ILP #2 "Design": Edmodo

For my second ILP I created an Edmodo classroom. Since I want to teach high school English, I created an online classroom for a fictitious 11th grade English class. Some of the assignments I posted were a vocabulary quiz, grammar practice worksheet, and essay prompt. I also included links to online resources such as a video recap of Macbeth and a guide on MLA formatting for essays.

I particularly liked how easy  it was to create quizzes on Edmodo and how clean the format looks. I think that I will use Edmodo for my classroom in the future.

My group join code is: ucwq3a

Pizza Survey

Please take my survey!

Post #10

A paragraph about how you think you will use Data Collection tools as a teacher. Be specific about your subject matter area and the grade level. · A paragraph on topics you found most interesting from reviewing your classmates’ blogs. · A paragraph on what technology-related skill you would most like to learn next, and why. · A paragraph on ways in which you might achieve your future educational technology-related goals

Data Collection Tools

I think that data collection tools can be useful for any subject or grade level because surveys let you as the educator know what your students think about the way that you teach. They can be a good way to get feedback on your lessons and help you plan for the future. Surveys can also be a fun way to determine how well your students understand a topic or just gather their opinion on an issue. I think that as a high school English teacher I could definitely use surveys to ask my students if they feel that they understand the chapter of a book we just read. 

Blogs

The thing I found the most interesting about reading everyone else's blogs was seeing how they plan to use technology for their specific age group and subject. There was a diverse mix of majors in our class, and I enjoyed hearing about the ways that my peers going into completely different subjects would use the same technology that I talked about in my blog. 

New Skills

 I think that I would like to learn more about HTML next. Learning a little more about basic coding would be useful for making web pages and blog posts look cool on almost any website. There are lots of websites with courses on the subject, such as Codecademy.

Tech Goals

I think that my biggest challenge with continuing to learn about education technology will be keeping up with all the new things that are constantly coming out. I think that this class gave me some good resources to start with, but being a teacher means that we will constantly have to learn new technology to keep up with the times. Maybe keeping the Twitter I made for this class can help me stay up to date. 

Post #9: Flipped Classrooms, Professional Development, PowerPoint Interaction

Flipped Classrooms

A flipped classroom is a way of teaching in which students learn material at home through video lectures and then do activities and participate in discussions in class. This method of learning reverses the traditional teaching method of lecturing in class and doing assignments at home. This allows teachers to spend more time answering questions in the classroom instead of teaching material the whole class. It also allows students to learn at their own pace and utilizes technology to make learning more self-driven and interactive. Khan Academy is an online source for educational videos that I have used myself throughout high school and college. There are hundreds of videos on almost any subject. I was only familiar with their YouTube channels, so I was excited to find out that they have their own website where you can sign up for free to view all of their content in one place.

Professional Development

Edutopia is a website that compiles all kinds of professional development resources for teachers. Most of the content is blog posts created by other teachers, so it is a great way for educators to connect and share resources. I particularly liked the video section, it is cool to see what innovative things teachers are doing in their classrooms.

PowerPoint Interaction

Honestly, I did not enjoy doing this assignment at all. It took me a long time to find a game template that I liked, and then once I found one it was very time consuming to put in all of my information. I am very thankful that we could use templates, though, because I am not sure that I could have made a functional game myself. While this type of study game is something I might make for my actual classroom in the future, it was just frustrating to try and come up with enough questions to make a game for a hypothetical class for a subject I am not interested in teaching. I still learned a little more about PowerPoint from this assignment. I learned how to set up a presentation to browse at kiosk, which is the setting that allows the Jeopardy game to work. I also learned about action buttons, which can be used to navigate to different slides or links within your presentation by clicking on them.

Post #8: Future Technology, Digital Divide, & PowerPoint

Future Technology

I think that the Personal Learning Environment is the most promising new technology for education because it can be used for almost any subject or age level. I think that creating online content through programs such as Moodle to is a good way for students to express their creativity and process information in the way that they learn best.

Digital Divide

The digital divide is the lack of access that some people have to technology such as computers and Internet access at home. I have always had access to technology such as computers and the Internet at home because my family is middle class and we lived in an urban area where having technology was the norm. However, as a teacher I cannot expect all of my students to have the same access to technology that I did growing up. I need to be aware that some of my students may not have a computer at home and make accommodations for those students, such as giving them time on the media center to work on research projects.

PowerPoint

I learned some useful skills from the PowerPoint for Information Dissemination assignment. One of the biggest new things I learned about PowerPoint was the master slide editor, which allows you to make your own custom templates to use throughout your presentation. This is really useful to make all the slides look more uniform, especially if there's a lot of elements like shapes and text boxes on each slide. I also didn't know that you could record your voice on PowerPoint. This is a cool feature because it would allow a teacher to upload a complete lecture with voice explanation instead of just the slides. I think it would be really cool if more online classes utilized this feature. 

I also stepped outside my comfort zone for this project. I want to be a high school English teacher, but after looking over many standards I decided to do my presentation on a fifth grade science standard. The English standards for high school seemed way too broad or complicated for this project, but the elementary science standards seemed narrow enough to be thoroughly explained in about ten slides. 

In my actual subject and age level, I could see myself using PowerPoint presentations to show discussion questions on the books my class is reading. Many of my English teachers in the past also used PowerPoint for quiz questions and grammar lessons, which I can see myself doing. 

ILP #1 “Participation” – Lynda

I chose to complete a Lynda course called Up and Running with Edmodo by Oliver Schinkten. This course covered everything a teacher would need to know about setting up an online classroom with Edmodo, and even provided videos to show parents and students on how to set up their accounts.


I think that this course provided a convincing argument about why Edmodo can be a powerful tool for teachers. It is similar to social media sites and it can be a fun and engaging way for students to interact in a safe and private educational environment.  This online classroom can also teach students how to communicate online in a respectful way, which is a very important skill in the digital age.




The course also provided lots of helpful tips about how to use Edmodo effectively in the classroom.
I learned that you can link your Google Drive and Edmodo library, which allows for easy transfer of files from your computer to your students. The following screenshot is just some of the many uses of this program in the classroom discussed in the tutorial.


I had never used Lynda before this project, and I am sad about that fact now because I have been missing out on a lot of free resources. I thought the Notebook feature was great; I love how it marks where on the video the note is from. Here are my notes from the course.

PowerPoint Tips: Banning the Bullet

SlideShare

Today in class we talked about ways to avoid using bullet points in presentations. I enjoyed this SlideShare presentation on the topic. I really liked the idea on slide 2, I think that it is easy to read and a good alternative to the bullet point.

13 Alternatives to Using Bullet Points in Presentations from Melissa Milloway, MSIT