Tuesday, April 18, 2017

ILP#2: Design

Here's a link to the Prezi I did on Alexander Hamilton! http://prezi.com/c8sihxno-yzp/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Thursday, April 6, 2017

Blog #10

I think that using data collection through surveys will be a great tool as a teacher, especially because of the anonymity. I would interested in teaching either 8th grade or high school level students and I would likely teach English. I feel like using the surveys would be a great way to gauge the students' interest in future materials (books we could study, ranking the books we did study for future knowledge, etc.). It would also be a great way to just generally have more class participation. It could also give the opportunity for new creative projects as students create their own surveys for other students to take and then explain their thoughts on the results (such as why they think things are interpreted in a certain way by most people for instance). It would also be a great way to get feedback from students and teachers alike so that I can always be improving and keeping my students in mind. Topics I found most interesting on my classmates' posts would be the assignments that we did. I liked reading about other people's experiences with the assignments and comparing them to my own, seeing both the similarities and differences. By doing this, and by seeing other people's final products through screenshots, I was able to look at assignments in ways I may not have originally and gain new ideas. For instance, with the website designing, everyone took vastly different approaches to the exact same assignment and the creativity was really cool to me. It also is something that gives me new ideas for future projects I may work on. A technology-related skill I would love to learn next would be Photoshop. I've always been fascinated by it and all of the possibilities it provides, both personally and professionally. I would be able to edit pictures with friends and family to improve their quality, and in the professional world, I would be able to find fun and exciting ways to engage students through original graphics of my own (or even colleagues). I think it just has so many opportunities. I will achieve this goal by looking into Photoshop classes and also talking to friends whom I know are well-versed in it, and I will make sure to prioritize it to the best of my ability since I understand that without dedication, it would probably be a waste of time.

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Blog #9

The first thing I'm going to talk about is the Flipped Classroom. The Flipped Classroom is essentially a model in which the teacher uploads videos of themselves teaching online (this can be done through sites like YouTube or on their own class website). The concept of it started with uploading videos of lectures to be accessible to students later. The Flipped Classroom model expects kids to go home and watch these videos so that they can learn and take notes on things necessary for class the next day. The first example of educational videos I thought of is Crash Course which is something I've been following for a while (partially because of my love for John Green and partially because it's excellent) which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse Another thing I want to talk about is "open" education. This refers to large amounts of information being accessible to large amounts of people. The four main components are "re" words that are easy to remember: reuse (meant for one person), revise (refers to content editing), remix (refers to content editing and updating to combine it with other information), and redistribute (distributing the resources in a new way). A site that I think is a good example of this, which I found when searching open education, would be this source: https://www.openeducationweek.org. This of course is not the only one and I would encourage you to explore your options through research! Lastly, the skills I acquired from the previous two assignments are surrounding details. I'm pretty decent with PowerPoint already, but I definitely got refreshers and some new information about the more detailed aspects of PowerPoint. For example, I relearned how to hyperlink things to other slides and I learned how to make a file of my recording presenting the PowerPoint (something I found really cool) and I learned how to better control interactive PowerPoints by disabling the mouse click to the next slide. Here are pictures of the cover slides of the two PowerPoints assignments I completed this week!