Delicious

Delicious is a great way to incorporate social bookmarking into the classroom. As a teacher, I hope to use this as a great tool to keep my personal lessons on file. This will make it easier to incorporate these lessons and keep them on file for a later date. In my classroom, I will have my students use this as a bookmarking tool to keep their research files straight. For instance, if I need to have the students turn in a bibliography for a research paper, they will be able to keep all of their resources they used on file without having to try to keep track of them. This is a great site that I will definitely be using in my future classroom.

http://delicious.com/network/turnagem

Prezi Presentation

This is a small presentation I did over the unit I will be teaching to the class on April 23rd, which is GPS units. This was a great website to become familiar with as I will use it in my future classroom either as a teaching tool or a learning tool for my students' to use.

http://www.screencast.com/users/turnagem/folders/Default/media/55c7552c-0fb9-4dc0-9fd1-27801b7056d3

Is it Superman?...Batman?...No! It's Zotero!!

We learned about Zotero today in class. It is a really neat website because it eliminates sites such as Knightcite or other bibliography sites. This is handy because it can be a pain to sometimes go back in and remember websites that you were at previously. This also would be useful for not only educational purposes, but personal purposes as well. In the classroom, this would be helpful at all ages. No matter what the grade level, this would be a wonderful tool to use as a teacher or a student. Great website! I am glad I learned a lot more about it.

Google "Mess-Up"

You call it Google SketchUp...I call it Google MessUp. I did horrible on this! Although it would be a good tool in the classroom, I need a LOT more practice! :) 

Tweet Tweet Tweet

Today we learned about the application called "Twitter." I previously knew nothing about Twitter, so this was something that I came into completely blind-sided. I created an account before class, but that was about all. Basically, twitter just sends out updates about what people are doing. The kicker is, the update has to be less than 140 characters. This is basically like a "facebook" for the older, more mature technology user. 

Integrating this application into the classroom can reap a lot of positive benefits, or also cause a negative effects. An application that I found that would be useful in the classroom was called  "tweetscan." This is an app that weeds out all of the searches that don't have anything to do with your topic, and only give you the posts that deal with your topic directly. According to tweetscan.com, "In the innovative world of Microblogging, one site aims to organize it all. Tweet Scan searches Twitter, identi.ca, and other Laconica-based sites with more being added all the time." This would be useful in the classroom when having a book talk. For example, you could type in the title of your book, lets say, "To Kill a Mockingbird," and you would read what other people had to say about it. You could pick someone to follow, and either form a book talk group or club, and discuss your thoughts on the book. You can either agree or disagree with someone's feelings on the book based on their thoughts posted in their answer to "what are you doing?" This would be useful in the classroom because it would integrate technology into the classroom when it could originally have been absent.  This gets students who are constantly on the computer trying to sneak on their myspace or "facebook" a reason to actually enjoy getting online in the classroom and it be allowed. This application would come in handy for this type of project because it allows a "search" of posts made by people and the students in the classroom would be allowed to research someone to follow and comment on their book reviews.

This could also be a negative thing in the classroom because students would have free reign of the website "Twitter" and could basically search, or post, whatever they like. The teacher would have to monitor the classroom very carefully to make sure that this would be used for educational purposes only. The username the students would create would all be fake names, to protect the privacy of the students names online. The usernames would all be "exampleturnage" with the same tag for each student. This would make it easier to follow the students and also monitor their posts. 

I feel like tweetscan in conjunction with tweeter would be a great and fun way to integrate technology into a High School English classroom. It would be difficult to monitor, but I feel that students researching others' opinions on books discussed in class would encourage discussion and in-depth thinking about literature in the classroom. 

Ideal Classroom Project

The topic/project for the Ideal classroom was a very long and confusing process. It is a lot of information to take in all at once, and I felt very overwhelmed at the beginning of the project. There is so much information to cover, it is hard to sort it all out and get organized. We decided to use a music/recording room for our ideal classroom. We thought that music integrated into the curriculum can really make a difference in the succession of the students. We hoped to create an atmosphere that was fun, creative, but also educational. We did not want to limit ourselves to only studying music, but incorporating it into math, reading, social studies, and science.

The process that we used to create this final product was one of organization. We started off by collaborating our ideas and deciding what each of us thought an ideal classroom would consist of. When we put our heads together, we came up with the music room. It has been proven that students involved in music have higher rates of graduation than students not involved. By integrating music, it reiterates this idea of using music and creativity in the classroom. After compiling a "rough draft" of what we wanted in the classroom, we got to work creating a site to display every aspect we wanted. We created a google site and each contributed our ideas, explaining in detail to characterisitics of the students, the classroom set-up, and a rough draft of a potential floor plan. We thought that by using a website, it would make our ideas more organized and flow in a better way that is easier to understand.

Technology played a very large role in the collaboration process between my partner, Abby and myself. Since this project was due right after Spring Break, we had to use the access of the internet to stay in contact and to create this site. By both of us having access to our Ideal Classroom site, we could edit and create pages from over 100 miles away from each other. This was a project that could not have been completed without the aid of technology.

A barrier that caused a kink in our project was the essence of time. Because it was assigned over Spring Break, it was hard to get time to meet to work on it. So this project was mostly done collaboratively online. We met a few times to discuss changes/additions, but nothing too major. This really was the only downfall we had while working on this project. I felt we worked well together and our ideas on the ideal classroom were aligned in many ways. I felt that I learned a lot from this project about what I want my classroom to be like, and also compare it to what other future educators may want their classrooms to look like. This was neat to see the differences and also the similiarites come out in things such as where the classroom will be located, how many students in a classroom, what kind of technology is being used, etc. This project not only put into perspective what I want in my future classroom, but also gave me a chance to compare it to what other people want in theirs.

This project was extremely difficult in the essence that it was so detailed. I felt it was important to include all of the small details in our descriptions to really get a feel of what we wanted our classroom atmosphere to be like. Also, we were specific so it could display the effort we put into this project. I feel we did an exceptional job on our ideal classroom despcription and it was a great learning opportunity as well.

Using Blogs in the Classroom

Recently, I realized that a major switch was needed in my life. The major that I am currently in is elementary education. The entire time I have been at UNI has been a great experience, it just did not feel right. I recently discovered that I am going to pursue secondary education. I want to be a High School College Prep/English teacher. I have always been fascinated with poetry, writing, reading, and grammar. This choice has also impacted the way I look at the current classes I am involved with now. I have to make the most of my experience, even if thus far it has been not on the right track.

Recently while researching different blogs that could be used in the high school classroom, I found a couple that caught my eye. The English blog of this 11th grade teacher discussed different ways to integrate poetry into the curriculum. I found it interesting the way that this school chose to use a blog as an informative tool instead of a teaching one. This blog shared teachers' ideas instead of using it as a resource for students to help them understand not only poetry, but also integrating technology into their curriculum.

This has been an enlightening experience that has changed the course of direction here at UNI. I feel that now, my view of technology in the classroom will be extremely different and look forward to blogging about these changes.