Educational Technology

As a teacher, it is essential to incorporate various forms of technology into your classroom. Technology is the basis for many jobs in today's workforce, as well as being an integral part of everyday life. It is therefore an important part of our classrooms as well. As a teacher, it is our job to prepare our students for the real world, and we cannot do this without teaching a sufficient background on today's technology.
Incorporating technology can benefit both teacher and student. For the teacher, it offers a great deal of ease. It enables ease in many areas such as grading, locating works, long-term assessment, sharing of information, and much more. It offers many benefits to students as well. It allows them to build a student portfolio which they can keep for the year, or can throughout their lives. It also allows them to acquire a lot of knowledge that they will need later in life, from taking photos on a family vacation, to creating an excel spreadsheet and graph to document business profits and much more. There are endless possibilities to the ways that students can benefit from the technology that they learn in the classroom.
Teachers can, however, also run into difficulties while teaching. One is simply the availability of technology. Often, teachers do not have access to enough technology for their entire class to use it at once. Also, if they are able to get enough technology, it may be difficult to teach to the variety of levels. Every student has differing amounts of technology background, which can range from none to expert by the upper levels. This can make it very difficult to keep all students engaged in one lesson.
This class has taught me a great deal about technology. Even the programs that I thought I knew how to use, I learned that there was so much more to each of them that I still did not know. There is a lot of valuable information from this class that I plan to use in my future. I plan to continue to use the tools that were taught in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, etc. I would also like to continue to use the things we learned in the SMART technology if my future school has the technology available. I would like to use blogging in my classroom as well, however the level of students would have to determine the appropriateness of this. Social bookmarking is also something that I discovered through this class that I plan to continue to use in my everyday life. It is the perfect way to maintain and organize links, as well as share them with others.

Copyright Laws

While learning about copyright laws in class, what surprised me the most was that things were automatically copyrighted as soon as they were typed, written, recorded, etc., although not copyrighted when spoken or sung, etc. I always thought that nothing was copyrighted until someone went through a legal process to acquire the copyright. I was especially surprised because the legal process of making it officially known to be yours was said to cost about $35 and I would expect that the government would lose a great deal of money by making things automatically copyrighted.
I do feel that it is a teacher's responsibility to help teach his or her students about respect for copyright. Copyright is law, and needs to be respected by everyone. In addition, I don't see how a teacher can expect to teach students to respect other laws, or not to plagiarize if they do not show that they have a respect for copyright as well, making it very important for teachers to also pay very close attention to copyright.
When I become a teacher I will model copyright ethics in my own classroom. I will do this be being very careful not to break copyright. Also, so that students realize that there are copyright laws, I may point out that I have obtained the correct permission to use something and explain to them why we can't use certain things without permission.

Interactive Whiteboards

Let me just start by saying that I absolutely love this technology! Interactive whiteboards can add so much to a lesson. They are such a great way to get kids involved in a lesson and the kids will enjoy it and can really have a lot of fun with it too. It offers so much to a teacher and has tons of features for you to add into any presentation. From exciting backgrounds to the basic ability to move things around on each slide during a presentation while locking others in place, to the many interactive activities that SMART provides with their software, resources just seem to be endless.
They can enhance teaching by providing a more exciting way of presenting information to students, because the more that their learning is enhanced, the more your teaching is enhanced. Also, the technology comes with many features in every subject. They are divided into backgrounds, images, and interactives, and you can just browse through categories or search, making it easy to find just what you are looking for. The interactives provide a lot of great ways to present information to the students that you may not have otherwise been able to do. They are great for capturing attention and including everyone. They can also enhance student learning greatly. The interactive nature of the technology makes it much easier for many students to focus, and makes it very easy for all students to get involved.
The technology was fairly simple to learn, especially on the basic level, and already having knowledge of software such as powerpoint, because the basics are the same, however the SMART technology allows movement and further interaction to be added into the slides. Things were all very easy to find, and simple to understand how to use. The only thing that was difficult about learning the technology for me was that some of the things I am used to having in microsoft softwares, weren't there, such as crop, so it was neccessary to find other ways around it to achieve the same goal, which in this case meant using the capture function. Also, though it wasn't difficult for me, if you were starting to learn this on your own, rather than in a class as we did, you may not catch on as fast, and may not even realize that some of the possibilities are there.
In general, interactive whiteboards are great for the classroom, and could be highly benefitial to have installed. Though there are drawbacks, as with anything else, the pros outweigh the cons by far. The first thing to consider when getting an interactive whiteboard is positioning. You will need to make sure that there is a good place to install the whiteboard so that all students can see it as well as reach it. While technical difficulties are common with any technology, and the software may take some time to learn, the benefits to both teacher and student will make it well worth while. Lessons can be made much more interesting and interactive, which will help students to pay attention, helping teachers to get across more information, and have fewer behavioral issues.

Software Productivity

This week in class we learned a lot of different skills for class on the computer. We made a lesson plan template in Word that lets us just tab through to add the information for each lesson. We learned about OdysseyWare and adaptable Online Curriculum which teachers can use in many ways. Students can progress through lessons at their own rate which allows them to review things they don't understand or advance more quickly. It also allows teachers to adapt the curriculum as they see fit. Finally, we used what we learned about Word, Publisher, and Inspiration as well as software production to create our own Newsletter, Flyer, Graphic Organizer, and Quiz.
For the Newsletter we used Microsoft Publisher to produce a 1 page newsletter. I created a newsletter for parents in my imaginary mixed toddler classroom. I chose a template, then added the information that I wanted to give parents for that month. I inserted a picture to go along with one of the topics. I then included a simple listing of upcoming dates.
We used Microsoft Word for the flyer and Quiz. For the flyer I used textboxes, shading, clip art, and more to create a visually pleasing flyer for an upcoming event. I used tables to easily allign the quiz. This made it easy for students to read as well as for me, as the teacher, to grade.
Finally, for the graphic organizer I used inspiration. I created a behavior chart for special education. It required the use of the rapid fire tool as well as inserting graphics into the file. The chart would need to be changed to accomodate each students schedule for each day. Students would be able to add stars to show that the targeted behavior was acheived during each part of the day in order for them to work toward a reward.
It was very benefitial to learn how to do all of these things. As a teacher, I will commonly need to create lesson plans and having a template which I can merely tab through will make it infinitely more easy. Flyers, quizzes, graphic organizers, and newsletters are also all things that teachers need to create often, so learning to create them in the easiest, quickest, and most visually appealing way will be very benefitial. It will make it much easier to make them when the time comes, as well as much faster. Time is key as a teacher, so being able to make these as quickly and efficiently will be very helpful.
I think that Inspiration will be the most useful for me as a teacher. It offers many templates, and you can make anything else you wanted by simply adding and linking more bubbles. It can be used in individual lesson planning, to illustrate concepts to students, for a behavioral chart, for students to create illustrations of topics, or in any number of ways. It allows for a great deal of individuality and makes it easier to follow.

Web Resources

My favorite web resource is eThemes because it covers so many topics. There are hundreds of topics with many links for each one. It makes it very easy to find something on whatever topic you are looking for. It also includes standards for many of them. It also provides teaching tips on everthing from behavior and hands-on math to elmos and ipods.
The web resource I would use the most is probably 4teachers because it provides many things to create on the one website. Rubistar to create rubrics, and quiz star to create quizzes would both be easily and frequently used because they provide an organized way of creating them, which provides you a starting point and allows any specifications to be made that you desire. Assign-a-day is a tool that can be used by the teacher to create an online calendar, which I think would be a good way create an online communication with parents that would allow them to see due dates and special events, allowing them to know what is going on in the class and what their children should be doing. Think Tank and Academic Skill builder are both great sources to use for the students in the classroom as well. Classroom architecht is another great tool that helps teachers to see how effective a classroom setup may be and potential problems before spending the time and effort to re-arrange their room just to find it doesn't work and have to move it all back.

Inspiration

I can see where the software called Inspiration gets its name, as it naturally provides tons of inspiration on ways to use it in the classroom. In early childhood education it can be used by the teacher to make many of the things that would go up in a classroom. Some ideas include:
-daily schedule
-displaying of student works
-converting things discussed in class into simple outlines
-a teacher to do or how to guide
-a web to go along with a book you read
In an elementary classroom you can use many of the same ideas as well as some more:
-students create story webs
-students create character webs to show connection and character traits
-students create cause-and-effect maps in history and science
-teachers can create concept maps for planning and use in lessons
-teachers can input information and present it in both a visual web as well as an outline to target multiple types of students
In a special education classroom there are even more uses, as all of the previous uses can be used for content as well as many more to target things such as behavior and regulation. Depending on the students' levels students can create their own, work with the teacher to create it, or the teacher can create them to give to the students. Some ideas are:
- many types of behavior charts
- checklists
- classroom picture schedule
- individual schedules
- content uses for lessons

As you can see, there are countless uses for inspiration in the classroom for both teacher and student. If I was a teacher in a school without inspiration I would probably invest in if for my classroom, though it would depend on the level that I was teaching at. At an early childhood level, or in a special education class in which the children were not very high functioning on computers, I might not because the students may not be able to use it, however in an elementary or special education classroom with children who can use the computer, I would most likely want to invest in inspiration for my classroom.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking has many classroom applications, both as use for student and teacher. As a teacher it can be extremely useful as a way to save websites that you find, making it easy to use at home and at school, as well as easy to relocate from year to year or even simply day to day. It is also very useful as a search engine for finding more resources to use in your classroom. You can see what other people have found that relates to what you are teaching. If you know other teachers who are using it, or introduce it to other teachers in your school it makes it incredibly simple to share the things you find with each other.

It can be useful for your students to use social bookmarking as well. They can use it as a way of submitting a bibliography for younger students who do not yet know how to create a bibliography, so that you can see the sources they used. It can also be used as a way for students to share sources while doing group projects. There are countless ways to use social bookmarking in the classroom for both the student and the teacher.

The endless uses would also bring a great deal of benefits to student and teacher alike. Teachers are able to find many more resources through social bookmarking, and in far less time. They do not have to sort through as many sites because they can look only at sites that have already been determined to be useful. Students can benefit because they are able to share many sources with each other with the click of a button. The added ease that social bookmarking supplies is extremely beneficial to all.

It can even benefit me now, as a college student, before I enter my own classroom. It can be used as a search engine to find sources for any class, to find samples of lessons, and so much more. I can also use it among friends to share interesting sites that I find. I can even save sites for the future when I do have a classroom, which I have already found useful. Social bookmarking makes so many things online much easier to do.