Blabberize me

Blabberize

Blabberize is one of the most fun websites that I have found an educational use for. I can think of hundreds of way to Blabberize my lessons. Blabberize allows you to upload any picture you would like and select its mouth so that it moves with the recording you create for it. This makes the picture appear to be speaking your words on its own.Why have a lecture on the life on Abraham Lincoln when he could tell you himself? The whole process of creating one took about one minute. The website even helps guide you with step by step instructions and review option.

Class Field trip Fish

Blabberize and the classroom

The link above is to my own personal Blabber of a field trip announcement. I made this as a sample because I wanted to show a fun way a teacher can use Blabberize with students. I would give the students a link to this blabber with the instructions to watch a short video online for homework. Imagine the joy they would feel when a little fish told them about their upcoming field trip to the Shedd Aquarium. I believe this online resource can be used in many ways for student instruction. I think that students would enjoy creating them on their own for projects and reports. The range of projects is vast from a presentation on a historical figure to a simple book report. I would love to integrate Blabberize into my classroom. I feel it would help reinforce knowledge in an active and engaging fashion making the students feel less like they are learning and more like fun.

Glogster

Glogster

Glogster is a wonderful and fun tool that I have recently found. This website allows for you to create a digital poster board of anything you would like. The posters you create can contain pictures, videos, links to websites, and much more multimedia. The amount of elements a person can put on one page is mind blowing. The first few times on this website was very trial and error. As much as I enjoyed this tool, I found it challenging at first to understand how to position and add elements to my poster. Once I overcame my learn curve I found this website to be a quick and fun way to get information out quickly.

A glog about Grace

Glogster and the classroom

I feel that this tool gave me some difficulty in building my own glog. This has lead me to use this tool to provide my students information rather than have the students build personal glogs. I feel that often times in schools students over look simple information because its just a boring read. I feel that making a glog of this type of new information may help to keep students engaged. I made a simple getting to know me glog in order to help students get to know me in a fun and light fashion. I think the students would feel more connected to me thru playing videos of my pets and both verbally and visually getting a glimpse at my daily life. I think that having a glog would allow students to be come more engaged in the information at hand. I can see this being helpful for school news letters and even to replace simple hand outs. If a glog was used instead of a handout it would allow teachers to use more resources such as videos as well as allow students to review the materials at anytime they would like.

Wordle

I often feel that students have many issues in understanding poetry and themes within them. I attempted to use the site wordle to help shed a bright new light on the important words and themes within The Road not taken by Robert Frost.

Wordle of The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

What is a wordle?

Wordle is a website that take the words you have entered and creates a word cluster that makes each one larger based on how often the word is repeated. The hope is that the more important a words will be larger and the least important will be the smallest. 

Wordle and the classroom

In trying to use wordle, I found the experience to be extremely easy to understand. You just type in the words you would like to use and repeat the important ones more often. You can also copy and paste in any work and wordle will delete all the common English words. Examples of the common English words are; and, the, these, ect. I feel that given the easy at which I learned to use this tool, children will learn this tool with the same easy, if not more. I feel that this can help student instruction for both post and pre-reading strategies. Wordle helps to teach students to prioritize concepts and ideas based on importance to the reading. I feel I would use Wordle as pre-reading for younger students to help tell me what words they feel are most important to the story. For post reading, I would use Wordle to have student list word and themes within a story and have them choose what is important and explain to the class why they choose those words. I feel that Wordle is useful both inside and outside of the classroom.

Stranger Activity

One of my most common phrases about the internet is, "if you thought of it...it must be on the internet". I feel that this makes me think about everything that makes me who I am being all over the internet. I grew up with a computer and started using it well before I understood how to use it or what it meant. In today's world, children are surrounded by technology and have pictures of themselves as babies all over their parent's Facebook, meaning before they can speak they are given a digital tattoo.

Finding out about strangers

Recently, I went to Google a stranger to attempt to see what information I could find and how quickly. Within minutes of searching, I can almost tell you everything about this man's life. No Sherlock Holmes needed to find out an address, phone number, relatives, work history, education, birthday, and even his hobbies. The speed at which I could gather this information floored me. If  it was so easy to figure out a great deal about this man how much is out there about me? I googled and looked around at my own digital tattoo. This search lead to nothing shocking but it did make me glad that I don't normally share much on the internet. I don't feel that the same can be said for my future students. I think it is extremely important to teach the effects of a digital tattoo to our student's. It is our jobs as educators to inform them how something as silly as a Facebook picture could cost them a job or a scholarship based on the small fact the school or employer searched them on the internet. I feel that children often think off themselves as bullet proof leaving little to no thought into how their image is being reflected.

Personal Learning Network: Twitter

Twitter is a social network that the majority of Americans have a slight idea of how it works. We see twitter hash tags in our television programs and even on flyers. As far as social networks go, Twitter is at the top of the heap. That  140 character limit Tweet can express so much and helps to keep individuals that are interested in the same topics connected. Twitter chats are instant live chats with hundreds of people all on the same subject to help share knowledge and help to feel connected. Although it is true that most social network sites are used for social and entertainment purposes, I believe that we can use them both professionally andeducationally.

My story with Twitter

Screenshot of Twubs of my Twitter Chat

In January, I created my own Twitter page(@GraceGasper). A class I was taking offered a professional light to Twitter that grabbed my attention. I always thought, "why would I want to read someone's short post or have more than one social media network?" To feel support is what my Twitter experience has shown me. I took this as an experience to try new things and found a few Special education sites to follow and read many articles they tweeted and finally desired to participate in a Twitter chat. I picked the New Teachers chat on Wednesday at 8 pm. I used Twubs to help connect me to the twitter chat and allowed me to slow down the thread in order to enjoy more resources. Many people were involved in the chat and even though I just said it was my first chat,  they responded back kindly. I mainly sat and watched, reading the article some posted and generally getting a feeling for the chat. I found the experience enlightening. Many of the teachers were just posting fun online tools and there was not much of a conversation but occasionally people would ask questions about their classroom and many links and pointers would be shared. I feel that this tool will be extremely useful to me as an educator. I often feel the need to talk with like minded individuals about my day as well as get others advice on struggles I will face as an educator. I look at this overall experience in an extremely positive light and hope that some of the friends I have made through these chats will help me to better my teaching craft. This chat helped me to find School tube which is an education based and community base YouTube.

SAMR model of technology integration

Today we often forget how technology can being incorporated into the classroom to help improve the quality of learning for the students. Recently, I attended my very first webinar. This webinar was presented by Susan Oxnevad. She presented an educational theory to help understand and use technology to help better the educational experience. This theory is called the SAMR model.

What the Webinar taught me about the SAMR model

This model is actually very simple to understand through examples. The first stage is substitution. This is when the technology as used to directly substitute as the tool with no functional change. This stage is simply typing up a paper vs writing it by hand. The same amount of effort is needed meaning nothing is improved. The second step is Augmentation. This is when the technology is a substitution for the tool but has a functional improvement. This stage is using a simple tool to improve the quality of work produced. This is taking the time to spell check a paper before printing. This tool is simple and easy to use but makes a large improvement to the work produced. The next step moves from the enhancement stage, or the stage of basic knowledge, and move learning into the transformation stage, or the stage of higher learning. This step is modification. Modification is when the technology allows for a huge task redesign. This is using resources to further learning the subject when not in the physical class room. This stage allows students to constantly collaborate outside the classroom.It is the action of giving students more resources to use outside of the classroom like multimedia. The final step is redefinition. This step is taking the task and using it in ways that was not conceivable before. This is skyping an astronaut while teaching a space lesson. This action is simply mind-blowing. Can you imagine the joy you would have had asking an astronaut questions? This joy creates fully engaged children which means they are going to have the highest results from their education. Some tools to help to create this type of digital learning experience in the classroom are Wikispaces, http://www.thinglink.com/action/store/education, Google Docs, and Common Core Standards.

The Webinar experience

This being my first experience of a webinar, I must admit I was very nervous. After the webinar began, my nerves were put to easy. The format was much like a classroom in my bedroom. I felt as if the chance to improve myself through technology was endless and if it was so simple for me it must be simpler for children. I did become easily distract though and fear this being a larger problem with young children. That being said, I did take advantage of reviewing the video. To review a lesson on my own time was extremely valuable and could never be offered in a classic classroom setting. This would allow more freedom to students for learning at their own pace, particularly on difficult subjects. Overall I found Susan's webinar extremely resourceful and it helped me greatly understand how children of this generation learn and become more engaged.

Research

Though out most of our days, we see hundreds upon thousands of people on mobile devices and think nothing of it. Have you ever stopped to think about how much technology children use? People tend to focus on how they would have never had a cell phone or computer or any high end technology at such a young age. The truth is most students, no matter how young, do commonly have access to these high tech tools. To put this truth in to perspective I will pull from The Kaiser Family Foundation survey of 2,002 students, 3rd-12th grade, nationwide who completed a 7 day media diary.

"Under 40" Source: http://under40.us/

Statistics from survey:

• Eight-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).   ‘Media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), means they manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into that timeframe.
• 
  Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in ownership among 8- to 18-year-olds: from 39% to 66% for cell phones, and from 18% to 76% for iPods and other MP3 players.  During this period, cell phones and iPods have become true multi-media devices: in fact, young people now spend more time listening to music, playing games, and watching TV on their cell phones (a total of :49 daily) than they spend talking on them (:33).
• 
  Top online activities include social networking (:22 a day), playing games (:17), and visiting video sites such as YouTube (:15).  Three-quarters (74%) of all 7th-12th graders say they have a profile on a social networking site.

For more information go to: http://kff.org/disparities-policy/press-release/daily-media-use-among-children-and-teens-up-dramatically-from-five-years-ago/

What does this information change for me?

In learning these statistics, I feel quite flustered by the amount our children are being flooded with un-educational technology, with very little to none of it being educational. I feel the deep urgency for the educational world to keep pace with a technology driven world. Just as adults find it hard to avoid technology it is even more of a norm for children, why not make it educational? I had never thought of this concept before seeing these statistics and honestly feel a bit silly in ignoring that trends are trends to all ages. I do believe that all surveys should be taken with the idea that all research is subject to a bias and that this may have been more leaning towards a negative outlook on students. Even with the research having a bias I feel that it helped me to form a belief that technology can help raise engagement in the classroom. The children of this generation will forever live in a mobile technology world and reach there peers mainly through digital communication. I feel that the advances in technology has built a preference to digital communication and offers additional aid that a classroom can not. For example: individualized assessments and instant feedback. I believe that having my eyes opened to this will help me to better myself in this field to help reach more children as well as having a more active classroom using technology.