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?