Building Skills and Student Discovery of Technology

I was reading the blog The 21st Century School House and came across a post about using different tools in technology in literacy programs. This person in particular is a high school school teacher and had been teaching about 21st century journalism. He used a number of tools to get students researching and understanding more about the world around them. The point that I really liked that he made was that students don't realize that there is a realm of information out there other than their social networking sites. I think that this is a great thing to teach students, even at a younger age. Many students may not realize the resources they are able to tap into, and as a future elementary school teacher, I plan on having students discover these many resources. I think that giving students the knowledge and understanding of setting up PLN's, looking at blogs, and using wikis to communicate is vital information and will help students highly succeed for years to come.

DJ Bloomie gives some really great example of what I mean when I talk about endless resources. Being able to access multiple libraries and many other types of information is just one way to show students that they are able to access any information that they need to know.

Seems like every week I am learning something new about how to organize information, and how to seek out information, which is making my life a lot easier, and I can't wait to share my knowledge with my future students.

Global Oppurtunities in Schools

When I think about the topic of global opportunities that could be used in the classroom, the first think I think of is cultural learning. With the technology that we poses today, it is possible to connect with other schools across the country and around the world. I think that this would advance students thinking. Rather than reading cultural information out of a book, or watching video, connecting to an actual culture would engage students and give them a unforgettable experience.





pic from www.flickr.com

I also think about global technology in terms of people being connect with each other, and that information is at anyone's fingertips. Students
can look up any kind of information and find an abundance of ideas and
facts about a particular topic. This shows how student learning is changed today due to technology. Even when I was in high school, we had the internet and it was able to give you information about certain topics, but today it is a totally different world of information..Its gigantic! Today students don't go to the encyclopedia to find out about a topic, they go online..and I don't blame them one bit. I love our technology and the way that it keeps us all connected globally.

My Social Networking Habits..

Social networking is pretty important to me. I love using Facebook because I am able to be connected to different friends and family that are scattered all around the world. From reading other blogs I see that many of my classmates agree with me (DJ Bloomie). I love being able to go to the Facebook homepage and read peoples status updates..It allows me to see how peoples days are going and see what my friends are up to. I also like Facebook because I am able to share pictures with others, and vise versa, which is much easier than emailing and then downloading on to the computer. pic from www.flickr.com

When myspace started, I also used that social networking site, but nowadays I feel as though it is obsolete. I used myspace for the same purposes as facebook, except I used it more to listen to music on myspace because thousands of famous and emerging artists have pages along with a couple songs to sample. I have since then been too busy to really mess with that anymore and so I hardly ever use myspace. In fact, I plan on deleting my account on myspace in the next couple days.


I love social networking because it keeps me up to date with my friends and family that I don't always see or talk to. Whenever I am at a computer I check my page, and even when I'm between classes I can access it from my phone and check it. It is defiantly my most visited website..

While reading some other blogs, I found this.. Social Networking..A help or harm that I thought was interesting because it brings up questions about being behind a computer to communicate and also about what we did before we had these social networks. It is a fairly interesting piece.

Blogging in Education

One of my favorite ways that blogging is being used in education is when teacher create blogs that students and parents alike can go read about what is going on in the class. As a future teacher, I plan on using this type of blog so parents can come to it everyday and see what students will be doing in class today. Also I will post homework assignments, permission slips, parent reminders, etc. so they will be readily available to students and parents.




Picture from www.flickr.com

Ed Tech Minor at UNI

Ideal Classroom Project

What: This project was about putting together a classroom and being able to choose what went into your classroom, what layout you wanted in your class, and also what subjects and lessons you wanted to teach to your students. We researched what kind of technologies we wanted in our classrooms for the particular lessons we were teaching. Also we came had to come up with a creative way to present the information we found to our CCA class. I worked in a group of three and we created a third grade science based classroom.

So What: This project was interesting and fun to do. We were able to look research many different aspects of the classroom to create one that was perfect to us. I thought that this project was also unique from others I had done in the past because I was working in a group and we all had to collaborate online with our information we gathered. It was nice to be able to do this rather than meet up every time we had information to give. Our group used Google docs for the most part, which was nice because we could post all of the info and have it saved one page so we were all able to access it. This project also gave me an idea of how expensive having the perfect classroom would be. It would be nice to have everything you wanted, but it seems unlikely it will ever happen.

Now What: From this project I have learned that its important to research what you want for your classroom and that it is pretty easy to do with the Internet. Anything you want to look up is accessible and also you can find out lots of information about anything you could want for your classroom. If I were to do this project again, I would get into a little more detail about what I wanted in my classroom. I also learned that group work is great over Google docs. With all of our busy schedules, it would have been tough to get together as often as needed, Google docs made the group work much easier and less stressful.

Ideal Classroom Project

Next Generation Teaching

This week we got the chance to be a part of a webinar in class. This webinar talked about how to incorporate social networking into teaching strategies. The presenter, Chris O'Neal looked at big social networks like myspace and facebook and talked about how students today are so interested in this type of computer use. He talked about how student like to use these social networks to post their works, like stories, poetry, and other writings. This way peers can read and critique what they have created and get a opinion from someone other than a teacher. I think that bringing this concept into the classroom would be a smart way to get students more interested in putting effort into school work. They will show not only their teachers but their peers what they have written, which could motivate students to try their best, and also they will be able to see others ideas which could help get their creative juices flowing. One concern that was talked about was that students would use the tool inappropriately by writing material not sutable for the classroom or for by posting negitive/hurtful comments on the page. I thought about these concerns and I think that if students are given an oppurtunity to do an activity like social networking, I think students may see it as an important and mature way of interacting and learning. Also if this idea of posting works on the internet to recieve feedback is as exciting and popular to students as it is claimed, inappropriate writing should'nt be a problem. Not only that but it is easy to monitor a wiki. If there is a problem the educator can take care of it.

A couple facts that stuck in my head from this webinar was the idea about how people under age thirty were primarily using the internet for their news and science. They said 44% said they used the net, where 3% said the newspaper. I thought about the comment that O'Neal mentioned about how when we were in grade school we were taught how to read a paper and how to find articles in the paper. We are going to have to teach skills to students today by taking them on the net and teaching them how to search properly for what they need. Also another comment that stuck out to me was that the computer used to be used as a reward for students that got done with their work early, where now the computer should be one of the main tools to use for learning.

One idea I thought would be a cool for sharing on a social network could be music compositions. You could have a site with the recordings of students compositons and a player so they would be able to be heard by other students. I think students would enjoy doing something like that.


I really enjoyed this webinar and thought that the ideas given to us were quality. These ideas can give any teacher an edge to help their students enjoy and stay interested in learning.