I think we have some very good ideas on different topics: sports (rules of some popular sports), occupation (description of different kinds of jobs), obesity (introduce the indexes of obesity, What kind of diet can cause obesity? How can we avoid obesity? ) Thanks for our classmates' comments and suggestions in regard to our topic. I think we will have more discussions on our topic and choose one that is more applicable and manageable as soon as possible.

Blog 5 - Chapter 7

Most of things I learned from this course was like a whole new world for me since I never experienced in the classroom where plenty of technologies had been used. I felt great to learn more about different types of  technologies and how they could be applied in the field of education and used for students in and out of the classroom. Chapter 7 provides us abundant information and resources of educational software and web tools and illustrates how can educational software promotes problem solving and inquiry learning, meaning that we should be clear that students are not supposed to merely know how fascinating technology is but to reinforce their ability of critical thinking, problem solving and inquiry learning.

Seems like we are all familiar with Word or Excel, but the example of the Excel spreadsheet program reminded me that there are more functions for us to explore even in those standard composing and calculating programs which are daily used in our computers. Besides building, inventing and creating software, I found visual thinking and concept mapping software is more effective that can visually benefit students in different levels. Visual thinking and brainstorming software can promotes students  thinking and instrumental learning.

Undoubtedly, students will find so much fun when learning engaged with computer games and some  people believe that video games may develop the conditions for deep learning. However, I still doubted that if video games can promote learning and problem solving or not. At last class, we watched a video of Minecraft applied within a classroom, I was interesting to hear that during the "live phone interview" with a kid who is obsessed with this game. But I felt a little shocked that he said the point of the game was to kill. The fact was that few things could really benefit students with thinking or learning. So I think we as teachers should seriously consider how to teach our students  learn with games.

At the end of this Chapter, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are shown to be effective in improving student learning. The best thing I would say about ITS is the collaborative learning models, which provides practices so that students can cooperatively work in groups and learn together.

Questions:

1. Are games supposed to be frequently used in and out of classrooms? If so, how can we control their time on those games? 

2. Can you list some games that you use in your classroom which you find them appropriate and effective?

Take Away Message for March 24

Plentiful websites have been shared today's class!

Both visual thesaurus and lexipedia present great visual technology can be used in exploring vocabulary. Personally, I prefer vocabulary.com which I think is an amazing website for students who need to expand their vocabulary. However, I would say that this website is better for higher level learners instead of students in the beginning level. Jason shared a website quizlet, which I believe is a very useful resources for teachers when planning their lessons. Also for students who are preparing for certain tests such as SAT, GRE, etc., this website provides quizes for various tests in different content areas. plimoth.org is another good website for both teachers and students to explore.

 

We then shared our experience discovering Google Maps, I do believe students are going to love it if we as teachers well-planned to help them use in the classroom. Speaking of Minecraft.net, I don't think it should be use in schools.

Blog 4 - Chapter 4&6

Before talking about how can technology integration and educational change help teachers in instruction, we need more awareness of the concept called Digital Citizenship (For more information, please click here). I like the explanation of digital citizenship that it is a way to prepare students who are now technology users for a society full of technology. Simply speaking, both teachers and students should gain more knowledge in how to appropriately use technology and be a good citizen in digital society.

Thanks to the professor of the Math class, we attended the Long Island Mathematics Conference last Friday. At the conference, several useful math websites had been shared. One of the best websites would be Illustrative Mathematics (Click Here). In this website, standards from K-12 has been clearly presented and relative tasks can be easily found by searching by Grade or Category, which I believe is a very helpful for math teachers. During the observation in a classroom where the general math teacher and a special ed teacher were co-teaching, the math teacher shared a website he frequently used when planning. The website is  called JMAP (Click Here), which offers teachers in New York plentiful free resources.  

Speaking of current technology on iPad, I tried some of the Top 50 free Education Apps our professor gave us. I think these two Apps- Preschool Memory Match and Learn and ABC Alphabet Phonics are great Apps for kids at their beginning level in exploring technology. They can literally learning for fun by "playing" with iPad. There are some other Apps I'd love to share which I learned from the Mathematics Conference. The session's called "The perfect Apps". MyScript Calculator is a tool that can turn our handwritten math equations into a functional calculator. It's one of the Apps I would say students are going to love it, they can learn to be independent and they can check everything on their own through this App. 

The fact is technology such as iPad, Smart Board are now widely applied in the real classroom. However, the problem is lack of teacher's appropriate support. Even though it is said at the beginning of Chapter 4 that even teachers with relatively little technological skill can provide useful instruction, I still think we as teachers should to the largest extent prepare ourselves to be more professional in order to use technology effectively to create positive change in schools.

Questions:

1. To what extent should the teacher use technology in a period of class?

2. In terms of the use of educational websites, I think we'd better ask students to write a short reflection on their experience of those websites so that we as teachers can know more about their interests and also make sure the students are in the right track. What do you think?

Take Away Message for March 17

Another informative class today!

It's always exciting to explore something new. I totally agree with the viewpoint that instead of thinking about what are lacking, we literally need to think about what we are having, what we can do. Technology does makes smart people smarter, however, for me it's more like a key for every one of us to open a door to a new world. As teachers, our job is to help students to become smarter with technology. It's not only about technology but is more about participation of both students and teachers in the digital age. I'm glad we discussed about what schooling prepare our students, it's still an ongoing question to think about out of class!

Take Away Message for March 10

In today's class, we spent a lot of time discussing the pros and cons of Wikipedia. Before the discussion, I doubted if Wikipedia would be a reliable website for students since it could be edited by people "randomly". But I would use Wikipedia for the students as a starting point to research some basic background knowledge of what they concern, and encourage them to search more resources to prove the information they find on Wikipedia is correct or not. However, after our discussion, my thought have been changed. It's interesting to hear about the community of Wikipedia, their vision or their goals that bound them together as a team to build up this free platform to share knowledge to the mass. I really appreciate their work on building this encyclopedia. Additionally, the multi-language versions which Les mentioned is another advantage of Wikipedia especially when we have ELL students who speak different languages other than English, they can get assistance if needed.

Many thanks to our professor for giving us the 100 education apps, can't wait to explore them!!

Blog 3- Chapter 5

In terms of the learning theories we learned, unlike behaviorism which particularly focuses on the performance while ignoring the thinking process or information processing which emphasizes on mental organization and a change of knowledge in mind, David Jonassen addressed in the article that constructivist conceptions of learning assume that knowledge is individually constructed and socially co-constructed by learners based on their interactions in the world. The goal of the learner is to solve certain problem, what's more important, it's the problem that drives the learning. Then developing a CLE that stands for Constructivist Learning Environments plays a key role in the whole process, especially in providing interesting, appealing and engaging problems to solve, case studies, information resources based on the problems. In addition, CLEs can provide conversations and collaboration tools for learners to work together and share the same goal of solving certain problem. In order to better support our students to learn in CLEs, modeling, coaching and scaffolding are needed when implementing the activities.

Thanks to Internet which is described as a worldwide library, our students and we ourselves get accustomed to searching the information by, for example, simply "googling" it. However, since the there's too much information exposed on the Internet, one of the learning goals is the information literacy, which means for both students and teachers, we'd better not only learn how to access information, but assess information carefully by evaluating the useful and high-quality information among the boundless resources as well. In Chapter 5, it's interesting to find out that the New York Times reports of reading shows that both children and adolescents spend more time every day reading online than reading books. It seems like a fact that we have to have the competencies of an array of new technology-based literacies and the capability to search and evaluate information from online resources.

By reading through this Chapter, I learned the useful resources I've never used before, such as Flickr and LibriVox. Besides, I explored varieties of Search Sites designed for students  which I've never heard of. Speaking of plagiarism, I believe that students should be very clear that plagiarism are not allowed not only for their assignments but even out of school.

It's true that Internet provides us a huge platform to easily get information, multiple resources and to interact with people around the world. As teachers, it's our job to support students with effective tools and teach them to screen out the useful information they really need by ensuring safe online experiences for students.

Questions:

1. Since we can do almost everything online, does it mean reading books and hand writing not important anymore?

2. How can we prevent the students from relying on websites like Wikipedia too much?

Take Away Message for Feb. 24

In today's class, we talked about a lot of information. We've discussed about if we really need to teach or learn differently or not. Then a point of view was brought out that what has been changed was the outside world, the methods we teach whereas our inside mind, our thinking process retains the same. Our professor also stressed three main learning theories: Behaviorism, Information Processing and Constructism. Either strengthes or weaknesses of each theories. What I would like to point out is those theories frequently shew up in other courses, but I found it easy to mix up. But the short video clips and active examples really helped me to understand. Great class! Now, time to create my own video!

WebQuest Topic

WebQuest Topic: Presidents Day
Subject: Social Studies
Grade Level: 3rd Grade

My WebQuest is geared towards 3rd grade students in which they are time travelers, going back in time using resources on the Internet to discover facts about President George Washington and President Abraham Lincoln and explore the national history.

Common Core Standards:

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.3 Describe characters in a story (e.g., their traits, motivations, or feelings) and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of events
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.7 Explain how specific aspects of a text’s illustrations contribute to what is conveyed by the words in a story (e.g., create mood, emphasize aspects of a character or setting)
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.9 Compare and contrast the themes, settings, and plots of stories written by the same author about the same or similar characters (e.g., in books from a series)
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.6 With guidance and support from adults, use technology to produce and publish writing (using keyboarding skills) as well as to interact and collaborate with others.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.8 Recall information from experiences or gather information from print and digital sources; take brief notes on sources and sort evidence into provided categories.

Blog 2- Chapter 2&3

On the first page of Chapter 2,  I finally find the most appropriate description(as far as I have seen) of the tendency or we can say transition in education during the past few decades. Here Mark Yim addresses the distinction of those two push model and pull model. Have a review of Prensky's article  we've discussed on the topic for online discussion, the traditional push model is based on what our generation as "digital immigrants" has been taught the way of being imparted by the teachers. Whereas the pull model may better fit our students who are considered as "digital natives", they grew up in the context full of technologies, thus, they think and process information in a different way. As teachers, I think it’s our job to appropriately use technologies as tools to teach in the classroom, and we can help our students to find the most efficient way to learn.

Good teachers can take good advantage of information to promote visual learning. I like the examples such as using technologies in content areas presented in Chapter2. Some websites like Pinterest and Youtube also provide large amount of primary visual sources for teaching and learning. What's more, technology can be used to create activities so that students can to the large extent get involved either individually or in groups in their learning process.  

Now the question is how can we as teachers to develop lessons efficiently with technology. At the beginning of Chapter 3, an interesting vignette of a teacher designing lessons as prepares dinner reminds me that we can find some inspirations at any place and any time in our real life.  Reading through the Chapter, I was attracted by "visual thinking". I had no idea what does it mean, then I googled it. It came out as "visual thinking strategy", which is designed to build students' background knowledge and develop thinking skills that use detail to enhance understanding through asking a simple question: "What's going on in this picture?". As we can see, technology can provide visual resources such as pictures when we plan what to teach and when we apply strategies in the classroom. As for me, I have less experience of teaching. Therefore, personally speaking, I need lesson plans as an outline when I am still a "beginner".

Question1: Is it right for schools to maximize the impact of technology? 

Question2: How can we help our students to control their amount of time to be exposed to "technology"?

Take away message for Feb.10

A lot of information has been discussed in tonight's class.

The first thing that grabbed my attention was the brain-storming about "technologies" around us in real life and it made me reconsider how technologies made our life and in terms of what we focused on- teaching and learning much more convenient and efficient.

I was highly impressed by variety of APPs we are familiar with like Twitter and Instagram can be used in education. Moreover, those amazing apps which were totally new to me such as EDUCREATIONS, Flipped Classroom can be used as imagery instructions in our real classrooms. The video which shew us how Lisa Highfill applied technologies in her classroom really presented us how well technologies can work out and inspired us to dig out our creativity in teaching with technologies.

Chapter1- Blog1

The short passage of three future teachers' discussion regarding technology at the beginning of the first Chapter reminds me how's technology being widely used in my daily life. I have to confess that the first thing I look for every morning when I wake up is my cell phone. Like other peers, I spend hours a day with a variety of media, such as listening to the radio in the morning, listening to ipod while walking, searching for information on the Internet through my laptop on a daily basis. Thanks to the technology today, I can have a video chat with my parents back in China through facetime or other apps whenever I want. I can't imagine how dull my life would be without those technologies. Right now, I'm 100% sure that multiple technologies not only play influential roles in our life but are essential tools for teaching in the classroom as well.

As a future teacher, I feel kind of uncertain as Ava does when she explains that technology is changing so rapidly and concerns that nowadays students might appear to know more than the teachers do. Our students- today's youngsters who are mentioned as Generation M have grown up using computers, the Internet, and other media. Technology is a great force to those kids therefore we are supposed to make good use of it and make learning more interesting to them. Compared to the noncomputer-based learning experiences when I was at elementary school and secondary school in China, I appreciate the computer-based ICTs which can motivate students to engage and promote interaction and collaboration among teachers and students.

In terms of my teaching philosophy, I prefer to build up a student- centered environment. As teachers, it's our job to help students how to efficiently use technology in schools, for instance, like how to use technology to get information to do research and analysis, etc. Our duty is to assist students to master essential skills through exploration and discovery to achieve their academic success.

Question1:
How can we do to help those students who do not have the access to multiple technologies?

Question2:
How can we teach students to efficiently use technology to benefit their academic achievement?

My First Blog

It's very exciting to have my first blog here! I'm not pretty good at technology, but I'm looking forward to learning a lot in this class!