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Module 6: SRSs as Formative Assessments

The assignment for our final module was learn about and demonstrate Student Response Systems (SRS). For the first part of this assignment, we were each assigned two SRSs to learn about and later discuss with our assigned Jigsaw groups. The ones that I was assigned were Poll Everywhere ( www.polleverywhere.com ) and The Answer Pad ( http://app.theanswerpad.com/homepage.html ).  Although I would not use Poll Everywhere too often in my own classroom, I still thought that it was a better tool to use than The Answer Pad. The first advantage of using Poll Everywhere is the accessibility it provides when you create a new presenter account. There are also multiple types of questions that you can ask with the website such as multiple choice, word clouds, short answer, clickable images, rank order, and 2X2 matrix. You can even ask different types of questions within the same presentation by selecting the survey option. As for responding, students can log into the presentation online or text
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Twitter Part 2

As I have mentioned in my previous blog post about Twitter, our class’ most constant homework assignment is using our Twitter accounts to tweet, retweet, or respond to other tweets about technology in education. We were also required to follow educators and organizations who post about using technology in school. On the last Twitter blog post, I mentioned that I started retweeting lots of posts from EdTech K-12 Magazine and some from Tara Linney. Since then, I have still mostly been retweeting posts from these users; but I have also retweeted posts from two other users which were Anna Vaughan and Richard Byrne. The former posted an article about connecting students and teachers through social media, which included a list of multiple social media that students can choose from. This list includes Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, Google Docs, Skype, Instagram,Tumblr. I really like this list because it encourages students to connect through videos and other sites that they would use
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Module 5: Flipping Out

Our assignment for the class’ fifth module was creating a classroom flip video. A classroom flip model turns the traditional model of instruction around. In other words, instead of the teacher presenting new content to students during class and then having the students complete assignments after class, the “lecture” part is presented online before face-to-face meeting. The content we had to present in our flip projects needed to be subjects that will eventually be used by the students in our field placements. They also needed to align with a standard for the grade that those students are in. My placement was in a special education school called Elim, and the classroom had students who were in 2nd through 5th grades and who all had autism. During my time in that placement, I noticed that one of the students did not seem to know how to identify the different parts of sentences (nouns, adjectives, verbs). Because of this, I chose to create an Adjectives presentation based on this third g
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Module 4: Technology Interaction

The most recent assignment for our class was teaching an interactive lesson on the SMARTBoard. Our lessons had to be in the form of a SMART Notebook file and last no more than five minutes. Not only was this assignment helping us develop our skills with creating a lesson on SMART Notebook 17.0 but it was also helping us practice our lesson planning skills. The lesson that I chose to taught was a 3rd grade reading introduction to finding the author’s tone. In order to teach this topic, I selected a short story and inserted the first paragraph of it into the SMART Notebook file. On the day that my lesson was taught, I read this paragraph aloud to my pretend students and placed emphasis on the vocabulary words/phrases within them. I then assessed the students’ knowledge of the vocabulary definitions with a matching game. Next, I used a fill-in-the-blank game to evaluate their knowledge of what the vocabulary words/phrases meant in the story’s context. In order to assess the students’ abil
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Twitter Part 1

Our class’ most constant homework assignment is using our Twitter accounts to tweet, retweet, or respond to other tweets about technology in education. This also included following educators and organizations who post about using technology in school. According to many teachers who use Twitter regularly, it is an effective tool for building and connecting with their Personal Learning Network. In other words, they agree that it is a good site to use for sharing educational ideas and learning from other educators’ ideas. The outcome of this assignment, therefore, is to help us see trends and gain insights about the increasing use of technology in education today. Since I did not have a Twitter account before this class, I had to create one and get used to checking it regularly. At first, checking Twitter regularly was a little difficult because the only social media I constantly look at is Pinterest. Once I got into it, however, I started retweeting lots of posts from EdTech K-12 Magazin
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Module 2: Digital Storytime

For our class’ second module, we had to create a Digital Story with Wevideo.com. This assignment required us to choose an Illinois Teaching Standard and connect it to our lives in the form of a story. The standard I chose was SS.G.2.3: Compare how people modify and adapt to the environment and culture in our community to other places. I connected this standard to my personal life by talking about living in Spain and Chicago. As I revealed how my identity was shaped by both of their cultures, I also explained how parts of those cultures came to be. For example, I mentioned that I am unable to speak Spanish fluently because my family moved between cities that speak different languages. The two cities we lived in were Barcelona and Madrid. Since Barcelona is located in an autonomous community, it has a different official language than the majority of Spain. Therefore, its official language is Catalan while most of the rest of Spain has Castilian/Spanish as their official language. We w
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Module 1: Jigsaw Videos

For the first module in our Technology in Education class, we were assigned a Jigsaw activity. If you are unfamiliar this kind of assignment, here is an explanation about what it is: First, the class is divided into a certain number of groups (eight in our class’ case). Each group is then instructed to research a topic that is given to them. All of these topics should have a common theme that the class is learning about. For example, our class was being introduced to different video-making websites which were given as the group’s topics. My group was given the website Animaker. So after everyone discussed the topics within their groups, we were rearranged into eight other groups which is the second half of the Jigsaw activity. In these new groups, every student would be teaching a different website to each other. In my new group’s case, I was teaching two other students how to use Animaker while they taught me how to use Powtoons and Spark Video. The five other websites that were re
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