EDUC-6714-UDL APPLICATION

Teaching in today's classroom seems to require constant adaptation and renewal of ideas and concepts in the classroom. To assist in this effort, I have included a PowerPoint presentation and student video example to support the trend towards using technology in the classroom to assist and aid students with 21st-Century Skills.

Example Student Interest Survey

Out of School Activities:

1. What do you like to do in your free time?

2. What do you usually do after school?

3. What are your favorite games?

4. Do you like making things? If so, what?

5. What special tools or playthings do you have at home?

6. Do you have pets? If so, what?

7. Do you collect things? If so, what? 



8. If you could have 3 wishes, what would they be?

9. Did you ever wish you were someone else? If so, who?

10. Are you afraid of some things? If so, what? 



11. About how many hours a day do you watch TV during the week?

12. What TV programs do you like? 



13. About how many hours a day do you listen to the radio during the week?

14. What type of radio programs do you like?

15. How often do you attend movies? 

18. What movies have you liked?

16. Do you play with computers? If yes, explain.

17. Do you like to read? If so, what kind of reading?

18. Do you like comic books? If so, which ones?

Additional Comments:

Reflecting on my GAME Plan

I enjoyed creating the GAME plan for my Video Broadcast Journalism class. The ideas and tips provided over the past several weeks have brought new ideas and concepts I can implement to keep my students engaged in the lessons and use the technology to enhance their learning. I found new websites that I can use for my classes that address social concerns and issues that my students will be working on. With the start of the new school year, I am fortunate to have received new computers, including iMacs, along with new high definition cameras. With the new technology, my students should be able to produce quality videos.

Having the new technology, my students will be able to create numerous instructional and informative videos that can be shared with other classes and the community. Revisions to my GAME plan will be made when necessary. The research part of the GAME plan will most likely change as I implement this lesson in the future. Many web sites change and the content of the sites change. I will have to stay on top of my own research before assigning the lesson to students.

Many of the videos that my classes will produce will be student driven; therefore, their creativity and ideas will need to be addresses. Having an open dialog with my students and collaborating with them will probably make modifications to the original GAME plan. I have already taken steps to change some habits of mine with regards to technology integration in my course. I am going to have students save all work to the external hard drives and create DVD’s that show all their work. They will keep all their work organized and at the end of the semester, they will have an opportunity to create a portfolio of all work that is burned to a DVD.

Integrating technology as well as problem-based learning, social networking, collaboration, and digital storytelling with my curriculum is already taking place. I have a class Intranet web site being designed and built so that my students can collaborate and share ideas and work during school. Outside of school, many of my students collaborate through a facebook page for class that a student created so that they can share and inform. I feel fortunate to teach what I do because it will allow me the opportunity to create many digital stories that can address cross curricular courses, create “how to” instructional guides, address concerns, and allow the students to be creative with their own technology skills.  

Update to my GAME plan, week 4, EDUC-6713

Thank you to my colleagues for providing some great feedback and links to other sites for information that can assist me in the pursuit of getting some things changed in the school district that I work for. I know that I am facing an uphill battle, however, some information shared by you has opened-up new possibilities and ideas.

In an effort to continue my request that the school district allow blogs and wikis, I plan to share some comments posted, and will leave identities anonymous. I will show the powers to be that technology surrounds us all and should be embraced and used in appropriate fashions when and where appropriate. I do not feel that I need to modify my plan at this time, but will continue to surge forward with my request.

I have learned that the district I work for appears to be going in the opposite direction with respect to using blogs and wikis as to those of my colleagues in this course. It seems to me that there are no major issues from other districts with allowing this type of communication tool in a classroom environment from other districts and therefore, should be granted for my courses.

The big question is, how to you convince the bureaurcracy of the district to make changes? It seems to me that a lot of policy is put in place from educators who have not been in the classroom for many years, thinking that the policy is the best for everyone. It is frustrating, and I am seeking help from anyone who can give advice.

Cennamo, Ross, and Ertmer, (2009), state, “Use blogs to achieve an instructional goal. Blogs can help students practice and demonstrate different styles of communication, especially through writing” (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). Having a blog for my class will not only help me, it will help my students and their parents see what they are learning and how they are applying their skills with the projects that they are working on.

Reference:

Cennamo, K., Ross, J & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom

            use: A standards-based approach. (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom ed.). Belmont, CA:

            Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

GAME Plan Week - 3 EDUC 6713 Integrating Technology Across the Content Areas

The intended learning strategy I would like to incorporate into my next student activity is the use of affective networking. Affective networking, as stated in Technology Integration for Meaningful Classroom Use by Cennamo, Ross, and Ertmer, states: “By offering choices of media and tools within the scope of your required content, you are supporting students’ affective networks” (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). A valuable resource I am going to pursue is access to a classroom blog or wiki page. Currently, my school district blocks access to such sites and I feel that having an online collaborative tool would be beneficial to student learning.

To get started on this process, I will begin with my department chair with the request and see what happens. I already have the technology in place to allow this to happen, I feel that the technology should and can be used to help the students socially interact about class related issues and topics. I will do some background research on other districts in the metro area that allow teachers to have a classroom blog or wiki and share my findings with whom ever makes the decision on these matters.

By having a classroom blog or wiki page, my students will be able to share what they have been able to accomplish, ask questions, etc. to help each other out with course work. They are already doing this through social media sites such as facebook, but I feel that a class site to discuss specific items related to an assignment or project would be appropriate and should be allowed.

I am reaching out to my fellow colleagues about this issue. Have any of you been successful with a classroom blog or wiki site? Have any of you run into issues from the local school or school district about creating one?  I plan to start this process next month when school starts back and classes begin. Any help on the issue would be greatly appreciated.

Reference:

Cennamo, K., Ross, J & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful

            Classroom use: A standards-based approach. (Laureate Education, Inc.,

            Custom ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

My GAME Plan

My GAME plan: Video Announcements

NETS-T standard 1. Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity

Teachers use their knowledge of subject matter, teaching and learning, and technology to facilitate experiences that advance student learning, creativity, and innovation in both face-to-face and virtual environments.

a.  promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness.

NETS-T standard 4. Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility.

Teachers understand local and global societal issues and responsibilities in an evolving digital culture and exhihit legal and ethical behavior in their professional practices.

c. promote and model digital etiquette and responsible social interactions related to the use of technology and information.

These are two standards that can help strengthen my confidence in my vdieo broadcast course. In order to work on the these two standards, I will develop a video production lesson plan that requires criticial thinking and self-direction from my students. After modeling how students will plan, storyboard, film and edit, I will assign the students to small groups and give them several topics to choose from. The topics will be about public service annoucemnets.

Students will promote and model appropriate public service announcements that affect their everyday lives. They will address the importance of their announcement through a video commercial. During the process, I will address with the students the importance of digital citizenship and responsibility.

I will monitor student progress on a daily basis to see how the students are progressing with the assignment. When the project is complete and the video are shown to the class, a rubric will be used for evaluation. I will also take the opportunity to have an open dialog with my students to see what worked and what can be improved on. Hopefully through the evaluations and open dialog we can determine if the overall goals of the project were met and if not, how I can change things to meet the goals.   


Reference:
International Society for Technology in Education, (2008). National education standards for teachers. (NETS-T). Retrieved on July 4, 2011 from
http://www.iste.org/Libraries/PDFs/NETS_for_Teachers_2008_EN.sflb.ashx         

Reflection - Learning Theory and Technology Tools

Reflection of my personal theory of learning and use of technology.

I mentioned early on in our course that I use nonlinguistic and cooperative learning style techniques to teach my students. Due to the new technology discovered over the past several weeks, I have expanded on my learning style to include these new technologies. I feel that I have deepened my knowledge on the use of certain technologies in the classroom by experimenting with and implementing the technology with my students. New discoveries and creativity with the technology has made my courses more interactive and fun. I feel as if a completely new window of opportunities has opened up for my courses.

Immediate adjustments that I have made to my courses are the use of VoiceThread and Blogs. I created a class blog for each of my classes so that students and parents know what we are working on and can provide feedback and input. VoiceThread is used in my web design course so that the students can interact with each other’s work and offer up constructive criticism through either voice or text. Using blogs and VoiceThread shows that I am using 21^st- Century skills and that I am keeping current with technology. I have had to adjust my teaching style a little bit to accommodate these new teaching tools, and so far, it has been well worth it.

One long-term goal I have is to help train other staff members on how to use VoiceThread and how impactful its use can be in the classroom. I will make a request to demonstrate this tool during one of our tech tool classes, which are offered once a month on Wednesdays. The teacher in charge of this is always looking for suggestions, so I believe I can get it on the calendar for next school year. Another long-term goal I have is to gain access to social media sites at school for educational purposes. As of now, many sites are blocked by the school district, and even the teachers do not have access to valuable resources such as Wikipedia and Youtube. Gaining access to these sites will be a big help.