Friday, June 26, 2009
Session 2
Share your ideas/plans for embedding technology tools in your classroom instruction to help students communicate/collaborate globally. What would you like your students to gain from technology usage? How do you envision the use of these tools will enhance students' learning in your classes?
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America used to have it easy. Think back to the space race in the 1950s. The federal government was behind education like never before. We HAD to beat the Russians. Science and math were stressed at all grade levels. We needed to compete and defeat the communist regime. Now with the advent of the internet and especially high-speed access (it seems every third world country has affordable high-speed access, but not my corner of Ritchie County, WV) people can work, learn and compete on a world-wide scale. This means once again, America needs to get its proverbial head out of the sand and push education like we did to win the space race. The quote I would pull from the article is: "...what we learn today in school will be outdated by tomorrow, and therefore, the most successful people in the 'flat world' will be those who can adapt and learn quickly." How true is that? We will need to use Web 2.0 Tools to learn and to learn "it" quickly.
ReplyDeleteTechnology usage will allow students to compete and succeed in the global marketplace. Learning will become more natural and more akin to the tools used in the workplace.
One way technology is used in my classroom is with the use of Finale 2009. This music writing program has many aspects of writing music. One aspect in Finale is called "Finale Showcase". This is the place where composers, arrangers, educators, and students can post their Finale music files online for shared viewing, playing, transposing, and printing. Students that want to post their original compositions can do so through Finale Showcase and communicate/collaborate with others globally about their music. They also get a chance to learn from other arrangers/composers about writing styles, organization of music and the overall ways of composing music for all genres. I strongly encourage my students to take advantage of this technology tool, with the hopes that the "right" people may take notice of their music. For my classroom, this is also a strong motivator, because students have an opportunity to see what's going on outside of WV in the music world. In the past, my students sometimes felt that "nobody's listening" because their musical ideas have only been heard locally, but through Finale Showcase, the world is a much wider place. Check it out!
ReplyDeleteIn my classroom and school, I would like to see our students and teachers using the technology tools we have become as much a part of the classroom as books and pencils. I would like them to remember and use all the Internet resources that are on their computer desktops. As a library media specialist, I want the books to stay but I want the technology resources to come to mind for research, too. When the students leave the school, that is where most of their resources will be. These digital resources are also the most current. However, the students must learn to evaluate the information so they recognize unbiased, true facts.
ReplyDeleteMy ideas of embedding technology tools into the classroom instruction will hopefully only add to our physical education program. I will have 5th grade students to use a variety of internet based searches to complete one of the activities listed below. While focusing on the main topics of physical education, we will break down walls of genders, age, and cultural bias. We will look at topics such as improving health through regular exercise and making good nutritional choices. We will look at fair competition: practice regiment and use of steroids. We will look at sportsmanship: attitude, ability, and work ethic. We will explore a variety of sports and their location of origin. We will also answer the questions, "what are the leading sports in a variety of locations locally and around the world?"
ReplyDeleteI also plan to use something like Global school net to complete an online expedition that follows the journey of a first time marathon runner and how they prepare and condition both physically and mentally to compete. We will follow through the end result of completing the grueling 26.2 mile competition. Using the International school cyberfair, students will conduct research at the local community level of community organizations (sports or health improvement based). They will then publish this information online. They will later compare their findings with those of students across the globe by accessing both current and past projects of similar subject matter.
This will help to create multiple opportunities for students to communicate/ collaborate globally. Students will gain a better understanding of health and physical education as it relates to themselves,their world, and the world as a whole.
I envision these tools helping students to learn because it provides students with multiple avenues to succeed. It is new and exciting. I could see my students showing a real interest. I could see parents and community members getting involved. I really see this as a exciting, affordable, interesting, fun, achievable means to integrating technology to enhance my physical education program.
Embedding technology into my classroom/therapy room will be an ongoing process. I have, in just this few weeks, learned so much about what is available. I have to agree with Greg that technology is slow to develop "in my little cornor" as well. Not a lot of our students have internet access outside of the school system - and even there, outside of the scheduled computer lab time. This condition is continually improving. For myself, I am itinerant and work in the hall, outside the bathroom, on the stage, in the supply closet, etc. Having stated this, I am excited and motivated when I read all that is going on with making the classroom flat. I can see utilizing the small group instruction, 'learning pods', to work with my language delayed students with web based exercises. I would like to incoorporate the language skills instruction with NCLB thoughts- meeting individual needs - utilizing web quest vs. Podcast vs. Inspiration vs. class blog, etc. where the student choose their group to work in. (also considering interdisciplinary units to meet different needs). I would love a classroom where I guide and facilitate their learning - but not control how it accomplished. I would like to also incorporate more technology into the literature program I have with the PreSchool and Special Needs kids - to make the stories come to life! The Global Schoolhouse will be a great source of information and ideas/contacts. I just need the county to catch up with providing the 'means' to do these things.
ReplyDeleteWeb 2 blog
ReplyDeleteShare your ideas/plans for embedding technology tools in your classroom instruction to help students communicate/collaborate globally. We have a distant learning class which allows our students to communicate with Liberty College in Virginia as well as all of the other students who are taking the course. In my Spanish classes we use a web cam to be able to communicate with a Spanish class in Buffalo, NY. After looking at Global SchoolNet’s I have decided to expand on my West Virginia’s class my students are going to collaborate with a history class in Buffalo, NY to compare and contrast the effect of changes in industries. Some of the topics Is there Life after Bethlehem Steel Plant, What is the future for King Coal, Can we compete with outsourcing? To complete this project students will be using web cams, word processing, excel, power points, video, emails, and search engines.
What would you like your students to gain from technology usage? Not to be afraid to try something new if it doesn’t work out. Technology is changing daily and at times I feel overwhelmed, I just learn a new thing ‘ blogging’ and now there is twitter. I don’t know anything about twitter. I saw a commercial about two people showing their friend their new phone. The friend was saying verbally I just make calls, I don’t need all those gadgets, but in his mind he wanted that new phone. I just make calls; I have no desire for an Ipod, podcast, palm pocket (if they still have those). All my life I have been behind in technology – when cars came out with am/fm radio with 8 tracks – I got a car with am/fm radio – when cars came out with am/fm radio and cassettes – I got the 8 track and so on! I don’t want my students to be like me. Jump in try the last gadget!
How do you envision the use of these tools will enhance student’s learning in your classes? Regardless of their learning style and what application of the tools they use it will enhance all of my students. Just the simple transaction from a desk top to a lap top had increased the learning process. I have students who bring their lap top to class to take notes. Being flexible to accept different formats for homework assignments has help my students.
One thing to take into consideration is that we have to teach our students that it isn’t America against the world. Too many of our students’ parents have lost jobs to outsourcing – down sizing – foreign competition. Due to these circumstances, some people have resentment and don’t what to be global, they want our government to put America first.
C. Cole
One thing that this topic helped me to realize is that there are many different ways that we can incorporate technology into our classrooms in order to communicate globally. One of the websites that we were to investigate this week was the GlobalSchoolNet site. I found it very interesting, because there are so many people that have already began to make their classrooms more flat by using sites such as this.
ReplyDeleteI know, along with many others, that this is what our Nation needs. No matter what or who, everyone should strive for more knowledge and for what all the world has to offer. I want my students to not only learn more about what we are covering, but maybe discover what another student or person can introduce about this topic.
A student from another state, country, or even continent may be able to shed light on something I am unable to. That is one thing that I feel the 21st century learning is all about. It helps students and teachers to realize that some things need to be learned cooperatively, and technology helps us do just that.
Exploring the whole world by just sitting down in from of a computer. That is the gift that we as teachers want to provide to our students. I am always exploring on the internet to find different resources for staff, students, and parents to use. Being a library/media person means that I need to help the students and staff develop methods on finding information from a wide variety of resources and tie it all together. sometimes it is a video clip from the History Channel or a game from Math Cats that tie into the text book unit. Other times it can be finding articles on EBSCO and the local paper to do a report. We need to teach our students how to process the information into a format that they can understand and apply.
ReplyDeleteI think it would be interesting to have my students communicate with students from other countries and compare the driver liscensing procedures in their countries to ours. We had a foreign exchange student from Germany and he explained to our class how driving over there was a privilege. He explained how the liscense was very expensive to obtain. They could also discuss the different traffic laws that each country has (and similarities).
ReplyDeleteI was trained on Think.com last year and am trying to encourage our teachers to use it with their classes for Project Based Learning. We are starting small, but the potential for world wide communication with other classrooms is enormous. The students are getting comfortable with technology skills and now we need to move on to interpersonal and communication skills. I want to help them learn to post productive comments, to analyze information for its appropriatness for research questions, and to learn which tools to use when.
ReplyDeleteI remember being a student in the sixth grade and for one of our projects, we had to write to a student in another state in order to learn about it. We would then present what we learned to the rest of our class. How times have changed. We no longer need to write letters to students in other states, we can send messages electronically around the world. What better way to learn about another culture, it's people and customs that go directly to the source?
ReplyDelete"21st century content: emerging content areas such as global awareness; financial, economic, business, and entrepreneurial literacy; civic literacy; health and wellness awareness" -- optional readings
We have taken learning to a whole new dimension. All of the above can now be easily achieved. I think that students must daily participate and facilitate new contacts around the globe in order to "broaden their horizons." The possibilities are now endless.
This upcoming school year I plan to incorporate blogging, email, and power points into my lessons. Students will develop their own power points to share their learnings in various units of instruction. I hope to use a blog to help students share their viewpoints about the concepts they are learning as well show understanding of the concepts. It will reinforce communication skills particularly their nonverbal communication skills i.e. writing and spelling. I hope to use one blog a week in a core subject around a specific concept. I will choose a different subject each week to blog about.
ReplyDeleteI also hope to set up a penpal network with another elementary school in my county through email so students can communicate in a realistic setting, and also help them with their keyboarding skills for the Westest Writing. I can also use the email to email me answers and or questions.
Lastly, I hope to use group power points to demonstrate what students have learned about a concept. As I have been brainstorming, I also thought about Google Earth and using it in the classroom smartboard to teach Geography. Along with technology skills and using them to enhance instruction, one other important aspect of embedding technology is teaching students how to use technology appropriately and what each application can do for their work by understanding the uses of the application
Next year in my classroom I intend to expand upon the powerpoints that I had my students to complete this year. I want to students to automatically think about how they can do an assignment on the computer before thinking how are they going to complete the worksheet. If we are to convert to true 21st century learning we as teachers are going to have to relinquish some of our power and let the students decide what would be the most efficent for them to complete the assignment. We need to make the children take ownership in their work and to have a sense of pride on what they are completing. When they are involved in the decision making and can go the computer and come out with a product that they are proud of and can learn from their mistakes, it seems to leave a more positive effect instead of us handing them a worksheet and then pointing out everything that they did wrong. I want my students to continue to complete projects using powerpoint, begin to complete their own blogs to correspond and conference with one another and other classrooms also. I also want them to create their own Wiki website so that we can highlight some of their work and others can learn from their efforts.
ReplyDeleteMy worry in teaching students to use Web 2.0 tools is that very few of my adult students know anything about the 1.0 stuff--Word, Excel, PowerPoint, email, searching the Internet...etc. At least that's the way I understand the difference between the two "versions".
ReplyDeleteI was very impressed with the podcast in our readings for session 2. That activity taught reading, writing, research skills, and the tech skills. I will definitely try to learn more about GarageBand...very impressive. Of course, it looked like each student had access to a Mac. I wonder how long this project took and how it was managed.
I would also like to try a wiki for my students.
I would like to take advantage of a project that would allow my students to communicate with students from other countries. Perhaps to set up blogs to exchange ideas and complete a collaborative project. In the reading, the business community expressed concern that our students lacked basic skills of communication and problem solving, accountability and self-direction. I would like my project to concentrate on these areas. I would like for my students to come away from their learning experience with a new awareness of a global world and that their future will be one where they will most likely be working or competing with people from all over the globe. That to me is the real idea of a "flat" world. Students need to be aware that they must be able to adapt to new tools and ideas and that Web 2.0 tools used today will probably not be the tools that they will need in the near future. ADAPTABILITY is the tool.
ReplyDeleteI want to incorporate more technology into my small group instructio through the use of the internet and possibly podcast. After looking at the website this week I so how students in other classroom are discovering different topics and comparing what that discover with others in another country. I think the use of use of books is always important when doing research, but like many have commented the Interenet is so much more current than a book that may have been sitting on a shelf for a year or two. However, students need to be reading reliable information on the Internet. We use Skype at my school and think this would also be a great way to communicate with others globally.
ReplyDeleteI would like to use a blog or google documents to connect students from a different class. My idea is to group students from different blocks together and each week give them an assignment (problems, project, research, etc) based on the learning targets for the course. Since the students are not in the same class they would be forced to use the web tools to communicate. I like the idea of having the students communicate with these web tools because it is something that is becoming common in today's colleges and workplaces. Also, it is a great way to connect math with reading and writing skills.
ReplyDeleteI would like to try using the Podcast in my classroom instruction. That activity interconnected multisubjects. I would also like to incorporate a blogging activity. I would like my students gain from technology usage the skills needed to compete in todays world and for them to learn what a flat world is. I am hoping that the students will know how to utilize the tools they have available to them. I would like to see students to not be afraid to be constantly learning new ways to use technology, and know it will be continuously changing.
ReplyDeleteI think it would be really cool if I could find a way for my students to chat with students in other countries to discuss the health problems that our students are conerned with at their age compared with the concerns of people the same age in other countries. I would also like to have access to maybe a video camera or webcam for my dance class because my students here in southern WV could learn dances first hand from students in other countries. Most students like to use technology and I feel they would enjoy learning from someone else their own age so far away.
ReplyDeleteAs an adminitrator I do not have a classroom, but I will encourage teachers to use applications such as wikis to share what they are doing with others. I would also encourage them to participate in professional development opportunities geared towards embedding technology both in the classroom and on the global scale. I would hope that the students would realize that the internet is global. I would also like them to learn that they can be creators of information and not just viewers of information.
ReplyDeleteMy students have a great handle on technology. I would love for other teachers to get on board so everyone was all on the same page. I understand the resistance (my mom's VCR clock is STILL blinking) But there are numerous resources available to remedy lack of tech savvyness. I'm almost to the point where I want to say there is no excuse. People cringe when I tell them I read/write blogs daily. It's a good place to start for those that have mastered email!
ReplyDeleteFor my students we have made the global move small.. We started with small peer groups, moved to whole class, school and across the state. I hope to add additional opportunities and hopefully into other countries to expand our flat classroom into the global arena.
Last summer, thanks to the West Virginia CITERA EdVenture Group, I learned how to program and manipulate Virtual Reality Modeling Language, or VRML. I loaded the necessary applications onto the 16 computers in our library, and onto the 29 computers in our first floor computer lab, so that anyone who became interested in VRML would have easy access to it.
ReplyDeleteTwo science teachers (one of them had taken the CITERA workshop with me) and I instructed all of the seventh grade science students on manipulating VRML language so that they could place representations of three types of star stages in order. Using authentic-looking pictures of real star stages, we covered circular figures with these pictures. Then, using the same exact pictures blown up, we placed them around our computer area so that the students could compare the arrangement on their computer screens with the larger pictorial representations. We paired students to increase their chances of success with this lesson. With the few students who did not achieve the desired objective, we either asked one of their peers to help their groups, or we were able to guide them through finishing their lesson correctly. All students were able to wind up with correctly ordered star stages.
I would like, in any tech lesson, to establish with the students what they DO know, and then build on that knowledge to achieve learnings of which they are initially uncertain, but feel confident enough to try to understand. As students experience success with all things technological, they are just that much more comfortable with trying more complex operations. Successful student technology usage should translate into students feeling assured as they encounter rewarding and productive educational applications that enable them to become further adept at 21st century skills in any setting.
During our next school year, and just as the seventh graders experienced last year, I anticipate that the students will become engaged with the interactive task at hand, as well as proficient at manipulating (and when we have completed the stated lesson) and adding their original transformations to the 3-D objects. Students like the opportunity to be creative, and we like to provide them with that opportunity.
This past year I learned about a website called ww.thinkquest.com. I used it a little last year but this year, I plan on using it a lot with my middle school students. The site is set up like MySpace so the students are used to these up and can use it with ease. The purpose of the site is for students to communicate and share idea in a secure location. What I really like about this site is that the only people who can log on to the site are teachers and students. To gain access to the site you must get a username and password through the State Department. This feature allows students to freely communicate and only be talking to other students. The site offers a large amount of other security features such as a "dirty word" filter, which will not let students post words that can be used in a negative manner. The teachers are required to log on to the site at least once every 2 weeks or the school account will be locked down. The teachers on the site have the right to flag any content of the student and by doing this the students are required to take a safety quiz before they can log back into the site. I plan to use this and other sites like this to set up learning groups for my students this year. A teacher or student can set up a project to work with another school to gather information and communicate. There are members on this site from all over the world so the students can truly communicate globally. The students also have the right to search for other project that students around the world are creating to join and be part of. This site can be accessed at any time from any computer with Internet access.
ReplyDeleteBy using technology I hope my students will gain a better understanding of the world around them. There are many technology tools that are bringing the world closer together that are so easily accessible for all students. During the NECC Conference this past week I attended a couple of session on using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom. One of the tools that I learned about was called Google Earth Lit Trips. These are set up with Google earth and found at www.googlelittrips.org. By using these trips the teacher can connect the students with information from the story. The trips are set up on Google Earth with location the characters traveled to during the story. Once there the students can see the local area and what the character would have been looking for while visiting this place in the story. This tool and others like it are connecting students with places all over the world in the touch of a button.
By using technology tools in the classroom, I hope to enhance my students understanding of the world around them. I hope to be able to take them to places and see thing that they could not have normally seen. I also hope to allow them to communicate with other students in different locations to learn from and teach in the global learning classroom.
While it has been several years since I was in the classroom, I was so impressed on how my students were so open on the internet - by creating accounts such as myspace, or by posting to blogs. I told myself numerous times that I will never open myself up like that for everyone to see. I know find that the attitude that the students have towards these sites are very positive. Often times, students are posting worthhile information on these sites - journals even. How can we complain when these students are writing - that is what we are asking of them inside the classroom - we don't even have to worry about creating the assignment, they are doing it on their own.
ReplyDeleteWe need to begin to think like our students and not have the attitude of putting ourselves out there for everyone to see...but that we are using these tools to communicate with a large variety of individuals that could provide very worthwhile information to the topics that we are passionate about.
I do not have a classroom of my own, instead I help put the technology into the classroom. I think Interactive whiteboards are very important because they really help get students engaged. I like the use of student responder systems to do quick informal assessment on topics. We have also started using mp3 players to help slower readers come up to speed.
ReplyDeleteI want students to learn how technology can help them achieve better and more global answers. In today's business environment, employers want the answer yesterday so I also see technology as a tool to speed up the answering process.