AS12 - Concept Mapping

ILP "Participation" - Sports Psychology

When I went to the Sports Psychology lab, I learned a lot about how trainers keep their athletes' minds' sharp and strengthen their mental ability when it comes to playing their sport. The guide showed us numerous pieces of technology that they use to exercise their players' brains, including multi-focus technology, eye-tracking devices, motion sensor simulations, and even GoPros. He showed us examples of how they use the technology during sessions with a player, and tried to give examples of how we could use the technology in our classrooms. One great example of classroom application involved the eye-tracking device. It could be used to analyze behaviors and tendencies of newer teachers and help them grow in their field. We could look at what aspects of the classroom newer teachers focus the most on or which students they pay the most attention to, and watch those first-person videos together with the teacher in order to train their abilities to be more well rounded when it comes to classroom scanning and student supervision, as well as be more aware of classroom activity as a whole. It could also be used to analyze more experienced teachers to see what they focus the most on and how they divide their focus across the classroom in order to gain insight on what newer teachers need to be focusing on during the class day. I think this is an incredibly great use of technology in the classroom, and I would totally be willing to be a subject of this type of activity in order to improve my teaching and classroom management abilities. He also showed us how GoPros can be attached to and record athletes during practices in order to critique their movements and improve their skills, as well as to see where they may be going wrong during a play.

There weren't too many technologies we could all try out on our own this time, but we did go through one specific one together, which was somewhat of a multi-focus piece of technology, where players are required to look at a small screen in the middle of a board that asks them to complete math problems or read passages, while also trying to press buttons that light up all around the board. This gets them to strengthen their ability to multi-task and pay attention to multiple different stimuli, which is incredibly valuable in sports, since you always have to be focusing on your movements as well as the players around you.

Overall, I really enjoyed going to the Sports Psychology lab and seeing how we use technology in many different aspects to improve skills in our everyday lives. I'm always astounded by what we are able to create to train our minds and advance our capabilities within a field.

Blog Post #10

I think using Data Collection tools are greatly beneficial to your teaching experience. You can use them to collect data regarding how well a students know material, student views and opinions about classroom topics, and create surveys to learn more about your students as people. For example, if you're teaching a 5th grade history class, you can use data collection tools in various ways. You can make a survey about certain historical figure's beliefs, like Abraham Lincoln or Susan B. Anthony, to let students see how they relate to and agree/disagree with that figure and their ideas about certain topics. You can also use surveys to conduct short quizzes or tests to get a feel for how well your students know the material you've been covering, asking questions like "When did the Civil War start?" or "What group of soldiers fought from the south?" Another use of data collection tools in a history class would be to create a survey presenting questions about how they've enjoyed a unit, asking questions like "How well did you enjoy this unit about the Civil War? or "Did the classroom activities and projects make this unit more enjoyable?" in order to see how you could improve your classroom to make students more interested, as well as see how what you've already done is working.

One topic that I found very interesting and helpful was Daniel's post about technology resources. He provided a link to a super helpful website called "Educational Technology and Mobile Learning" that provided tons of resources and articles about useful technology that could be used in the classroom. I had a hard time finding a good resource to put in my own blog post, so now that I know about this website, I can better keep up with educational technology advances and not have to weed through tons of technology posts. Another topic that I found interesting was in Morgan's post about Bloom's taxonomy and PowerPoint. She did an amazing job applying it to a lesson about gravity, addressing each level of Bloom's in an aspect of PowerPoint, including addressing Analyze by having a list of questions on a slide asking students which object they think will hit ground first, if they will reach at the same time, and then why did they think one way or another. A third topic I found super interesting was Rachel's post about Web 2.0 tools. She talked about a resource called Dragdis, which is a visual bookmarking tool that allows users to click and drag images into a sidebar that allows users to save the images under certain folder names to make resources more organized. You can also share findings with other users, and they will get instant updates when the people they follow add new images. This is a great online resource that I am happy to know about and potentially use in my future classroom to find images for lessons, share images with fellow teachers, and allow students to contribute helpful resources as well.

Another technology-related skill I would like to learn next is is how to create a grade book, attendance sheet, or any other database related material in Excel. I know we just went over the basics in class, but I think it would be super beneficial to see Excel applied to actual future uses in the classroom so we are not only prepared to use those applications in the classroom, but also know the in's and out's of how to use them so minimal mistakes are made when presenting student information/data. I can achieve this goal by looking up some online grade book and attendance sheet resources that can be applied to the Excel program, and analyze how they work in order to make my own and practice the motions that are needed to accurately form my own material.

Blog Post #9

A flipped classroom involves students listening to prerecorded video lectures for homework before coming to class, and use class time to work with content in group or individual activities and with their teachers in order to deepen understanding of the content. This allows for students to become active learners engaged in exploration and discovery within the content's framework. Teachers can use various technologies to record and share their instruction with their students, whether it be through a closed network, website, blog, or YouTube. A great source of educational videos that could be used for online instruction is www.brightstorm.com

This podcast talks about how open education, open content, and open source all affect the classroom. Open education involves making educational experiences available to a wide audience. This includes lessons on various material being available online for anyone to use when they please. A great source to access open education is https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm which offers free courses and materials. Open content specifies what people can and cannot do with the educational material they find online. It is made up of four credentials, including reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. Reuse includes using material for your own needs, whereas redistribution includes putting the material out into a different means of access to be used by others. Remix and revise includes modifying content on it's own or to be combined with other useful related content. A great source to access open content is http://search.getty.edu/ which provides free access to periodicals, photographs, and many other resources on a variety of topics. Open source includes software whose source code is available for anyone to access, allowing for people to modify or add new features to it. A great form of open source software is Linux, which is a free computer operating system that can be used on PC's.

Some new skills I gained from working on this assignment is using action buttons to make presentations more interactive and including audio throughout a presentation. I really liked creating questions and linking the answers to multiple slides in order to navigate through the presentation. The only thing I was hesitant about was making sure everything linked to the correct slides. I think I could improve my presentation by making it a bit more interesting with animation, but I wanted to make the presentation as clean and clear as possible. I think this assignment was a great way to prepare me for making these types of interactive presentations and quizzes for my students in the future!

Blog Post #8

Some skills I've gained from working on the website assignment is how to format a website, create new pages of content, and include pictures and links to helpful information. One of the things I really liked about the assignment was that it gave me a taste of what my future may hold: Uploading helpful materials, announcements, links to study help, calendar of assignments, and everything else that a teacher could provide for their students. I surprisingly had a really fun time doing this assignment and got really into the whole thing. The only thing I disliked a bit was the limitations of design/format that came with using weebly. There were some things I wanted to do including placement of pictures or text that just weren't possible with the layouts that I tried. I think my website could be improved by making it a little more inviting and exciting for the students and parents. The layout I chose was the one I liked most out of the ones provided to me, so I definitely think if I had a bit more options or had used a different website maker, I could have gone in a bit of a different direction with my webpage. After completing this assignment, I feel pretty confident in my ability to make an actual one for my future classes!

Here's a link to my website: http://annie-eme2040.weebly.com/

Blooms Taxonomy includes many levels: Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create. Powerpoint can be a great way to tap into each one of these levels during a classroom lesson. Remember can be presented through slides of previously learned material that serves as a basis for the current lesson, like making sure students remember how to plot points and identify the x and y-axis. Understand can be presented through slides of the new information/material that includes the basis information from the remember level, like how to find the slope of a line using those plotted points, and giving the formula for point-slope form. Apply can be presented through students completing slides of practice problems involving finding the slope of a line and putting it in point-slope form in order to apply the information they've just learned. Analyze can be presented through slides that present information that look closer at particular parts of the formula and how they affect the graph, including what the y-intercept does and how slopes of perpendicular lines relate to each other. Evaluate can be presented through a slide of a quick quiz or in order to see if the students retained and understood the material just gone over in the lesson. Create can be presented through slides asking students to come up with their own points and applying them to the point-slope formula, and then plotting that line to show representation of the line and mastery of the material.

One website that keeps track of all of the latest technology trends is: https://www.wired.com/

Wired provides in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology and how they are shaping different aspects of everyday life, including business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, etc. It provides endless articles and resources of the newest developed technology and how they are making their mark on the world, as well as what their development means for the progress of our society.

Blog Post #7

Adaptive technologies are technologies that help people with disabilities or special needs more effectively use computing equipment, whether it be helping students to write, read, do math, or organize abstract ideas. Through the technologies, students are given the ability to use voice recognition software such as text-to-speech or talking word processing programs to type their ideas or assignments or read displayed text to them, as well as use word prediction software to predict what the student wants to say based on the first letters the student types, so they don't have to exhaust their energy if they have problems dealing with a keyboard. There's even talking spell-checkers that students can read aloud the misspelled word and it gives a list of suggestions of what they meant/how it is spelled just like how it does for us who can type. Students can also use a track ball or joy stick to navigate a computer if they are unable to use a standard mouse, or various types of keyboards such as expanded, mini, one-handed, and on-screen depending on their specific needs. Reading technologies can help students with disabilities or special needs easily access and keep up with reading materials though recorded books if they are unable to read due to mental or physical disabilities, as well as use high-interest low-vocabulary books that help lower-level reading students through narrations with different characters spoken in different tones and reading sounds more dramatically, which captures those students' attention more easily. Scan/read systems also provide students with the option of providing a visually enhanced display that is also read aloud to them, while also using optical character recognition to track the students' eye movements in order to type what they want to say. There are also more easily accessible forms of adaptive technologies for students through Apple devices, which can place traditional text on screen in different text sizes and with different contrast levels to make it easier for the student to read, while also providing additional features that help support struggling readers such as the Speak Selection feature, Multitouch textbooks, and iBooks. Specific applications that provide these services include StickyKeys and Mousekeys. My sister has some type of visual impairment that makes it hard for her to focus on small text in books or on computers, so she has used a lot of text-magnifying tools to help her read assignments for class. My next door neighbor, whose daughter has Down Syndrome, uses a lot of the technologies I mentioned above such as modified keyboards and recorded books to help her with assignments and communication in school. Some challenges I could see using adaptive technologies in the classroom is getting both the student and the teacher to fully understand how to use the tools and effectively use them in the classroom, as well as determining which adaptive technology would best suit the student based on their needs.

One of the technologies I saw in the Sorts Psychology Lab that I believe could be greatly beneficial in schools was the eye-tracking software. This could be used to see where students' attention lies in the classroom most of the time, as well as what items they focus on the most to help process new ideas and information, and what distractions may be around them that are impairing their learning. It could also be used on new teachers to help train them to scan the classroom and notice specific things going on so that they don't miss potential trouble or critical advancements in student thinking during activities.

After using Diigo in class, I learned how to highlight website information I believe to be important, add notes to specific passages or lines of text, and save it to a group so that others can access my annotated information! I think this could be greatly beneficial to students who need to read and annotate long text by highlighting key information and reflecting on ideas presented in the reading. This could also be a great tool for fellow teachers and me to share materials and lesson tools with each other that they believe to be beneficial to the classroom. As far as group work, the activity in class showed me that students could easily access the same information and annotate while also making comments on other students' ideas, forming a more valuable and broad understanding of the material.

ILP "Participation" - Tech Sandbox

When I went to the Tech Sandbox, I learned a whole deal about the new technology we could implement in our classrooms in order to increase student's learning experiences and get them excited about the material they are learning in the classroom! This included things like 3-D printers, Smart Tables, Smart Boards, Virtual Reality (Google Cardboard and Oculus Rift), Note Taking Apps and Devices, and Letter/Shape Recognition Tools. They showed us how to use each form of technology, and gave examples of how we could apply it to specific lessons as well as classroom activity in general. For example, when students are learning about the human body, a teacher could use virtual reality equipment and download an animated simulation of a journey through the human body in order to give students and incredibly in depth look at the material, as well as make the lesson a ton more exciting than reading about the circulatory system or parts of the heart in a textbook. After class, I looked into if there was any virtual reality videos for math concepts, and there was! It would be awesome if I could include material like this in my lesson, since I believe it would really get the students excited about concepts. Another example was using a Letter/Shape Recognition Tool. You attach this camera sensor on the top of an iPad in a stand, and place shapes and letters compatible with the app software under the camera based on the question it is asking on the app. It was definitely one of the most unique things I saw in the Tech Sandbox. I could totally see this being used in younger-aged classrooms when they are learning how to spell and complete gaps in words. They said it also has higher level capabilities of dealing with mathematic concepts, and I would've been really interested in seeing how that worked and what type of things it asked about. I might go back and look into that more so I can see if I'd be able to use something like that in the future. Overall, a lot of the examples of how to use the technology were oriented towards younger-aged classrooms, and not high school like I intend to teach. So, as we were going through the tour, I tried to think a lot about how I could mess around with the technology to make it more appropriate for older students and orient it for more complicated lessons and material.

In Tech Sandbox, I probably spent the most time looking at the Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard. I have always been so fascinated by virtual reality and remember when the Oculus first got released, but I had never seen or tried one in person before. It was such a cool experience being immersed in this virtual world and experiencing it as if it was actually happening around me. I also got to keep one of the structures that the 3-D printer made. Seeing it being formed one small stroke at a time was really interesting, and I was astounded by the ability of the printer to create a printing of chains, with each individual chain linked together. I still don't know how it was able to do that, and I'm so excited for the future of 3-D printing to be more accessible to students who are interested in these types of technology. Lastly, I got to play around with Sphero. I was obsessed with the model of BB-8 they came out with when Force Awakens was released, but it was definitely out of my price range for something I probably wouldn't use too much anyway. It was so much fun to interact with and honestly really cool to think about how the technology worked. I was having a hard time thinking of how it could be used inside of a classroom, but it was a really awesome piece of technology and I think the creators had an incredible idea in making it. Overall, it was such an eye-opening experience to what us teachers of the future will hopefully have access to in our classrooms in order to provide better education and stimulating experiences to get students excited about school.

Here are some of the pictures I took during the field trip: