EDU 590

As I was doing research for my paper I came across an article in The Journal which is an educational technology periodical. The article was a case study on a school district that had implemented new filtering system software with the goal of trying to make resources and online content more available to taechers while still protecting students from harmful and innappropriate materials on the web. The district's technology director said that "he wanted to find the right balance" and acknowledged how valuable resources are often lost to both teachers and students because so much is blocked. His plan to find this balance lied within a new filtering software called Lightspeed Web Access Manager which claims to "ensure safe an appropriate web browsing with customizable filtering." He had great success and was able to unblock valuable resources like You-Tube. They did this by creating an educational video library where teachers access You Tube and approved videos and content are put into this library for all to access. They also review reports daily that looks at what is being searched within the district and what items have been blocked which allows the tech team to make decisions regarding unblocking or blocking content. While it requires them to stay on top of things it also allows them to open up the net to taechers and students and use it for all its valuable resources.
I found this interesting because I am a teacher who gets frustrated about a lack of access to some good sites especially You-Tube. It also made me decide to look into our filtering system and I got some good information from our tech director. While U-Tube is not going to be unblocked in my district anytime soon he did help me understand why and it was much more productive then just complaining that I didn't have access.

EDU 590

It has been a wonderful experience for me to delve into my district's technology plan. A document that I didn't even know existed until I took this class and certainly hadn't read. Ialso discussed this with my colleagues, the majority of whom had also never read the document. It was helpful for me to read because it mapped out my district's plans and mission regarding technology. It was also very helpful because it contained the METS broken down by each grade level and it had teacher "goals" for incorporating technology in the classroom. I had never really looked at the METS I am sad to say. I knew there were technology requirements but I had always left it to our technology teacher to make sure that these standards were taught. I was happy to see that I do teach and incorporate many of these standards into my daily instruction, but now that I have read the document I am including them in a more purposeful manner and analyzing my lessons to see how and when I could include more. How unfortunately ignorant I was about this and I wonder how many others are like me. I also wonder why these standards don't just become a part of the GLCEs? If the goal is to make technology a part of regular daily instruction then why are they not a part of the standards that lead regular classroom teacher instruction? What do you think?

EDU 590

The issue that I am focusing my paper on is the debate over weather the 21st Century Skills Framework is a needed change in education or simply a fad. I have been researching the ideas behind the partnership, who is involved, and which states have signed on. It is fascinating. Right away when I first read about the framework I saw that it was not simply about incorporating technology into the classroom which is what I had originally thought. Instead it is a push to change classroom instruction and testing towards a more problem solving and skillbuilding framework. Technology is certainly a piece but even more so it is teaching in a way that empowers students to be innovative and creative. The idea behind it is that we don't know what the future holds. Research groups believe that many of the top jobs in the future, the jobs that my fifth graders will be competing for, have not even been invented yet. So instead of teaching them facts and asking them to memorize information we should be spending more time on helping them master problem solving skills, teach them how to access and use information, and giving them more opportunities to work collaboratively. These skills are going to be more important in an unknown future. I wholeheartedly agree. What do you think?

EDU 590

This afternoon while I was working at school, preparing for the week ahead and working on my projects for this class, I was looking online for an effective map making tool for my students to use. Right now in social studies they are creating native american projects. They are working in small groups to study the regions of North America and the culture and lifestyle of the earliest Americans that inhabited that area. One of the things that they need to do is to create a map showing their region, the tribes that lived there, and the topographical geography that impacted their way of life. I was so excited when I found google mapmaking because it was free and my kids would have access to it. The problem was that I had a ton of trouble figuring out how it worked and trying to use it for the purposes that I was looking for. I spent a ton of time trying to figure it out and finally gave up for the time being. Tomorrow I am going to talk to my school's tech coach about it and see if she can help in any way. Technology can be so frustrating at times!

Anyone else ever use this? If so do you have any helpful hints for me? Thanks!

While I was working on my project this past week and reading the class text I came across a great site for electronically generating a timeline. At the present time I don't have a use for this site because of where I am with the curriculum but I made a note to myself that this would be a great tool when my students write their explorer reports later this fall. The site is easy to use and I think that my fifth graders will be excited about the professional quality of the outcome! I was so happy to be able to find a useful resource that I could easily plug into my curriculum. This has always been one of my personal qualms about technology: finding a useful, meaningful, and timely way to incorporate it into what I'm doing. Our class text has been extremely helpful at showing me ways to do that!

For anyone else who is interested the site is www.ourtimelines.com

EDU 590

This past week my elementary school took an electronic leap and began distributing our school newsletter via e-mail eliminating the need for paper distribution to almost all of our almost 400 families! I am extremely excited about this change which will help on 3 different fronts. First we are facing extreme budget issues and in the past two years we have been encouraged to cut down on the amount of paper we use and the photo-copying that we do. Second environmentally this makes so much sense and lastly I hope that it will lead to better communication with our families. For the past few years we have deen doing a lot of double production which totally goes against our mantra of "working smarter, not harder". We all have web pages and we are required to post copies of all information that we send home. (ie. newsletters, field trip notes, flyers etc.) We have also always sent home paper copies. These paper copies often get lost in students' backpacks or accidentally thrown out by parents and we end up printing additional copies. I like the idea of just sending one mass e-mail and knowing that it won't get lost or at least that a parent will know where to get extra copies: just print it off from their home computer! I have not yet switched to a completely electronic policy but I am going to observe how efffectively this school change works and then make the leap myself.

Does anyone else use a strictly electronic distribution policy and if so what are your thoughts on its effectiveness?

EDU 590

Another thought about technology came to me today as I sat down with a group of teachers from our middle school. We met to discuss what they were seeing in the middle school regarding skill/content strengths and weaknesses. Our goal was to pinpoint some of the areas in the elementary curriculum that they are finding students still struggle with a year later. Things that maybe we need to spend more time on or use alternative methods of teaching for. I found this meeting (a sit down, face-to-face) so incredibly helpful and enlightening. This was the first time we had met like this and one of the reasons that we had never done it before was because we plug all of our data into a program called Pearson. Anyone else use it? This program compiles data regarding tests and other types of student achievement and offers a "big picture" view of all the data entered. And I will admit it does provide some good data. HOWEVER, I think using these types of technology programs has an extremely unfortunate side effect if it is the reasonong behind less face to face data gathering like the meeting I had today. Technology shouldn't replace teachers' professional opinion it should simply be another beneficial resource.

Today I heard an interesting technology story from my boyfriend who teaches alternative ed out in Jackson. It raises the question of what we are really trying to teach kids: skills or content? He was administering a test to students the other day. It wasn't a class that he taught but he was filling in for a coworker. As he was giving the test he saw a student hunched over his desk funny so he went to check it out. The student was using his phone to look up an answer (or at least get some information about it) online. My boyfriend asked him what he was doing and he explained (defended himself) that he had no idea what the question was asking and that he was trying to get some more information about it. Well they discussed how this was technically cheating and how there are other strategies, like asking for clarification etc, if you are unsure how to do something on a test. The student proceeded to show him the question and he didn't know it either. (Again not his test/class/content area) So he looked it up online!
Now it is up to the classroom teacher how to deal with this incident but the thought does cross my mind that one of the most important skills any person can have is knowing how, when, and where to access information. In the real world you dont need to know everything, it wouldn't be possible, but you do need to know how to get information. To me this is an important skill. It doesn't make the cheating ok, but it certainly makes sense. What do you think?

EDU590

Today I recieved an e-mail from our elementary school's technology coach. We are lucky that this position is one that has escaped all of the unfortunate cuts that our district has been forced to make. The e-mail was sent out to our entire staff and offered a professional developement opportunity for this fall. She had a short survey in her e-mail that asked what kinds of technology teaching we were interested in learning about and what dates we would be available for doing so. It was wonderful to first of all have this opportunity but even more so because she was working at making it relevent to our teaching and convenient. The response was great! When I filled out the survey I was able to view who had already shown interest and at the time 13 out of our 15 classroom teachers had shown interest! It made me feel good that in my building there are teachers who see the value of incorporating technology in the classroom, are willing to take time out of their busy days to do so, and who are excited to learn new things. It also made me see how this type of important learning can take place if it is presented in the right way! Kudos to our tech coach and the fabulous teachers that I work with. I hope that these types of opportunities are made available again in this same manner. The winning formula seems to be relevance + convenience = interest!

EDU 590

Hi Everyone,

This week I was teaching a lesson that was designed to help prepare the students for next month's MEAP test. It wasn't the most interesting lesson but it is a district requirement and I will admit that this type of reading comprehension practice serves a purpose. My students were reading an expository text article about the one-handed pitcher Jim Abbott. We read the article and as we were discussing I found my students asking a lot of questions about how he was able to pitch, field, and throw. They were fascinated by his ability to overcome this challenge but they couldn't quite wrap their minds around how he did it. So we decided to investigate a little further and we went online to find out more about him, view pictures, and hopefully watch a video that would clearly answer all our questions. This was all easily done and viewed because I am lucky enough to have a smartboard in my room. Much of what we were wondering was answered in our online quest. We read a little more about him and we looked at some pictures. The only problem was that the websites we were looking at had video footage of Jim Abbott in action available...only not to us because our access to these videos was blocked by the district. Everything I looked up came back to You Tube or some other site that we are not given access to. While I understand that some sites need to be blocked for content I was very frustrated that we could not access what we needed for this spontaneous teachable moment. Obviously I could have thought ahead and downloaded some video at my house to bring in but it would seem that the beauty of having the interenet and all of its information at our fingertips is that it is a resource for spontaneous moments. It would be nice if there was some way for districts to grant teachers access to some of these banned sites that actually offer great learning tools!

Hello All!
My name is Gina Rios and I am a fifth grade teacher at Murphy Elementary in Haslett. I teach in a self-contained classroom which means I teach every subject area. Let me tell you there is not enough time in the day to do this, but I'm sure many of you feel the same way! I'm excited about beginning this program. Largely because my district makes providing technology a priority and I have many resources at my disposal as well as grant money available to try out new things. My only problem is that I find it very hard to incorporate technology based projects without the lesson taking forever and being a ton of extra work. Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to hard work. I wouldn't be a teacher if I was, but I feel like there has to be a way to seamlessly to do it and I think that becoming more tech savvy myself is a great way to start. Therefore, I'm looking forward to learning from all of you and from the class!