Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Wikis, Students, and Clashing Personalities...

I have never heard of Wikis before this week. Of course I have repeatedly used Wikipedia in the past, put I never realized that you could set up your own and edit the information.
I do understand now why professors look down on Wikipedia as a viable source of information. If anyone can edit it, how can you ever be sure it's correct?
As far as setting up my own, I think it would be a fun experience to set up a private Wiki for my classroom, where they could edit each other's material and converse about a project. I think a Wiki would be more efficient than a blog when it came down to a project.
I don't believe conversing in learning communities to be MORE effective than traditional instruction, but I do believe it to be a necessary part of teaching. Conversation helps people retain information, and relate it off several people's opinions.
I'm not sure you could prove if learning communities were more effective than classrooms. I suppose you could judge online students' scores versus traditional students scores, but then, you have to make sure to give the exact same assignments and testing standards (which alot of professors don't do with their online classes).
I strongly agree that your learning type is directly linked to your personality type. I think knowing my students personality types would help me become a better teacher, making sure I could reach every student.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Spreadsheets R' Us

I have always been able to complete basic steps on spreadsheet, but this week was a bit more challenging. Making a material aid was something quite foreign to me, and frankly, I would have never guessed it was made in spreadsheet!
I've learned about many different applications to Excel now. As a teacher, I can see where it is utilized. Grading, ranking, lesson planning...all of these are vital functions to the curriculum. Now that I understand it a bit better, I can use Excel for time lines, puzzles, or diagrams.
Spreadsheet over calculators makes the grading process smoother, more accurate, and easy to understand. Calculators, while useful, can be time consuming with 20 plus students! With a spreadsheet, you are 2 mouse-clicks away from a student's semester average.
As I said before, as a teacher, I would definitely use Excel, more now than before, now that I understand more of the capabilities of the program!
I'm am psyched about what I am learning in this class; it makes me feel confident that I WILL know a bit more than my students in the classroom! Ha!

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Inspiration on all levels...

Walking through the tutorial for Inspiration 8 was amazing! This is the technology I WISH the teachers would have had access to when I was in class.
This basically outlines the important information for students and teachers, while making it interesting and interactive for both.
Perhaps on the the strongest tools Inspiration brings to the tables in organization through technology. Now, teachers NEED to be able not to only teach their subject, but to be able to guide students through learning basic computer programs as well. Inspiration gives the students the opportunity to organize their thoughts and become used to the idea of interacting their thoughts on a computer program.
I think that research projects and general prompts would get the most use out of this program. Because you can go so far on a single idea, the program helps you expand your points and get an outline going on what you want to mention and/or include in your writing. The program is ideal for group projects because everyone can contribute to the idea of what needs to be discussed.
I agree peer feedback is vital to the revision process. In my early writing classes, my papers were edited by another classmate before being submitted to the teacher. This gave us the opportunity to fix basic errors while also teaching us the editing process.
This could also be done online, though, through the student blogs we discussed last week or perhaps using this new "inspirational" tool for writing. Students could upload their outlines or email them to a classmate, get the new edited version emailed back, and see the changes. This is a lot of what we do in journalism. While old school pen and paper is always trusty, its sometimes not timely.
All in all, it seems educators are jumping on the technology bandwagon and finally figuring out that if they want to keep up with the education curve, they have to become more interactive. I believe Inspiration 8 proves just that.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

My thoughts on blogging...

I've always been a strong supporter of blogs and personal web sites. While I am not a techie and I could tell you JAVA or any other type of code, I think grabbing your own slice of the World Wide Web is important.


For starters, you know what's going on around the world, in other people's lives, and how they view ...well, everything. You can see raw talent through poems or short stories or songs that people all over the world post.


Using blogs in the classroom, especially a classroom centered on using technology in the curriculum for future teachers, is logical. If there are any students taking this class that have never blogged or never set up their own site, then it will be good to have a personal experience before delving into a classroom where knowledge of the high-tech world is ever-changing.


There are tons of options for lesson plans and curriculum tools that I think would benefit my future students. I'm a strong supporter of PowerPoint for lectures; it's more efficient for the teacher, and handouts of the slides can easily be copied for the students, allowing them to have access to the important points, and write down notes of their own.


Also, I think interactive demonstrations help students retain vital information. For example, if I am teaching grammar, interactive computer games and/or simulations can guide a students through the different methods of punctuation, sentence structure, and those lousy prepositional phrases.

As far as using blogging as a tool in the classroom, I would consider it. For my journalism students I would encourage an online website for the campus newspaper, since students are more likely to view a website or FaceBook than actually read the paper. Writers could blog about news, opinions, or even post videos of current events on campus.

For any English curriculum I would encourage personal web sites and blogs to sort of publish their own works, whether it be short stories or poetry.

All in all, I am very excited to learn about the many options I will have before me in the classroom, and the tools that are created every day to help students learn.

Monday, September 1, 2008

Life as I know It....

Obviously, my name is Annette. I'm 23 years old, a junior at Texas A&M University-Commerce, and a Journalism major with an English minor.
Eventually, and hopefully sooner than later, I will be in the classroom teaching high school kids wondering, 'Was I really this dramatic?'
I love writing, reading, watching old movies, and just hanging out at home with my fiance and the most lovable dog in the world, Socks, creatively named for her knee high white socks on every leg.
While I created this blog as an ETEC assignment, I hope to maintain this and share my crazy, sometimes ditzy, but otherwise totally relevant views of the world.