Week 15

I decided to do a glogster for my final lesson plan. I wanted to do something new and different at first, but after researching and not finding something new that I really liked, I decided to do something from early on that I hadn't done a lesson plan on. Writing the lesson plan went really well, I wrote out the whole lesson plan and then at the end went to make my tutorial and glogster wasn't working well. I'm not sure what the problem was, but I could get images to link and images that I uploaded were taking forever. I was able to work around it to create a tutorial, but it was extremely frustrating to be so closed to finished and then have that unexpected road block.

Field Trip 2 Pompei

Pompei

For my final field trip I did another virtual field trip, this time of Pompei. I used the World Wonders Project from google to explore Pompei. I would use this in the classroom to have students get the opportunity to walk around in Pompei. I decided to do another virtual field trip as I haven’t had time to do a real one, and because I enjoyed the first one so much. I have traveled to Italy but sadly didn’t get to visit Pompei. It is somewhere that I hope to go someday so thought it would be fun to explore.

I had seen pictures before and had read about it before, but it was not what I was expecting at all. I guess I was thinking it would be more similar to other ancient cities that I’ve been to. I thought it would be more spread out and didn’t expect it to look so much like a modern European city. This field trip was educational for me so I’m sure it would be educational for elementary students especially if they hadn’t yet learned about Pompei.

Week 14

Aida's class with the students was not what I thought that it was going to be. I had thought that we'd have more interaction and there was very little after our icebreaker. She did say that a game she wanted to do was missing so perhaps that would have given use more interaction. The things that she did share were great and I think I may use them in my class room one day, but it just was not what I was expecting.

Week 13

I have been trying to pick what to do for my last lesson plan. I did some exploring of google earth with the World Wonders Project, thinking that I may do something with google earth . Some of the locations are really cool, they have 360 views of the Great Barrier Reef, the Grand Canyon, a hut from a 1912 exploration team in Antarctica, Pompei. Out of those I've only been to the Grand Canyon, the views that they have I didn't experience as all of them are from down in the Canyon and I've only experienced it from the upper rim. It is really cool to be able to move around to see more, but it still doesn't have the awe factor of actually seeing it in person. It is a great tool to use when teaching about any of these places to be able to give the students a taste of what each place is like, but it still doesn't substitute the real thing.

Week 12

I'm nearly done with my lesson plan and think that this was the easiest one yet to write for this class. I hadn't made a screencast before that was just talking students through how to use a website. It took less planning and prep to be able to do that portion of the lesson plan and the rest of the lesson plan seemed easier as a result.

In the aftermath of the bombings at the Boston Marathon, I would use this opportunity to bring this current event and talk about it with the class. I would share with them that because I am a runner I also feel for all the runners that were running in the Marathon that after all their hard work did not get to finish the race. With this we could discuss point of view.

Week 11

I really enjoyed the virtual field trip that I did for my first field trip and think that I will explore the possibilities it has to offer further by developing my next lesson plan based around the students doing a virtual tour at home. I have come to find that I really love google drive when a speedy Internet connection is readily available. It has made it very easy to collaborate in this class and in our other class, TCH 630. I am starting to use it more for personal use as well. And my biggest gripe about it is that when using the app on a tablet, you can make the documents viewable offline, but can't make changes that would sync up once you get an Internet connection. This was an issue for me while I was traveling which I solved by just not doing homework while I was on vacation. :)

Week 10

From this weeks materials what i found the most interesting is skype in the classroom. I just think it is a great way to connect with other classrooms to create a collaborative learning environment. It seems like it would be so easy to find a project or create a project and find another class to work with. I think this would be a great way educate students about multicultural issues. I am not sure about using edmodo in elementary schools, I don't know that it would be a good way to communicate with first graders. Although, I do think that it could be useful for connecting with parents.

Week 9

I think that it is increasingly important for students to have multicultural education. The world is getting smaller everyday. It seems that it is more important to be tolerant right where we live as even the small towns in Wisconsin are becoming more diverse. This makes it more important for students to learn to be tolerant, but it also offers them more education about other cultures without ever leaving the classroom. I think it would be a great idea in a more diverse classroom for students to help inform their fellow classmates about their culture through a little presentation. I tutored two boys that attended an international school, they had an international day where families came in and set up booths with food, drinks, music, clothes from their respective cultures.

Virtual Field Trip of Machu Picchu

Sites that would be used for Virtual Field Trip:
Interactive Map and 360 Panoramas 
National Geographic
UNESCO
Map 



What I have learned from this experience is how much information is out there that can be used in the classroom. We have talked about how to engage students and get them excited about learning and I think for social studies this is a great way to do it. Taking virtual field trips when real field trips aren’t possible or practical seems like a great way for students to get to experience a place without ever leaving the school. I found myself in awe of the panoramas and of the information that I read and I have no doubt that it wouldn’t have the same effect on students. I don’t think that having students look at a text book with static pictures would give them the same experience that they could have through a virtual field trip where the material is interactive. I have always loved traveling. While traveling I have been fortunate enough to experience so many great things that I read about in books or learned about in the classroom. Actually experiencing these things in person was so much more powerful than what I had experienced before and virtual field trips are the closest that I can come to giving students the in person experience in most cases. After this experience, I know I will try to use virtual trips whenever possible in my classroom.

Week 7

This week we explored wikis and web 2.0 sites. I have mixed feelings about the wiki, although it is quick to create and edit, it is not very attractive. It will take some time with playing with formatting and perhaps playing with other sites to find something that is more appealing to my tastes. Again, I think it would take time using all of the different tools to see what the benefits would with a wiki compared to others. I found a couple cool 2.0 sites. Pixton.com seems like it would be really fun way to learn, having the students create comic strips.

Week 6

This past week we worked on another lesson plan. With learning a new way of writing the objectives, it made it a bit more difficult. I'm sure this will become easier as I get more used to it. I enjoyed making the animoto. It was really easy to do and the end product turned out very nicely. I may make some just for fun. Something that I have found challenging at times when writing the lesson plans is to be sure that I'm meeting the standards. At times I have stop and think about it and sometimes go a different direction.

Week 5

This past week in both TCH 632 and 630 we were to create a lesson plan. In both cases we were asked to engage the students first. The idea of doing something to capture our students attention first makes perfect sense, but doesn't always come so easily. Having this idea be a focus of our lesson plans for both classes seems to be helping.

The lesson plan that I'm working on for this class comes with a fun aspect for creating it as well. We plan to use animoto to create a tourism commercial for Door County as a example of what we want our students to create. As I love Door County, I think that will make this project quite enjoyable.

Week 4

The first lesson plan complete with a screencast went a little differently than I expected. I forgot how frustrating technology can be when something is made for a mac, and then some for a PC, this driver isn't up to date, the wireless won't connect, that file format doesn't work, there aren't photo editing programs on these computers, etc. So, the first screencast creation was a bit shaky. I thought I would be clever and bring my own laptop and do everything on it for the screencast, that way when it came time to record Dona and I could easily go into the hall or somewhere quiet. But, that cleverness was quickly defeated by technological hick-ups. However the lesson plan seemed quite easy to write, it seems that I'm finely becoming more comfortable with those. It might take a while to become more comfortable with the technology needed for this class including figuring out how to get my mac to work with some of these obstacles. 

Week 3

Last class period we explored screen casts more closely. Sandy shared one that she had done herself and it made me realize how beneficially it could be to have tutorials such as hers for tasks that the students could use on their own whenever they need them. If Sandy had assigned a paper and asked for proper citation she could have just given the students the link on where to find the lesson for creating these citations. It seems that if a teacher planned well they could create lessons like this that students may need to access several times in an academic year (if they need a refresher) and that could be used for years and years (as long as what the tutorial is on doesn't change too much). I look forward to experimenting with the process in our current assignment.

Week 2

This is something I found very interesting in the reading:

In 1998, author John Brockman proposed an interesting question to an organization of more than 100
scholars. His question was simply, “What is the most important invention in the past two thousand years?” Responses to this question varied from the somewhat obscure public key inscription system (a security system for computers) to more expected candidates such as the steam engine or the computer. Eleven of the inventions nominated by the scholars are listed here.
1. The printing press
2. The scientific method
3. The computer
4. Numbers
5. Reading glasses
6. The atomic bomb
7. Democracy
8. The steam engine
9. Clocks
10. Plumbing
11. Hay

Lee, John (2011-12-01). Visualizing Elementary Social Studies Methods, 1st Edition (VISUALIZING SERIES) (Page 377). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

It made me think quite a bit, also made me give more thought to low vs. high tech. Numbers to me is the most important invention in the past two thousand years from this list as most of the other impressive inventions that came after the invention of numbers used numbers in some way.

I have seen voice thread before, but not glogster. I tried playing with it a bit, and was going to attempt a quick trial glog.  My Internet stopped working and then glogster didn't want to cooperate so I'll try another day. Project Gutenberg was pretty neat. I knew that after copy rights run out you can get a lot of books for free in kindle format on amazon and assumed elsewhere, but I did not know about this site. I just discovered that when I copy from my kindle version of our text book, a citation is automatically generated and added to the contents when I paste as seen above. After having a class where we had to site everything, I find this to be a very cool feature of high-tech reading.

Flipped & Sophia

This will be my first hands on experience with a flipped classroom. I have read about them before, but have never been a part of one. I was intrigued by the idea so am excited to see how it actually works. I spent a few minutes exploring Sophia.org, and it looks like it would be a good tool to use if/when utilizing the flipped classroom style. I liked the idea of playlists that students or teachers could make to help students when preparing for a test or exam.