Blog Post 10

   When I become an elementary school teacher, I can see myself using data collection in many ways as a helpful tool to manage my classroom and my grades. Excel is a helpful resource to collect and present date from students' grades, especially major test grades. Being able to see students' grades all next to each other will help me as I decide what material to cover less or more throughout the years. Data collection, such as a survey, will help me get feedback from students and parents on ways to improve my teaching and management strategies in the classroom. Being able to conduct anonymous surveys may help my students feel more comfortable in presenting their feedback, so that I can better tailor my classroom and teaching to fit the needs of my students.
     In reviewing my classmates' blogs, I found it interesting how my classmates were able to gain different skills from the different assignments done in class. I was also interested in the amount of different resources my classmates accessed that will be useful when we become educators in the future.
    In terms of technology-related skills, I would most like to learn how to use new technologies to present to a classroom. For example, I would be interested in learning how to develop a supplemental activity to share with a class using a Smart or Promethean board. I could potentially accomplish this goal by attending webinars and viewing tutorials online of teachers using these technologies, and I could visit the Tech Sandbox again to get a more in-depth look at how these technologies are used.

Blog Post 9

   The Flipped Classroom is a new way for teachers to present material to students. The Flipped Classroom allows students to better grasp the material, allowing the different needs of each student to be better addressed. In a flipped classroom, students watch videos of the lesson on their own time at home, allowing some students to pause and rewind to review material as needed, while other students who have a better understanding of the material can go through a lesson quickly. Then, during the school day, students are able to receive feedback and help students wherever they need it.
    "Open Education" allows learners from all areas of the world and all socioeconomic statuses to be able to attend courses and learn from an educational institution at their own pace and on their own time. There are a number of open courses available from websites like OER Commons. "Open Content" allows teachers to make changes to certain pieces of available material in their classroom. A popular example of open content is Teachers Pay Teachers, a website where teachers can share their classroom ideas and materials with other teachers, who can then purchase and modify these materials to best suit their classroom.  "Open Source" is software that is available for anyone to access, so that a software can be improved by a community of users seeking the function that a specific software serves. An example of an open source software includes the educational platform Moodle.
     I enjoyed the two PowerPoint assignments. I learned how to link to different slides within a presentation, to make the PowerPoint more engaging and flexible for every student to use. I especially liked PowerPoint assignment 2, because I enjoyed being able to create a presentation that felt more like a fun game than a traditional PowerPoint slideshow. I will definitely be using the skills learned from these assignments throughout college and in my own classrooms when I am a teacher.

PowerPoint 1: Information Dissemination (The Water Cycle)

PowerPoint 2: Interaction (Jeopardy Game)

ILP #2 Design: Prezi

    For Independent Learning Project 2, I chose to design a presentation on World War I using Prezi. The presentation is available here.
     I found Prezi to be very helpful at creating presentations that need just quick facts presented to a class. This is a good tool that I can definitely envision myself using in my future classes and in my own classroom when I become a teacher.

Blog Post 8

  Of all the technologies seen in the lab tour, I think that the text-to-speech software would be some of the most useful in a school. There are many students who have learning or physical disabilities that prevent them from being able to read and comprehend words on a computer screen, so this type of software would be very helpful in a wide variety of circumstances.
   PowerPoint can be used to help students throughout the entirety of Bloom's Taxonomy. Students can create PowerPoint presentations to create a project and evaluate what materials to include in their project. Students can then analyze the information to deem what is most appropriate to include in their presentation, and they can apply this knowledge by thinking of practical, real-life applications for the information that they are reading and presenting. Finally, understanding and remembering the information will be a key component of using PowerPoint because students who present a lesson will need to understand and remember the information in order to effectively help their peers understand and remember the information.
   

 Using sources such as scholarly journals that research trends in technology would be useful for teachers to stay up-to-date on technologies. These journals do comprehensive research of what technologies will be trending in the future, so teachers and schools know where to best invest their time and resources on the most effective, long-lasting technologies.