Chapter 3

What is meant by "lesson development using technnology?" "Refers to all the activities  that teachers do as they create, teach, and evaluate lessons with students. Lesson development involves a teacher's decisions about three interrelated elements of teaching lessons: academic content, teaching goals,methods, and procedures,learning assessments. " 62.Maloy

Academic content is what to teach, includes the textbooks, book, and internet resources as well as curriculum frameworks. The goals and procedures are how the teacher will teach, understanding by design nd student learing objectivity. Learning assessments is how to know what students learned, either by quizzsing them or testing and performance evaluations.

The picture below explains in a diagram what I have stated above abut lesson development.

Tech Tool 3.3- Rubistar and QuizStar

After reading that that both, rubistar and quizstar are available for free, after registration, I logged on to their link that is shared on our text. This is an online tool that allows instructors/teachers to create rubrics electronically, allowing you to save them and having their own URL link, so one can access them whenever needed. "What is a rubric?" One may ask if they are not familiar with grading, or school for any reason, rubrics are used to grade students work, but further than that, it also works as an evaluation for the students and the teachers. The student will be able to determine what he/she missed in the assignment, or what he/she excelled in once the teacher has finished filing out the rubric.

A teacher can create her rubric by using the scale from 4-1, as mentioned in class, it's always best to use even numbers, odd numbers leave a "mutual", therefore, the student isn't really sure if the teacher is "satisfied" or "needs improvement". The website gives the following choices on what subject the rubric will be used for based on the template: Oral Projects, Multimedia, Math,Reading, Art,Work Skills,Writing,Science,Products,Music. Something I found really helpful on this website was that "tutorials" are available and when making a rubric, if the professor comes to an obstacle, it is easy to click on the tutorial button, located on the top right and get help, leading to the following links:

I would like to create a printable rubric, but do not wish to save it.

I would like to create  printable rubric, but wish to save it.

I would like to edit my saved rubric.

I would like to analyze my saved rubric.

 

For an assignment as a college student that I will be doing, creating a rubric, I know that one of the resources is the rubistar, while browsing on this site, I now feel more comfortable for my first class assignment.

 While reading the chapter, the first few paragraphs really got my attention because it sounds very familiar to what I have heard before. The beginning of this chapter starts out by explaining how one of the teachers plans out her lessons. She mentions that she thinks of the best lessons while she is cooking dinner. " As I stand at the store and listen to music and the news on the radio, I get excited abhout what i will teach the next day, somewhere between the cooking of the food and the beat of the music the plans come in as movies." When my mom was a math teacher, I use to wonder how she planned her lessons. I remember that she would mention that she would think of her best plans while she was driving home from work, she had a long drive, therefore she had really good plans!(:

She would analyze her day in her head and while driving thought of what she would be doing the next day to make it better than the day before, she would get home and make a "skeleton" of her day, and start filling it in as the day went by, as the teacher in the beginning of our chapter.

While I was a student,  I would be sitting in the classroom as the teacher went on and on about something I personally felt like she/he hadn't explained clear enough, and at the end, I would ask myself " What did I learn through out this?"

In the chapter, in page 64, comes the Student Learning Objectives, these five objectives emphasizes the outcomes of what the students will be able to learn after the material is taught. There has been times that I, as a student have been left wondering what was taught, learning and reading about these five topics makes me wonder in retrospect if these were missing.

1. Tell who

2. is going to do what

3.when

4.how much or how often and

5.how it will be measured or evaluated

These five steps are very valuable for a teacher to be sure that the students are getting every step and not being left behind in the lack of information.

Chapter 2

One of the focus questions that really caught my attention in the beginning of the chapter was Focus Question 2: "In what ways does technology promote unique, powerful, and transformation learning for students?"
In last weeks class, Introduction to Technology for educators, we watched a Youtube video on how technology can help students as well as teachers in their academics. The video clip demonstrated text messaging your students, as a teacher to make "pop quizzes" or as group messages for assignments. As a third year college student at Edison State College, I have never came upon something like this, I have never even thought about it due to the fact that while I attended Elementary, Middle and High, I was brought up believing that using any types of electronics in class was considered rude and disrespectful. Learning that technology is one of the best ways to reach out to anybody, imagine all the possible things we can all learn, if we are using it properly.

This course has given me a new perspective on how electronics can help our education as teachers and as well as students, technology can promote, unique, powerful and transformations in leaning for students. Not all students learn the same way, one may be a visual learner while the student sitting near by may be a an auditory learner. Visual learners learn from having the images, objects in front of them or hands on. Technology would benefit this student by being able to reinforce the ideas he/she may have just read by making a PowerPoint presentation or writing a blog about the lecture, and being able to express him/herself by posting pictures on the blog.  Allowing the student to be creative in their own way using technology allows them to grow academically as well as within themselves.

In this chapter I came across " A New Science of Learning" in this page I was reading how the teacher took her students outside at different times of the day to draw the students shadow on the cement. Each time the students went out they would trace their shadows in different color chalk and be able to determine how the shadows "change" their size according to the position of the sun.
In this experiement, the teacher was explaining to her students that the Earth is the one that moves around the sun, even though it seems as the Earth is "still."

As a teacher, I would like to do a similar experiment with my students but I would also like to reinforce the idea with a presentation on the computer. Using technology to be able to reinforce the idea, as well as outside of the classroom.
I would let them take pictures of their shadow traces and upload them to the computer and make a slideshow with animations of the Earth rotating around the sun, for my students to get the visual of what it is that happens while their shadow is the one that looks like is lengthening and shrinking.
 At the end of this chapter I wanted to make an awesome word cloud with the words that I had read as well as words and tools that I had thought of throughout typing my blog.
Using Wordle.net (thank you professor Coleman) I made this really neat word cloud!

Chapter 1

How do new technologies create new opportunities for teaching and learning?


Technology's influence
" Technology plays an enormously influential role in the lives of the children and adolescents who will be your students. Infants, toddlers, and preschoolers are "immersed in media", interacting regularly with a variety of technologies and creating a new category of experience that sociologists call an electronic childhood. "
3 Maloy. Transforming learning with new technologies.

Technology now a days is everywhere, we see it at schools, jobs, libraries, restaurants, airports..etc, you name it. Children growing in this generation need to be taught with what is around them, which is the technology's of today's world.
According to our textbook " 85 percent of 5-17 year old's use computers at school" 3 Maloy meaning that if any teacher in a classroom is having a hard time with technology because they weren't condition for it, the students may have a challenge learning the material efficiently.
Technology for students empowers them by learning new skills or improving their already acquired skills through many different representations on any device, computers,cell phones,etc.
Students benefit through the learning of technology increasing the accuracy and speed in their date collection,as well as enhancing their visualizations.

Tech Tool 1.2
7 Things You Should Know About Group Texting
The seven questions
1.What is it?
Group texting is an easy means of sending one brief missive to many people by means of cell phone text messaging. The ones receiving the group message do not need a smartphone since this group text messaging can be possible with any phone that has text messaging. Many mobile apps facilitate grou messaging such as -Celly, GroupMe,Whatsapp.
2.How does it work?
"To use these tools, instructors create a group or "cell" for each class of learning team."
Meaning that the students in the group can access the channel from e-mail, the web or a mobile device with the ability to make each post public or private. Instructors can set up reminders for the deadlines, as well as being able to use hash tags to route messages posted.
3. Who's doing it?
From my personal life, I have taken online classes, and I can check my online classes and assignment due dates on my cell phone. "A number of colleges and universities are experimenting with group texting products as part of bring-your-own-device." Universities are recommending students to download group texting services so they can use their phones as clickers.
4. Why is it significant?
Text messaging is one technology to have originated on the cell phone and spread to over devices, being able to communicate through group messages provides a flexible platform for learning, offering enormous potential for collaborative work, creating a complete interactive learning environment.
5. What are the downsides? Not every student has a cell phone with an unlimited text messaging. Some instructors can become frustrated when they learn they must check elsewhere for notifications and reminders. Privacy concerns can also be an issue, because there are maps that can show where group members are located.
6. Where is it going? "One feature on the horizon for group texting is probably greater integration with social media services and the campus LMS. Facebook purchased the group-texting service Beluga in 2011, suggesting that Facebook may be looking at ways to include this technology in it service offerings." The ones who have limited texting can be fixed with apps like "Whatsapp" that offers free international texting word wide.
7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?
If current experiments in group texting for k-12 are successful in improving access to digital services, higher education can expect to see an influx of students similar with this technology and with the potential it offers for the creation of virtual communities of learning.
These tools offer a workable group-based communication option for field work or internship that can keep the instructors in contact with the students.

Works Cited:
Educause. Learning initiative. 7 Things you should know about group texting.

EME

Test Post

January 10th 2013

First day of class !