The future awaits us

As the semester comes to an end, I see more and more students on their laptops in class. When I say on their laptops, I mean searching facebook, twitter and all other social network feeds. In the beginning of this semester I was all about how technology could be used in classroom and how it enhances classrooms. Lately I have been against technology in classroom. I think what I am starting to realize is that it works when the teacher has control over it. Students in younger grade are more likely to respect the teachers and do what they say. College students are more in the mindset that they can multitask, even though most of us can't. I used to say I was a great student, like many others. Come time for college I know say I am an okay student. Yea I do my work and hand it in on time and I go to class, but paying attention is definitely my weak point. I know I paid attention in high school because I didn't have a phone and I was thankful for that. Now I wonder if students in high school are paying attention to their teachers.
I was reading an article that was talking about making technology work and using it to your advantage but as of lately I think it works better to get students up and active. If they are active they do not have the time to dose off or get bored in and search a twitter feed or text the person in the next class over under their desks trying to be sneaky. Technology is only increasing and getting better, what will we as teachers see our students using in a year or two from now? Will we be getting them up and active or will we be trying to feed their need to be engaged on the computer and with technology. The future awaits us my fellow education majors, hope you're prepared!

Should we stop waisting trees?....

Through this semester I have seen many different way of creating assessments. I have seen my cooperating teacher sit down at the computer over and over tweaking tests for the incoming classes. She always labeled a few with an M for those students had an IEP saying that they needed modified testing. As of recently within my fieldwork I have heard of doing all standardized testing on computers. Teachers spend so much time working on their tests and creating tests that work it seems that they have finally created a standardized test online that may work. I have different opinions on standardized testing, but are all of our testing going to move towards online? I see this hard to do within a middle school and high school setting because not many of them can afford a laptop for every student at once and that is the problem they are facing at the school where I do my fieldwork. Taking a test online offers but so many problems. I can attest for the sleepiness of looking at a computer. I took my praxis at 11 in the afternoon, fully awake and able to pay attention after 8 hours of sleep. After completing a half hour of the test my eyes began slowly shutting. Working on a computer in general makes people sleepy, taking a test can’t be proven any more awakening. I see something wrong with testing on a computer. When I was younger we always were told to go play outside. We were only allowed to be on the computer for homework (which took all of 20 minutes) and all of 15 minutes other than that to play a game if we were lucky. Students now are always on the computer doing work and when they are not doing work parents let them spend time on the computer long than being outside. All in all what I am trying to say is that maybe technology is going too far. It seems like they are trying to make things easier and more convenient but rather they are just getting students addicted and dependent on technology and computers.

... College students - Professional's at using Fluff

As I sit here doing 5 billions things for finals, I stopped to think about what I am doing. Is writing a 10 page paper about my experiences during fieldwork really going to prove to anyone that I learned something? Is a paper of a child I "interviewed" really going to say that I know my audience when I go into teaching. There's a common saying among college students "College didn't teach me how to write paper but rather how to "fake" papers." We simply add a little fluff and act like we know what we are talking about. Granted we may know that material, but making us write a paper, that most teachers do not want to read seems crazy to me. This is the part where I tell you  I am the worst English major ever. I can not stand reading over my papers, I cant spell for the life of me and the first thing I do for fun is not pick up a book, crazy I know.
So again, as I sit here writing papers, I think about how I am going to make classroom fun and not just another English classroom where my students have to write papers. Technology offers so many things. As I was going the final project for this class, I found an amazing website to make madlibs. Now this may not be excited for everyone, but I can tell you that I have just as much fun filling in the blanks as I used to.
I look back on my last three years here so far, honestly, I might remember one or two papers I wrote and what I got on them. Having finished my psychology minor two semesters ago, I could not tell you one thing that I wrote in those papers that's for sure.  Simply what I am saying is that I question whether or not writing papers is the way to do it any more. We have so many resource at our hands but a lot of classrooms continue to go back to the old routine of writing papers so show that the students know the material, but do they know that material? We all know that the internet can tell students exactly what they need to know, and if they are clever enough they can reword the information to skip over the thought of plagiarism. I think that as we go into this field we should be looking at ways to make technology prevalent because that is where the world is going to continue to head and we need to prepare our students to encounter creating presentations rather than always writing paper.
I will back myself up here and agree that papers are need on occasion and for specific reasons but I think that the "write a 5 page paper" assignment is getting old, and students are getting smarter at getting around taking the time to write it and prove that they know something.

Final Project - Intergrating Technology in an English Inclusion Classroom

 

 

Technology being used in classrooms but sometimes technology being used within an inclusion class makes learning for those students with disabilities, just a little bit easier. Having worked in a special education classroom all year I have seen what technology can do for these students and how much easier learning becomes. My lesson is based on parts of speech focusing on verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Each of these has a corresponding video that will be played on the smart board. Before they view the videos they will be handed a graphic organizer that helps them see the difference between verbs, adjectives, and nouns. The videos that are provided will be shown on the SmartBoard and will have the students active. Even if their disabilities prevent them from participating in the songs, I have personally seen students get more excited simply because it involves music. Music is an engaging form of technology that can be used in any classroom to the teacher’s advantage.

 VERBS
 NOUNS
ADJECTIVES

After this review of nouns, verbs, and adjective, they students will read a short story and I will ask the “who, what, where, when, how” questions and also ask them to identify when they are using nouns, adjectives, and verbs. On their individual IPad or computers the students will use a Blog to answer my questions as we go. To meet the needs of my students, voice recognition such a Dragon Naturally Speaking in order for these students to participate in the blog. These blogs can be answer with simple few word sentences, for such a young age of learning this is will be easier to have the students answering the question while learning technology at a young age.

After this section, the students will go on this website to create a madlib. This website allows the students to enter their own nouns, verbs, and adjectives and creates a funny story. This allows them to use what they learned and to create fun stories. These stories may not always make sense but as a few volunteers read them, I will ask for a better suggestion of what they could use in these stories. The students really enjoy these stories and for the fact that they will all most likely choose a different story, they will all have an individual touch to them. What is also great about these stories is that the students will not feel like it is work but rather they are learning while having fun in a student centered environment.

I will have each student print out their stories and from there, whether it be just in class or continued as homework, I will have them create an illustration of part of their story. This will give them the opportunity to see the nouns, verbs, and adjectives on paper rather than just hearing the words. On this picture I will want them to label the parts of speech that they are trying to represent.

 

This lesson can be used to any type of classroom. I think that it is a great way to enhance an inclusion classroom because it allows for so many different things to be done whether it be to use Dragon Naturally Speaking, or having everyone simply on a computer using technology to their advantage. It is a lesson that get the students involved and enjoying learning about English, or at least I would hope so. This allows for the inclusion students to right alongside of the other students.

Some of the adaptions that I would make outside of having them potentially using Dragon Naturally Speaking or giving them more time to work on their artistic element would be to give them a graphic organizer that is color coded and completely filled in with simpler terms and examples. Another adaptations that I could use is have lists of nouns, verbs, and adjective printed out for these students so that they have it readily available for them when needed.

I truly do think that the technology in this lesson plan that I created will help the students, both inclusion and regular education, to get more out of the lesson. The videos will give them a catching song for them to remember and the fill in the blank activity will make them have to think of the uses of the words and come up with their own words to use rather than me telling them what a noun, verb, and adjective is and what it can do to a story.

Spreadsheet

PowerPoint

As I was babysitting last week, and interviewing the 7th grade girl about reading and her English class for a project of mind I found out something that simply amazed me. I asked her if her teachers used PowerPoints often. She looked at me like I had three heads. She asked me what a PopwerPoint was and I responded with "You know, like slides, they put them up with notes on them for you to copy". She honestly had no idea what I was talking about and had never created a PowerPoint presentation for a class. This had me baffled so I had to find out more about the technology use in her classroom.
I continued to talk to her about her classroom and how the teacher implemented technology. She responded with, she really doesn't. Not to age discriminate, but I asked how old this teacher was and she told me that she was older, definitely one of the older teachers in the school. This made me think that there was a little bit of a technology disconnect between her and the students. Further more this made me wonder if the girl was at a disadvantage being in this school district. PowerPoints, to me at least, are a huge part of technology and presentation in college, next to papers of course. Not only do students have to create them but teachers use them to present information.
I then thought back to my classes when I was in middle school. I am absolutely positive that we worked with PowerPoints both in the aspects that teachers used them and we had to create them in order to present information. My cooperating teacher just had her students present a type of book report via a PowerPoint, so I know that it is being used in other 7th grade classrooms. To say the least, are some teachers holding students back from things that they will need to know technology wise? (not all of course) Also, is PowerPoint a lost art due to the new uses of the SmartBoard?

NETS for Teachers - Interactivity 5

• Net Standards Spreadsheet
  
  I was luck enough to Interview my cooperating teacher who is a 7th grade Language Arts Literacy teacher in the West Orange school district. She is a woman that has been teaching for about forty years and enjoy every second of it. She tries very hard to keep up with the new advances in teaching but as she had to admit, it doesn't always work.
  The teacher that I interviewed know about the standards but is not necessarily familiar with the standards themselves. She seemed to know what they were when I asked her but did not know much more. The have been brought up in conversation she told me but they where never something that was a requirement of the school itself.
  She informed me that there was talk about the standards but they are not obligated to include them on lesson plans etc as of yet. She said that she understand the need for technology and she is working her best to keep up with it but adding more standards just adds another aspect for teachers to include on their lesson plans and search the standards when they already accomplish them in their classroom one way or another. This particular school has recently put a brand new SmartBoard in each classroom therefore urging the teachers to integrate that technology into their classroom. The teacher I interviewed loves her SmartBoard and uses it now in all of her lessons. She did tell me that it was up to her how to learn to use it though. She had to teach herself and see if classes were offered in order to learn more than the basics of a SmartBoard.
  I was not really surprised by her responses because I have been in the school district and have heard very little about these standards. She keeps very up to date with the technology that she uses and keep me very in the loop when talking about anything lesson plan and standard related. I see her implementing most of theses standards without having to be told to do so.
  As a future teacher I believe it is important to know about technology and how to use it, but these standards are what new teachers are going to be implementing on a regular basis without actually looking at the standards. I think that these standards are good, but will become irrelevant because they will become common practice.

Communication and Technology

Technology allows for a lot of communication whether it be between teachers and parents, teachers and other faculty, or teachers and their higher ups, communication is key, but is email always the way to do it?  I have been able to watch a lot of technology based communication go on at my fieldwork site and sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. When my teacher has a concern with a child, she either emails the parent or will call them.  There are both good and bad things about both of these.
With email there is a record that the teacher did try. Unfortunately, not every parent checks their email as much as all teachers would life. Some messages are not read until days after the concern and then either the punishment has no effect, or the issue was already taken care of without the parent knowing. Emails show that the teacher has tried, but if they parents does not read that email and respond, the teacher is obligated to try harder and contact the parent in another way.
When talking to a parent on the phone is used, there is less of a documentation that is seen. Yes, a call log can be used as proof, but the conversation that happened between the parent and the teacher is not recorded and therefore can backfire. No one knows what is said during that conversation and if the parents was properly informed of what the issue was with the students.
Email allows for a quick conversation that can be done any time that the teacher has an extra minute. A phone call is usually only made when the teacher has a free period and in the same token the parent may not be able to be reached. I hope that we can all be great teachers and be able to communicate with our students parents as needed but must make sure that technology and communication is used properly and intelligently.