Mr. Espinoza's Education Corner

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The Glogster was a fun interactive way to get a point across. I liked how easy it was to use and add text and picture. It was very creative to find ways to explain bullying in my own words. Click

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#2 reflection. Pick two favorite and why? One of them would definitely be skype, with the technology that we have now why wouldn’t we use it to our advantage. Being able to keep students from falling behind due to illness is a major advantage of it. The second would be edmodo, I really like how it is like a social media site but in a classroom setting. Students are able to upload school work to it for the teacher to grade, but also able to communicate with other students about assignments. Notes are able to be up loaded for those who maybe missed a class.

#3 The two tools i liked from this semester was one the edmodo site where we had the chance to make a video using pictures and music to teach a little bit of knowledge to someone. It was a really cool way to show someone what you liked and the cool way you could teach them.
The second tool was garage band, i liked how we were able to make our own music and beats to a video. I liked the freedom we had with it, and the luxury of being as creative as we wanted to be.

#4  My wow or ah ha moment was when i started to get feed back on my site. I didn’t think people would actually go to my site and read it. I liked the idea that people were on my site and go through leaving comments. It was a suprise because the internet has so much information for someone to come to my personal site and really look through it.

#5    The scratch program seems like a great way to connect with kids, by getting them involved in learning while begin creative and playing at the same time. I like how interactive it was for all ages.

1.    Langwitches blog was written by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano, is about teaching teachers not only how to blog, but to also learn how to read and understand blogs. A good question that was asked was how to enhance students leaning through a blog. I think blogging puts you closer to a students level, by writing a blog you are putting out there what you feel about something particular it has a real essence to it. Students know when a teacher is being a teacher and when they are being an everyday person, students relate better to someone who has some feeling in matters. They reach those students who have a problem with authority by letting them know that they also have questions about things, they never have all the answers. In a way a blog is just asking questions to whoever reads them.

2.    In Vicki Davis’ blog she talks about how she is making strides teaching with the use of technology. I like the idea that we are in an age where technology is being used in almost every faucet of educating students. I believe that it is a better way to connect to students in a world were much of everything thing becoming online or on a computer of some kind. Being able to implement them into the classroom not only make the work easier on the teachers it make the work easier to understand from the students perspective. I think that is what we, as teachers strive for, it to be able to get information to the students and also connecting with them. Not only can we get information faster we can share it just as fast, not more lag time getting information to the students. Most people don’t think of how much we are saving the environment when we move towards full intergrated technology, no more wasting of paper on assignment never finished or once graded tossed out. Technology in the classroom is the future for us our students, and our planet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j0JOp3b0Ws

Ipads are the classroom technology of now not the future anymore. Many schools are moving to 1:1, meaning that every student in the school that has 1:1 will have a ipad to keep with them the entire school year. I think this is a great idea, many students can keep up with not having to write notes all the time even when they are a slow writer. Much more information can be given to the students because most notes can be put online along with powerpoints, making it easier for students to keep track of notes and information. They are much lighter and much more cost effective. I believe that schools should move to 1:1, for the main reason of keeping students constantly connected to school and having everything they need at their finger tips.

I used two different pictures of tractors to compare and contrast. Many students would notice the differences immediately, but what i would shoot for are the comparisons. They both do the same types of work on a field, still only have room for 1 person, and they still bring about the same feeling of hard work and commitment. In our team lesson we used pictures in a different way we used pictures off of book covers and had students write stories of what they think the book would be about just by what the picture on the cover was.

Being able to use pictures in a lesson is a great advantage. In the blog he is using the pictures to enhance the thinking of the students and getting them to think outside of the box. He is also letting the students decide on their own what they think of the pictures and why they find suprising in them. There really is not wrong or right answer, but there is an answer. That is what we want from students is to be involved, and by letting them answer without being critiqued lets them open up their minds to ideas and deeper relevance thinking.

1. I think he should of changed the title to 10 reasons why Google is better. He gave great examples of why Google is a better program. But many people are satisfied to use the Word program because it is what they are comfortable with. Yes as we move into the future we need to update ourselves with the times, but there are people that are out there that question how stable is google to have all our documents and important things on the web. We still live in a day that technology is moving much faster that we can protect it. There will always be someone who will want what we have on the Internet, how can we protect what little privacy we do have in today’s society.

2. I have the same feelings as were talked in the blog. I feel that we need to have a set of standards to guide us not to follow. Following never got anyone the satisfaction of learning anything. When you follow you only have to know where the person in front of you has gone. If you use it as a guide, you keep it as a reference to make sure you are not getting lost. Being able to find things out on your own has a real accomplishments behind it and it makes the learner even more hungry for knowledge. As long as the students learn I don’t mind that they took a different path to the same destination.

3. He did a good job giving a brief very detailed instruction on how to use your Gmail account effectively and less time consuming. Being able to use your Gmail in a way that you can use it as a tool instead of an assignment on it’s own makes for a easy way to keep things on track and in-line.

4.  In the CoETaIL blog, it explained about this programs in which it connects teachers to other teachers and schools to other schools, as an advantage to get help and information from each other to learn different teaching strategies and implementation. It also went on to talk about the different ways that teachers could stay connected through the program one example being twitter.

5.  I like what he did here, explaining that if you have a new technology that you must be willing to learn new ways to teach with the new tools. Why get something new if you are not willing to change your teaching skills to be able to implement the new tool efficiently. It was shocking to hear the schools going 1:1, were only doing it because it was the thing to do. I feel with the 1:1 you have an opportunity to further the educational horizons to limitless possibilities. In doing so students will be more than willing to learn when it is something they have not see before, since most of them are on the Internet as is. As a future teacher I must be willing to change my habits to accommodate better instruction to be a better teacher to the students.

Learning is Messy:
I think using Skype in the classroom is essential to those students who need it.  Brian Crosby made valid points to why we should use Skype in the class. I feel that many students fall behind in school work because of missing days for illness and other reasons. Being able to still give the information to the students regardless of where they might be it great. Another great advantage to using Skype, is being able to work with other classrooms from different schools, states, or even countries. I like the idea of teaching culture from different people is a great way to culturally educate ourselves of other people and ways of life from the people who live it everyday.

Jason Levy has implements the Google Programs into his schools in the Bronx, New York. Before this his 10% of his colleagues were even using email. In today’s day and age we are a population that is moving more and more towards technology. It seems that Google has seen this also and it doing everything to make this technology possible for everyone. The way that they are doing this is by making it free to use Google docs. A program in which a user may simple long on to his or her email, at any location where the Internet is connected on any computer. The email account is free, so to are the programs that come with it. Many schools are beginning to follow this trend in times of short budgeting and funding cuts. In the presentation he had in the video he couldn’t stress enough the importance of using this free technology that really does help how efficiently a teachers implements a lesson. The reason is this, teachers and students are able to collaborate and work with live program. This program runs on real time, so if students are logged in doing work a teacher could be logged on at the same time and be able to help the students whenever and where ever. This is seen in the test scores in the Bronx, they have risen dramatically since the implementation. I think if schools want to help students learn and get work done efficiently, than many school should start using Google docs in every faucet of school.