Last week of class!

Watching the video 'is anyone listening' on youtube really made me appreciate all the things I was fortunite enough to have as a child. There were times when I would hear my parents talking about being concerned about bills, but for the most part we had everything we needed. Both of my parents worked so we spent quite a bit of time with my grandma and at after school programs, but we made the best of it. It is so sad when children are stressed out about not knowing if they will have a place to live anymore, or having to drop out of school to help pay bills. Some of these children have had to grow up way to fast and deal with adult problems they should not be faced with. From what it sounds like most of the parents encourage their kids to focus on school, but the reality is they have to be able to eat and have a place to live. I think instead of focusing on other countries and how poor and starving they may be we should look at our own backyard and help people in our own country that are in serious need.

Our school system is headed in a very bad direction financially. Not only are students starving and dropping out to get jobs, but they are cutting the school budgets so bad, especially in California. In the next couple months, just in Apple Valley, we are closing two middle schools because of lack of funding. All of these students are going to be crammed into other middle schools that already have huge classrooms. How can a teacher have any one on one time with a classroom of 40 students? The state is also cutting funding of preschools all together, where are all these kids going to go? How are these young kids suppose to get a head start in learning without having a preschool to attend. How are these parents going to pay for daycare so they can go to work? There are so many financial problems in our school system right now, on top of everyone else's personal financial burdens.

I enjoyed all of the new things that we learned in this class. This class was a real eye opener about the potential for using technology in the class. Not only can it improve learning but it can make our lives as teachers a lot less complicated being able to integrate technology in our classrooms. I think my favorite thing that I learned was google docs, I love being able to work on a project and being able to open it on any computer. And being able to share those documents and have other people edit them is a huge time and paper saver! I believe the thing I learned in this class will come in handy time and time again!

Overall Hybrid

I really think it is neat that we don't all have to be present in a classroom anymore! There are endless possibilities to hybrid classes. They can be a bit challenging at times if the technology does not want to cooperate. It sometimes is a little difficult to figure it out if you are not very technology savvy but we made do! I think the most complicated part was when we did the project with our group and our only communication was typing to each other, but it was a new experience. I found the story about that persons sidekick phone to be astonishing! I can not believe the termoil that a silly phone caused. Technology is a wonderful thing, but it is also very scarey. I think we are just begining to learn its full potential.

I would have to say that out of our two classes the first one was much better. I liked being taught by the instructor opposed to having to read and follow directions. It was also nice being able to type questions to him and getting a response right away. It would have been even cooler to have a headset that would have allowed all of us to talk. I am sure there will be many more hybrid classes in our futures so we had better get used to it! =)

Feb 18th hybrid class

This weeks class was very challenging. It was a lot of material to try and figure out on our own, and was a lot of reading. The information about copy writing is very useful in the classroom so we do not get ourselves in trouble. There are so many different confusing rules to know about copywriting that I am to scared to use anything in class. I will defintely keep the printout we received as a reference tool to help decifer what is okay and what is off limits.

David Thornburg took a much different approach about cheating in the classroom. I never thought about cheating in the perspective that he brought up. One teacher was expressing concern that one of her students was texting to another student that was in the library looking up the answers to a test for him. This teacher wants to not allow students to have this type of technology in the classroom. Thornburg points out that the questions we should be asking shouldn't be able to be looked up on the internet or in a book. The types of questions that we should be asking should require more thought out answers. I really found his approach on education to be very interesting and I think it will defintely have a place in our future. Why should we teach students to remember things that the answers are at our finger tips. As adults if we don't know something we just do a search for it to find the answers. Our students are merely coping what we do everyday! Now a days we have to challenge them to think a little deeper than true or false and multiple choice.

I am not very big on social networking, but the story about the sidekick phone helped to put social networking into perspective. I never knew that there were that many people that actually read so much on the internet and follow other peoples lives and stories. It is a little unbelieveable and kind of scarey to think that so many people can get involved with something as petty as a cell phone being found in a cab. Wow!

I never knew that our schools website had this program Scholar. It can be very helpful for doing projects and research. It is especially neat that you can follow your classmates on there. I am very new to bookmarking and tags, but I see how it can be beneficial. Diigo is a very new site for me, I am having a hard time figuring it out and am going to have to ask for help in class on thursday. Maybe my brain just decided to give up at that point, either way I will need help!

Hybrid class

I really enjoyed our hybrid class this week, it is pretty cool that we were able to have class from anywhere. I chose to go to the computer lab because I wasn't sure exactly what to do on my own. Cherish was there to help us lost lil souls!! Even though we weren't able to talk to each other it was still pretty cool. Being able to break off into separate groups and being able to instant message each other was fun too. I don't believe this would be used a ton in an elementary school setting, but would be very helpful for online courses or if the teacher was out if town or sick. It would also come in handy for guest speakers from anywhere in the world.

I really liked that we could message each other and draw cool stuff. Our group did a project about hello kitty. At first it was a little frustrating to not be able to communicate with our team face to face, but once we got going we worked pretty good together. We got to find out some pretty cool facts with everyone elses projects too. this was a very good way to learn good communication skills for students.

We also made our own flyers, and learned how to personalized them with logos. This is fun for teachers to use in their classrooms to award students for different things. Over all I would say our hybrid class was enjoyable and very helpful!

Feb. 5th class

I really enjoyed learning how to use animoto, it has so many uses in the classroom. It would be very fun to have students make videos of themselves to get to know one another. Instead of show and tell we could make videos of their family and pets. I shared my videos with my husband and he was so excited, he wanted to make his own video. Animoto also has many uses outside of the classroom. You could make a slide show for a wedding, or of pictures throughout the year to share with family members. The really cool part about animoto is that you can email your videos to anyone!

I found that the google forms where a lot easier than the other form website we were using. It is more user friendly and is convenient to use while logged into my gmail account. There are so many reasons that we can use forms in the classroom, any where from permission slips to getting emergency contact information about students. I am really glad that we are getting all of these resources to be able to use with our future students!

Week 4

I really enjoyed making up our own fairy tale in class. Being able to work on the same project with multiple people can be very useful. This program could teach students how to work together on projects, and give them the ability to work on them from home. It can also allow the teacher to see who did what on the project to prevent some students from slacking off.
Being able to create your own database is very useful in the classroom. You could create surveys to help get to know your students, or a welcome sheet for the first day of class to retain info about students and parents. This program could also be used to create tests, and because it can all be done paperless we are saving the planet! The able to link the database to anyone's email would make grading very quick and easy. All of these helpful tools are going to make our lives as teacher much easier.

week 3

Online collaboration has many uses in the classroom. It is a great tool to use all the time for assignments. As a teacher you would be able to monitor how the students are doing on their assignments. You could see who has started and who hasn't started certain assignments. Another neat thing is that you can go into their assignment and edit it if need be. This will also speed up grading times, and reduce the use of paper. It will be very easy to share the students work with his or her parents. I think this is the new wave of technology in schools, and will hopefully make life a lot easier for many of us.
Jing is one of the coolest things that we have done in class. I always wondered how you could capture images on the computer. There are so many uses for this in the classroom that I don't even know where to start. Anytime you are walking the students through a new program you could make a slide show like we did for picasa. You could use it for a powerpoint presentation to include different images or step by step instructions for something. I am very excited to use Jing more often.