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"?