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Blog 10

This week our group completed our final project for Software Applications. It was an interesting learning experience to explore Smart Boards and I think it’s a valuable tool for all teachers to explore and better understand. I think Smart Boards offer an exceptional way for teachers to create collaborative lessons that will be meaningful to their students.

Because the technology was so new to everyone in our group, our video really focuses mainly on the basics of Smart Boards and how to interact with them as an instructor. Now that I am familiar with the technology, the next step is to focus on how the technology impacts student learning and what I can do as a teacher to help them actively engage the smart board.

From what I have read from other teachers, the biggest impact smart boards can have in the classroom is keeping students engaged because of the “coolness of it” and the ability of students to actively work with the technology. It’s imperative to get students up to the board and start working with it.  Creating lessons around activities and games already offered through smart exchange is probably the best first step. I have explored Smart Exchange a little and while there is not a lot of content offered in my subject area, there are many tools I can use if I do have a smart board in my classroom.

I think Smart Boards are extremely underutilized in most classrooms. Just from my experience alone at Ohio State, I have had 5 classes where smart boards were in the classroom and never were they even turned on. Schools have spent a portion of very limited resources to obtain these tools for the classroom. If they are not used, it does a great disservice to the students.

Blog 9 Carmen Connect

I would like to reflect on our most recent class and the use of adobe connect in the classroom. This was the third class I have used adobe connect in and this was the best example of how the platform can be used effectively. While there were some hiccups as far as loading content onto the page, generally the class ran very smoothly. Like face to face classrooms, the session required a facilitator well aware of the capabilities of the site and how to manage the content being presented. Classroom management on connect is just as important as it is in a face to face classroom.

In one class I was previously in, we used connect to collaborate weekly on creating a group response to readings. Our group (five students) struggled each week with the technology and connection issues, and until we were able to resolve those problems it took our focus away from our main task. It seemed like every week, someone would be lagging the entire session or wouldn’t be able to connect. But because we were not face to face we were also able to complete the task in a more reasonable time than groups that met face to face. We didn’t get off task nearly as much after we overcame the connection issues. We could formulate our response usually in less than an hour where the groups that met in person, would spend time commuting to campus and then often meet for more than two hours.

The other class I used connect for met about ten times on connect during the semester. The management of the process is really what lacked during the connections and were the failures of the instructor to adequately prepare for the session and not the technology.

While not perfect, connect does offer an opportunity to collaborate online in a meaningful way. I enjoyed the session, but as a future teacher I would have to become much more familiar with the tools available before I could use it in the classroom.

Blog 8

I remember when I first started at Staples in 2001 paper based grade books were still in huge demand. Even as late as 2006, we were producing customizable grade books in the copy center that teachers could purchase. Those days are long gone with the development of software catering to the technology minded teacher. I can’t imagine any district not having grades and other information online anymore. It improves communication dramatically between administrators, teachers, students and parents. All aspects of student progress from attendance, assessments, IEP’s are available for everyone with the right access rights. It is a huge leap forward for transparency in education. An administrator can easily evaluate a teacher and make recommendations to new teachers on lesson plans and other opportunities. Parents don’t have to go digging through book bags to see their child’s grades.

But, we have also seen some disturbing issues regarding online grade books. Columbus City Schools and their data manipulation scandal comes to mind. Thousands of student’s grades and attendance files were changed by administrators eager to pad statistics for performance evaluations. CCS has stated that all these problems have been addressed and it is much more difficult now to manipulate these statistics any more. Our legal system has allowed these administrators to go unpunished. Yes, one administrator recently pled guilty to a felony, but received no jail time and is retired (on his school pension) and living comfortably in another state. I fear, that unless the state of Ohio aggressively punishes these administrators, more opportunities will arise to manipulate the system for the benefit of administrators and not the children they have been tasked with educating.

Blog 7

Because Carmen has been down all week, it made me very aware of the importance technology has become in the classroom. Every classroom uses technology to some extent. A recent article that caught my attention focused on the CEO of McGraw-Hill and his comments that traditional textbooks are dying and their focus as a company has moved more to online and e-books.
So what do we do as teachers if we have the type of disruptions that occurred at Ohio State this week? We talk all the time about adding to our toolbox the resources we need to be successful in the classroom. Are new teachers prepared for eventualities like the loss of data or a system crash? Probably not and that will lead to a loss of productivity in the classroom. So as future educators we must be prepared for all eventualities and while my tool box now contains primarily electronic resources, I must also prepare a file cabinet of sorts that uses the same concepts of differentiated instruction that technology provides.
One method of differentiated instruction that has long been a staple in the business world is using role play in the classroom. Providing real world scenarios, rotating roles and having the student provide each other feedback is a great option for those days when the network goes down. If you are teaching a class on technology, what do you do? Do you completely abandon your lesson plans for the week? You have to find a way to teach the same concepts by pulling out the pen and paper and going old school.

Project Based Learning

Project based learning was first introduced to me as a model for learning from a teacher I was observing for an education class. He uses project based learning in both his business class and to a lesser extent his personal finance classes. During the summer, this teacher also works with PBL.org and facilitates classes for teachers on the theories of PBL.
When I began my observations, many of the students were finishing their last semester of high school. Many of the student’s had “senioritis” so keeping these kids focused and learning was a challenge.
The first project I observed was both real life and solving a given problem. The students were introduced to the president of a website. Their problem or goal was to develop a way to market the web site to its audience. Student’s worked in small groups and presented their proposals to the president. By far the best group presentation and concept came from the most underperforming students. The students essentially used their own interests to create a music video with a catchy tune for the website. The project kept the students focused on task, they were able to learn independently and create a project they were proud of.
The last 9 weeks of this business class was focused on developing a business plan for a project or product of their own choosing. Student’s then presented their projects at the end of the semester in a “shark tank” format to a group of outside business people. I was present during the final presentations to 3 “sharks” they did not know. In most cases the presentations were effective, showed student learning and mastery of concepts I really didn’t believe these students had the ability to achieve.
When I enter the field of teaching, I plan to use PBL as much as possible. The future in education is creating lessons for students that are impactful, relevant and instill a sense of efficacy and lifelong learning.

eBooks and eTextbooks

Our readings this week in ESWDE 5624 focused primarily on e-books and how the technology can affect learning in our classrooms.  While I own a basic kindle, I rarely use it. I am much more comfortable using the app loaded on my computer. As I move from student to teacher next semester, I hope to make more use of my Kindle in both for reading for enjoyment and to advance my content knowledge in my particular discipline. I had an interesting experience with an eBook this semester I would like to share via this blog.

This semester I finished up an 8 week course on Business Law and it was the first class I exclusively used an e-textbook for a class. I wish I had read this week’s content prior to the class to make use of all the features that came along with my eBook and most importantly I wish I had also accessed the eBook during the semester instead of just accessing the connect version.  I purchased the connect version of the textbook from McGraw-Hill and was frustrated with the eBook all semester. My priority goal in purchasing the connect version was the study aids accompanying the online version. I have found flash cards and online quizzes an effective method in my studies and had used connect in other classes successfully.

It is important to note the eBook provided by McGraw-Hill did not make use of the Kindle platform, which in my opinion is very restricted because of copyright laws and not effective for textbooks. This reason is primarily why I did not access the eBook version.

The roles of Electronic Books in the Transformation of Learning and Instruction by Huang et all. Lists the top five functions used on eBooks as search, annotations, audio, bookmarks, chapter and headings. Only chapters and headings are available on the connect version of the textbook I used, Dynamic Business Law by Kubasek et all. This morning, even though my business law class is over, I finally accessed the e-book version of the text. All five functions listed by Huang are available in the eBook format, and I would have used this version had I accessed it because the connect version lacked bookmarks and a search function. I spent many hours copiously taking notes to prepare for class and although hand writing the notes were effective in learning the materials, it consumed a lot of time that I could have used more efficiently. My connect version did not allow highlighting and the ability to organize the highlights in an effective study medium to prepare for the exams and class. Both were present in the eBook format provided with the textbook.

As a future teacher, e-textbooks can and will be a very effective tool for my student’s learning. But only if I the teacher both communicate the tools available and incorporate them into the design of my lessons.

Blog 4 Social Media

I firmly believe schools need to teach children to be responsible with social media and I do not understand the reasons school districts block social media sites in their buildings. I watched the Ted Talk by William Ward and absolutely agreed with his concept of using social media as a tool to move our classrooms into the 21st century. We need access to every tool we have to reach our students and our student’s interest and connection in social media are obvious and an important way to connect with them.

And in his talk, Ward mentioned how important social media skills are in jobs today. He noted 25% of Google bonuses are based on their skills with social media. Many jobs now list social media skills as a job requirement. Sites like LinkedIn are paramount to a successful career and being irresponsible by posting an inappropriate picture or comment can also destroy a career.

I had a very difficult personal experience with social media that I want to use as a lesson for my students. While in my previous job as a general manager for Staples, I spent 2 years in a very high volume store in Manhattan, New York. I had several disgruntled associates open a twitter account in my name and post some absolutely horrible things about me, my other managers and associates. I was able to eventually have the account closed, but the damage it did to the morale in the store was very difficult to overcome. It’s for this reason, that I am passionate about teaching responsible social media.

5 image stories

For ESWDE 5622 last week, we had the fun experience of creating a 5 image story for our class. I enjoyed the assignment and had several take-aways from the assignment that would be very beneficial for my future classroom and the teacher I want to become.

The first challenge was to focus on the story and create a small enough story to be told in 5 images. I choose primitive fire starting and added a funny twist mainly to satisfy the requirement for 5 images and to make the story a little more entertaining.  Keeping lessons simple allows students time to fully absorb the content and helps them segregate the material for their own organization whether it be in their notebooks or how they organize in their brain.

Central to the story was the time frame needed to complete the task and show the challenging nature of the task. In a survival situation, you could spend all day trying to start a fire, with no regard to shelter or water.  All are important components to survival skills as we all know from the numerous survival shows on television.  Including the time on my images helped the story but I could have included pictures that showed the passage of time (ex, bright sunlight to begin, reducing light to show the passage of time).  Students are aware of the little white lies we use to teach and will call you out when they notice them.

Finally, the last element I included were transitions using power point. They also contributed to the story in a meaningful way. They were fun to experiment with and added to the story. I would recommend to any teacher that using transitions effectively in power point can help in keeping students focused on task.

Copyright and Fair Use in the Classroom

For this blog post, I want to mention some of my experiences with fair use and copyright education in both of my observation classes in school systems this past year. Both of my observations were completed in outstanding suburban school systems around Columbus with exceptional teachers working with great students. Both of my observations included lessons which required students to create projects that required them to use pictures, graphics and content taken directly from the internet and used in their projects.  In both observations, copyrights and citing sources were considered important and communicated to the students at the beginning of projects. Students were required to list URL’s as citations and grades were reduced if they didn’t include sources.  In one instance, students were given a zero on their assignment if they didn’t include references. In preparing for this blog, I went back to the websites of both programs because I was only in the classrooms for 12 weeks. Did the teachers spend a significant amount of time explaining fair use and copyright, or what I observed was all that was communicated? In the person finance and business classes I observed, the review of basic concepts were probably enough.

My real concern came out of the Infotech classes I observed in one high school. This class was a requirement for all students in the high school. This class contained two days of lessons early in the year on copyright and fair use guidelines and then for the rest of the school year, students were only required to cite the URL of the source. . By labeling the creation of these products educational material, it gave students free reign to use all these resources, while glossing over the concept of copyrighting. Are students really synthesizing the concept that it is ok today for “educational resources”, but when they enter the workforce, just listing a URL as a citation is not enough? I do not believe enough information was presented to the students and they were not clear enough or consistent in the message they sent to their students.

After I reviewed the lesson taught in this class, I felt it necessary to return to the content standards provided on the ODE website for classes I will teach in the future. Unbelievably, there are no standards listed for copyright and fair usage. In my opinion they should be included for Informational Technology and 21st Century skills. This is a huge miss that I will focus on and make sure to include in my lessons. We have a lot to teach our kids and fair use are copyright must be included.

Kahn Academy as an educational resource

https://www.khanacademy.org/

I choose Kahn Academy as my educational source for a number of reasons. I first discovered Kahn Academy several years ago on 60 Minutes and found its mission to be incredibly inspirational. I had just made the decision to return to school and pursue a career in teaching, so it became both a tool I can use in the future and as a resource for my studies.  I found it enormously helpful to review basic math and algebra concepts I hadn’t used it probably twenty years.  More recently, I had to prepare to take my business content exam in order to student teach during the spring. My concern was that I had not taken two business courses yet, macroeconomics and business law. It had also been twenty years since I took a statistics class. All were specific proficiencies I needed for the exam.  I researched Mooc’s, but because I was taking five classes this summer, I didn’t have the time to commit and the classes didn’t work well with my current classes.  Kahn Academy provided the necessary review in statistics and a basic overview in macro to get me through my content exam on the first try!

I would recommend Kahn as a tool for any adult to use as a method to learn about a topic they are interested in or review concepts that might need refreshed. As a future business education teacher, I hope to make use of Kahn in my classroom as a supplement and provide a varied method of instruction for my students. Since, I am still challenged on many math or algebra concepts, I can use a specific lesson to support learning where I might struggle in explaining the topic.

Kahn Academy is covered by a creative commons license according to their website. Their main requirement is to attribute the content directly to Kahn and provide the following notice along with any licensed educational content. “All Khan Academy content is available for free at www.khanacademy.org”.