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Blog Assignment #9

At the end of Every year Mr.McClung writes a blog post about challenges and accomplishments he has faced while teaching. My blog assignment will cover his first year of teaching blog post and his most recent complete year of teaching blog post. In the school year 2009-2010, Mr.McClung shared his thoughts on what it was like his first year of teaching. Going into the year he did not quite know what to expect, so the best advice he could tell himself was to "stay positive". Mr. McClung feels that in that first year of teaching he has grown and matured both as a person and as a teacher. At The Teacher's Desk Is the first blog post that he made, in relation to his teaching experience. In this blog he shares some of his thoughts on how to become a more effective teacher. He talks about how to read the crowd (your students), how to be flexible, how to communicate, how to listen to your students, and how to be reasonable. All of which are areas in which many teachers differ.During his first year Mr.McClung realized that his way of thinking, needed much improvement. He use to feel like he worried so much about impressing his supervisor that he didn't do as good a job in teaching the lesson plans in ways that were most effective for his students. He has learned that you must be flexible because the lesson you plan is almost always different from the one you teach. He learned to stop always trying to control things. Mr.McClung advises teachers to communicate with each other and share what works for them and what does not work for them with other teachers, so that they are more productive in their own class.Realizing that not every student will meet the goals/standards that you set for them, does not make you nor them a failure. Our job as the teacher is to keep encouraging them to do better.

Mr.McClung's Blog on What I've Learned This Year was for the school year of 2011-2012(his 4th year of teaching). In this Blog Mr.McClung reflects on the previous three years blogs and has come to the conclusion that he did not learn as much as he thought he had this year. This fourth year he has come to care more about his reputation with his peers as oppose to previous years, where he cared what his students thought of him. It took Mr.McClung halfof the school year to stop worrying about what the other teachers thought of him, and instead he decided to stick to one rule and that rule was that the kids have fun, while at the same time learning.
Facing his third year teaching the same material Mr.McClung found himself becoming too routine and predictable and slowly started feeling his creativity diminishing. Lucky for Mr.McClung he had the opportunity to teach a new subject this up coming year. With this new subject well on its way, he has new found inspiration when creating the lesson plans for his new subject. The most valuable lesson he learned this school year was that, when you get to comfortable and too in the routine of things, that's when teachers become lazy and less creative.

What I took away from reading both of Mr.McClung's blogs is that teachers are what motivates the students, having fun lesson plans are a great way to engage students into learning while at the same time having fun, and also I learned that as a teacher routine equals lazy.I do not want to become a routine teacher.

PLN Progress Report

Dear Reader,

I am still brainstorming Ideas for my PLN Project. A few ideas has come to mind but while I am still in the weeding out phase of my project,I can guarantee that it will be a great project. I will come back and edit this post when I have narrowed my topics down to just two.

Blog Assignment #8

In watching Richard Millers' video This Is How We Dream Part 1 and 2 Mr. Miller talks about his beliefs, in how much technology has changed over the years. He talks about how he was able to do a whole research paper without having to step foot in a library. I agree with the fact that he believes that we are living in the greatest times of communication as we know it. We have crossed many stepping stones and have gone above and beyond what scholars could have imaged decades ago. Being able to communicate instantly and globally has taken communication to all sorts of unimaginable heights.
I,like Mr.Miller grew up in a house filled with books but unlike Mr. Miller I never really sought out a career dealing specifically with books. Mr. Miller spoke of two different changes in technology, which were incremental changes and fundamental changes. Incremental changes may include colaboration using technology from the web such as print documents, and or visual images on the web, which lives on through the web even after you take it out from your document, the document is now freely available to everyone who searches for it.
My response to watching these two videos is not only amazement, but also fear. It is amazing how much information you can share with people in different countries, with just the click of a mouse. What is fearful to me is that people would loose the enthusiasm to go out and find things on their own. People would become lazy and not ever try to find information for themselves but instead rely on the internet for answers.
The one thing that I know is that change is inevitable, so I would prefer to join this technological movement rather than to get left behind. I am very much interested in learning all that I can to improve education and teaching in the classroom.

In Carly Pughs' Blog post 12 Carly speaks of how she had gotten behind on some assignments and since she was seemingly bored decided to catch up on her work and even go above and beyond what was asked of her. Carly took it upon herself to think outside of the box and like Mr.Miller she decided to use Incremental changes in technology to create something fundamental. By making a playlist of teacher videos, Carly was able to put all the videos she needed together and create a great look into what kind of teacher she would hope to become, all without having to step foot outside of her house.

After watching the two assigned videos on EDM310 Is Different page, I found that the type of creativity that I would most enjoy doing or enjoy being a part of creating would be to do a video on time management and organization. I would maybe, be in an hoarding type of setting, which would display how unorganized and messy things can get, if we never learned to manage time or organizational skills. Learn to Change,Change to Learn was a very interesting video. It brought up a lot of facts that kids of this technological era are currently in and going through. With this new technology students will be able to learn more while at the same time enjoying the tools that are allowing them to do so. It is foolish to apply standardized testing to make things better, when in fact, society today does not live by this approach. There is no more sensibility in standardized testing. We should be moving away from standardized test which causes students to memorize facts that they will never use outside of the classroom. Instead we should be preparing students for what is beyond the classroom, teach them how to go out and find and use the information that find, in an everyday type of setting. This video was very well put together and I agreed with everyone in the video.

For our Scavenger Hunt, three of the five tools listed were: Community tools, Presentation tools, Mobile tools, related links and video tools. Under Community tools, I found Classroom 2.0 which is a network for teachers to share and collaborate.This sight is perfect for new teachers, and it serves as a support group as well as an informative website to gather useful tips for teaching. The tool that was most likely used for this project was the presentation tool(prezi). The pricing for teachers using Prezi, I think is unbelievable. Teachers are able to do so much, for so little. They have the option to be billed monthly on either package deal for just enjoyment purposes which is priced at $4.92 a month or $59.00 a month, or they could enjoy the Pro package that has wonderful features such as using your own logo, premium support and using prezi on your own desktop for either $13.25 a week or $159 a month. Either package you choose using prezi period, is a great way to add some creativity to your teaching skills in your classroom. My comic that I created looks like this:

The video tool that I would most likely use in the future would be ANIMOTO, because its features are more of my liking. I love making slideshows, and just grouping pictures together in a organizational format. Animoto also is able to include music in the slideshow, which is something I don't yet know how to do, but am willing to learn how to. I believe I would be able to use this tool in my classroom, in that I could have my students draw there own comic books, and make caption bubbles for their comics, and we could put them together using this slideshow, and do voice overs for the students visual story books that they have created.
Polleverywhere.com Is the tool that I used to create this poll which asks the question "Do you believe in love at first sight?"

C4T#2

Mrs.Millers' blog post titled The HSC Arrives, talks about how fast a students senior year moves for them, and raises the question how prepared are they to begin their college years? Mrs. Miller brings up the fact that 30% of freshmen college students will either drop out or change their college courses to another degree all together. Mrs.Miller knows that their are many factors that goes into deciding on whether to go to college or not, such as maybe their families aren't supportive, they may not have enough money to go to college, or they may have to work and go to school, and just choose work over school because they need the money now. And after reading her wonderful post, the comment I left was, "This post brought back so many memories from my senior year in high school. All of the note taking, and essays, and tests can get to be a bit overwhelming, and calling it a train ride, is the nice way of putting it.The questions you have raised are questions that I often find myself asking even now, and I am in my Junior year at the Univ. of South Ala. I think there should be a class that seniors take in high school, that will better prepare them for their college years. I know I wish I would have someone to tell me the things I had to figure out on my own. This was a very good read!"

Adobe Education Leaders Summit is the title of Mrs.Millers Blog Post. This post is a summary of Mrs.Millers thoughts on the Adobe Summit that she attended for the past three days. Mrs. Miller has gathered tons of new information, networked with new people, and also shared a bit of the information that she knows with fellow co-workers. At the Summit Mrs.Miller had the opportunity to see new software that has not yet been released, which gave her plenty of time to plan how she could use the software in her curriculum. While there Mrs. Miller had a chance to meet some very dedicated teachers who taught in remote rural schools to at risk students, which inspired her to keep doing what she is doing in her classroom because it does make a difference. Mrs. Miller believes that it doesn't matter what the tool is that you teach students with, but rather does the tool aid the learning. At the end of the summit Mrs. Miller stated that we need these four C's to have better schools which produce better students: 1)Creativity 2)Connections 3)Collaborate 4)Communication. With these four C's schools are destined for success. Mrs. Miller now feels as if she has the perfect tools to help her grow as a teacher, and to help her better teach her students.

Blog Post #7

The Networked Student
I think that network students need a teacher because who else would be better able to help guide the students through their learning process. Teachers will be able to help them learn the difference between useless un-information sentences, and information that is most important and relevant. Having a teacher there to answer questions and give resources to backup the information that she shares with them will also be beneficial to the students. Teacher are still needed because students will need help organizing materials into categories, and tracks as to not get behind on certain topics or skip other topics all together. This video gave interesting details as to what a network student is. There is only one negative that I see with this and that is, that If students post what they have learned like the guy in this video said he did. Then I am afraid that it will make some students lazy. I mean they might think well all I have to do is go and check out what someone else posted and copy and paste it as my own, and then that student would never have found out or researched on their own. Making new connections and contacts is a great way to get even more information then the information that you yourself find or even important information that you may have missed. Although I don't believe I am prepared to be a Network Student's teacher as of yet, I will however do all I can to become one.

7th Graders Personal Learning Environment(PLE)
The distinction, as I understand it, is that the PLN focuses on sources used to learn or look up information. PLE Is a self gratifying and helps me become more knowledgeable of the subject matters that I cover. I am much more happier that I am learning about subjects and topics the way that I want to, by using sources that I like and not Sources that I have been told I have to use. (blogs, wikis, webpages, forums, broadcasts etc…). My PLE focuses on the learning that I am doing over the length of my learning journey both in and out of school.

C4T Assignment

Henrietta Miller was the teacher that I was assigned to. In her post titled ACEC2010 to ACEC2012 (Australian Computers Education Conference) Mrs. Miller talks about how she heard of this conference via Twitter, and she then talked to her fellow co-workers and principal about raising money for her to go to the conference. While attending the conference Mrs. Miller had the opportunity to hear from great Australian educators such as Adrian Bruce and Steve Collis. What Mrs.Miller brought back with her from attending the conference was inspirational, Inspiration to be a better teacher then the year before. She wanted to continue growing as a teacher and finding new and improved ways of teaching. While at dinner one night with fellow educators and the conference, Mrs. Miller discussed using PLN and other technologies in her class to improve her students creativity in learning. Mrs.Miller was asked by one of the speakers at the conference to get up on stage and share the many things that she has learned with fellow educators and she accepted. Mrs. Miller was nervous at first and then realized that there were so many teachers new to such technologies just like her, and she thought if they could do it, so could she.

This week while returning to Mrs. Millers' blog "Classroom Chronicles" The latest post on her page was titled Reflections from ACEC2012.Mrs.Miller talks about the things that she will walk away from the conference. Mrs.Miller learned that the Alice Program was created with girls in mind. Alice purpose was to inspire girls to learn more about programming. According to Mrs.Miller the Alice program is challenging and well worth exploring, and I for one, plan to look more into the Alice program for myself. Students of today are learning in more efficient ways then those of earlier generations. Being able to communicate and share your ideas and stories with people from around the world is a very powerful tool in education. Global communication allows students to be more sociable without even leaving the classroom.

Project #8 Podcast

Project 9b Time Toast

Blog Assignment #6

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
When Randy spoke of "The Last Lecture", I was immediately drawn in to listen to more about this video. What really grasped my attention in the beginning of this video was when Randy said, "If you had one lecture to give,what would it be?".This mainly caught my ear because we as people think that we're going to live forever. I know that I rarely think about "the last" anything, other then the last piece of food,So to go in front of a crowd and tell a room full of strangers about his Illness was very brave of him.

Randy also said something that I live by which was,"We can not change the cards that we are dealt,just how we play the hand". This is so true, we do not have to accept things as they are because society or someone says it has to be a certain way. People have the power to do anything they desire to do, and the key to that power is knowledge.

Working with real people and in an actual environment is the best way to learn and see what works and what doesn't. Just because we do what is expected of us does not mean we have to stop there. We can set the bar higher and higher, reaching new goals and having new objective.If we go into things with one goal that is all we will accomplish. What Randy is simply saying is keep setting the bar higher and not to settle for good enough.
Randy's view on the subject of education is that it should be hands on. He liked using "EDUTAINMENT" (video technology)as he called it, to teach people new things. I believe also in Hands on learning, just as Randy does. Books can only teach you so much. It is much better to get some real life experiences rather than to read it in a book. Randy said, "The best gift an Educator can give is to get someone to be self-reflective". I 100% agree with him on this statement, because how else can one grow without learning from their past? Sometimes you have to look back to move forward.

"The best way to teach someone something, is to have them think they are learning something else." This quote is one that I will share with my fellow teachers, just as a means of motivating them to come up with creative ways of teaching a particular subject. Being able to have a scale that shows how much you've grown in a particular subject, over the course of a class, is a great way to motivate students to do better. Randy has taught and proven to the world that, It is possible to learn something hard, while at the same time having fun doing it. In short it takes dreaming to become successful.