Blog Post #13

Dr. Strange this is by far my favorite assignment! I chose Option 1 because, I am a Secondary Education and History major and planning on getting my Masters in Geography. I was in International Studies in high school for four years and loved it we had to be very familiar with our countries. I had never heard of WolframAlpha or google/squared. When I looked up to see the what percentage the United States population is in China's population I was kind of frightened, we are 22.8% of China's population. So just to see I reversed it. To make China's population we would have to increase 439%. Wow! That is scary when you think of everything that can happen. I am addicted to WolframAlpha now. I then looked up the United States population compared to India. We are 25.4% of India's population. Which is still very scary. In high school I did a paper on the World Water Crisis. In my research for that paper I learned that New Delhi, India is predicted to be completely out of groundwater by 2017. Then what? This is why history is so important to me. I feel that if we do not know where we have been we won't know where we are going! This information totally reiterated everything we learned from the video Did you Know? We have to do something or else I feel we are doomed. We don't need to catch up with their populations but we do need to be more competition than what we are. If not they will have our jobs, our schools will be taught what they are taught, our businesses ran by them and last by not least our money going to them. I will without a doubt be using WolframAlpha in my classroom. I think it is a great tool. I feel my students will be able to look up the country we are currently studying and be able to relate to it more and get a better understanding of what we are talking about. Thank you so much for introducing this to us.

SMARTBoard Project Part 2

Blog Post #12

The assignment that I have chosen to create is very simple. I think that it is one that we should have done in the very beginning of class. As we have all learned in EDM310 a lot of assignments have to be completed on a Mac. There is just no way around it. For many PC users like myself, those days were like learning Chinese. I have found two similar videos on how to use a Mac. Both of these videos just start with the basics. First the video PC to Mac: The Basics shows the difference between a PC and a Mac. The video starts with the Finder application and compares it to the Start menu on a PC. This video then compares the Dock on a Mac to the Windows task bar, showing a comparison each time helps out because you then have something to relate to. The next video I have is How to use a Mac- Guided Tour this video starts out with explaining all of the applications on the Dock. After the video goes through the applications and gives a quick guide to the Finder app it talks about connecting printers, cameras and more. Once you know the basics of a Mac it makes it much easier to operate things such as iMovie. Everything starts with the basics. I think a good assignment would be to watch these videos or others like it maybe something a little more in depth and then demonstrate something that you have learned on the Mac. This will do a few things; one, show that the student watched the videos, two, show they learned something and three, for most of the class they would have to go in to the lab. 

C4K Part 1 Mrs. Yollis' Blog

I believe it is safe to say that Mrs. Yollis' Blog is the best blog that I have ever seen! I loved it! She is doing so much with her students! I saw in reading her blog that they do post for everything. Mrs. Yollis finds a way to fit technology in to every subject and I admire that. Not every teacher can do that. I can not believe how many people her blog has tracked and from so many countries! That is amazing!!! She really is an amazing teacher and I know her students will remember her forever! Third grade is very impressionable on a student. I remember third grade very well and that I had a great teacher! My sister teaches third grade in Mississippi and was awarded teacher of the year I believe it was two years ago. She loves third grade and has so much fun with her students but she does not have a blog anything like Mrs. Yollis'. I am actually going to pass her blog to my sister to see if she can get any ideas. I love the videos and how much the students get involved. I am so thankful that we are learning all of this now so we can use it in the future.

Progress Report on Final Group Project

My group which members other than myself are Alyssa Jackson, Morgan Sims and Katie Wilhelm have decided to do a "How To" video on an assignment using all of our outside resources we have learned in EDM310 combined into one project. We are using everything from the SMART Board to Google Documents. We made a Google Document to share our ideas when we are not meeting. We do not have our topic yet but are meeting on Tuesday to decide which topic we will be using.

Skype Interview

Blog Post #11

First Graders in Ms. Cassidy's Class and
Skype Interview with Ms. Cassidy

Thank you so much for this video I thought it was great! All the students knew so much about technology. They talked about their blogs, wikis, Skype and more. You can see they are all doing a wonderful job learning everything there is to know about technology. I admire Ms. Cassidy in all that she is doing with her students. I saw that the students were using the SMART Board, this is something that I want to do with my classroom. Even though I am planning on teaching in the Middle to High School level most students like to "mess" with the board, computer, or overhead projector. I think that using a SMART Board is a great way to get students involved in what they are learning. When I was in high school my Forensic Science class used Skype (or something like it, I am not to sure) to talk to other Forensic classes. Our class was the only one in the county at the time, so we talked with other classes in the state to see what they were doing and sometimes to help us solve our cases we were working on. I think that she is doing a great job preparing them for the future in school, as well as in their lives. She seems to have approached every angle of technology she can for their young age and has done amazing. They probably know more about technology and computers than most adults. I feel safe trusting them with our future for society. In her Skype interview with Dr. Strange I like how she talked about the way she addresses the fact of keeping the children's identities hidden. That is a very clever way to still be able to post their work online by not matching pictures up with names and only using the student's first name. Because first graders do not understand with their names and pictures can not be online, at that age they want it to be. They want the credit. I thought both videos were great. I am going to try to use her interview as an example for my Skype interview.

C4K Summary October

The first student I had this month was Tiffany. She did not have any actual blog post just pictures and some animation. She is young and had put a lot in to her blog that she could. I told her that I liked her page and its many colors and all of her pictures. Dr. Strange wrote in our assignment to tell them something about the United States. I thought about this and thought that for her age I would tell her about Disney World. I told her how amazing it was and if she got the chance to come to the United States that it is a must.
The next week I had two students to comment on, the first student I had was Tabbey. I got her name from the name generator they had on their classroom blog. Tabbey had recorded a project of her and a fellow student Peyton. In their project they set a timer on an iPhone to see how long it took to chew up bubble gum. It was very cute. I told her that next time they should try to have someone video them so they did not have to pass the video back and forth. Her blog was put together very well.
In that same week I was assigned Raymond from the same science class. Raymond seemed to LOVE science. He had graphs, and pictures galore. He is a 12 year old boy and has a very strong love for animals. He talked about animals in his blog and had a ton of pictures of them. I really like Raymond's blog it was very colorful and he did an amazing job.

The following week I and a few others had Ty, Hailee, Payton, and Cole. Wow they were some cool kids! They had an assignment to create their own animal after reading about Flat Stanley. I had a Flat Stanley project on year. It was so much fun. We got to take our Flat Stanley everywhere and take pictures. Oh how the imagination is so grand! Ty created a Choth, a Choth is a mixture between a Cheetah and a Sloth. He described his Choth as having a body of a Cheetah and legs of a Sloth. Hailee created a Girafhant. Yep a Giraffe and an Elephant. She described her Girafhant having the legs of a giraffe and the body of an elephant, but with the neck of a giraffe as well. Payton created a more house friendly pet, a Catdake. Which is a mixture of a cat and dog. She said it had the body of a cat and the head of a dog. Lastly Cole created a Chipliz. A Chipliz is a combination of a Chimp and a Lizard. He said his animal has the body of a lizard with the legs of a chimp. I wonder if I could have come up with one of these animals at their age. It was so much fun to try to picture these animals in my head. You can without a doubt see that these were the minds of children a few reasons were because when they had to described what their animal did during the day the most common things among them were that all the animals LOVED ice cream! Every child talked about ice cream. They also talked about how their animals jumped on the trampoline with them and took naps. This was a very creative project and I enjoyed it.
In the last week I had a history class in Portland, Oregon. I can admit that I was a little confused on which post we were to comment on so I picked one from their class blog. Their class blog was amazing! They are high school students and seemed to have been working with Blogger for a while. The post I chose to comment on was the introduction to Learning about the Reformation. This post was written by Lucy, she opened an introduction perfectly. She talked about how going in to the subject she could recall vague memories of what they were about to be learning she said " I was almost clueless. At that point, I had a few vague memories of this topic from history books in years past, involving a man nailing a paper to the door of a church." She then went on to talk about how much they were learning, what they were expecting and so on. The students blog was very thought out and neat they had all the authors (students) links to each post and many pictures to guide you through that period of history.