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.