Field Response

I don't even know where to start for my field response! I had such a blast during field. I had such a great time with my fourth grade classroom and learned so much from our cooperating teacher and the students. I wasn't sure what to expect at first because our cooperating teacher is from the East coast and likes to speak her mind. I was just afraid of what she'd say about our teaching. : ) She turned out to be an awesome teacher with a lot of great feedback. She let us take over reading groups, teach multiple lessons, be creative, and encourage technology in the classroom. Everyone was very welcoming and this experience made me all the more excited to eventually have a class of my own.

I learned a lot about classroom management techniques and that what works for some students may not work for others. She used the elementary school's theme song to bring students back on task, she used hand signals to bring the class back. She never raised her voice or was demeaning to the children. I also learned a lot about preparation and how important it is. We were very detail oriented on our lesson plans and had many late nights perfecting them and working out the kinks. We also learned as we went and got a feel for how this particular class worked together and functioned. Our cooperating teacher, Mrs. Schino, runs a tight ship but she does it with love and out of a pure desire for her students to have a successful learning experience. I learned a lot about the teacher I want to be. I want to be fun and understanding but firm in my decisions. I've learned a lot about who I am and the talents I have and how they can be incorporated into the core curriculum. I love to write raps and rhymes and being able to use those in our lesson plans really engaged the children in introducing them to a new topic.

Our lesson plans went smoothly and we got along great with the teacher and students. We created a mutual trusting and respectful relationship which enabled us to have great lessons with the students. We found out what worked for the students and what didn't by making observations and trial and error. The only thing I would do differently is being better about time restraints. In a perfect world lessons for each core curriculum would fit perfectly into a time slot and things wouldn't run over in time. In the real world it happens all the time. It was really difficult at first to stay within a time constraint but our cooperating teacher was very patient and kind to us while we worked that kink out. This happened during the first couple of lessons but it was eventually worked out and perfected bit by bit the more we taught.
 
During this experience we got to use "The Utah Experience" digital story. The kids absolutely loved it. Their eyeballs were glued to the screen the entire time the story was playing. It engaged them immediately into our new unit on the symbols of Utah and helped them answer questions they would need answered for an assignment. Now that I know how to make one, the next time I will use one in class it will go a lot faster and I can teach the students how to make one themselves. I will definitely use digital storytelling in my classroom. I've only had positive experiences with it. We also got to use a document camera to help the students while we made Utah salt maps. It made life so much easier for all of us because I could project what I was doing on my salt map (molding, sculpting, putting the proper colors and landforms where they belonged, etc.) onto the projector and the entire class could watch me from their seat as we did the project together. It was very beneficial to have one and these could be used for any subject. Math, writing, history, for pictures, giving examples of work, and many other things. Our cooperating teacher used the document camera many times during our field experience and it benefited the kids greatly. Our teacher has an appreciation for technology and is working on incorporating more of it into her classroom. She also loved the digital story and wanted to know how long it took us. I think she was trying to figure out if she would ever want to put forth the extra effort to make one. We explained that after the first one, it's a lot easier to do and it would be a great idea to begin incorporating them into her curriculum. 

Week 8 Creative Commons and Licensing

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that helps you license your work. This is important because it allows you to choose a level of licensing you need. You use it to copyright your work. This makes it so other people can use your work and if you allow, they can build upon it. It makes it easy for you to know if you can use someone's work and how or if you can't. It gets rid of the gray areas in copyrighting. It sounds pretty easy to do. There are six ways to license you work. Basically, all of them allow other people to share your information. It's up to you to decide if you will allow others to share commercially, noncomercially, or allow others to share your document only if they link it back to you and give you credit or not, or to allow other people to tweak or build on your work and share it with the same or different licensing features. They ask you questions to help you figure out what is appropriate for you and it seems fairly simple to do.

Week 6 - 7 Steps in Creating a Digital Story

1. Writing a Script- Brainstorm and find your story and tell it out loud. Make sure the writing style is conversational, like you are talking to friends or family.

2. Planning the Project- Create a storyboard to make a blueprint for your project and include text from script, titles, and images.

3. Organizing Project Folders- Create and organize your own folder where all media files can be kept so they won't have to be re-referenced and hunted down in random areas. 

4. Making the Voiceover- Create the voiceovers for the story using appropriate emotion and intonation. You will be using a microphone and to prevent a popping sound when you pronounce a T, B, or P sound, place a clean sock over the microphone.

5. Gathering and Preparing Resources- In this stage you will be gathering music and images and playing with the technical tools to develop emotion and depth to your story. Music is 50% of the story experience so it is very important to choose wisely.

6. Putting it All Together- All elements are mixed together and music is added last. Make a rough cut version and a final cut version. The rough cut won't have transitions or music added but will give you an idea of what is missing so you don't have to work too much with the final cut.

7. Applause! Applause!- Your creation is finished and you can export it to DVD's or even bluetooth for cell phones. You are officially a "Story Keeper."

Even More Google Tools Reflection

Even More Google Tools

Week 4

The more in depth lessons on the many benefits of Google helped me a lot this week. Before this class I only used Google for a search engine, email account, and blog. I had no idea that something as simple as Googledocs existed but it is now my new best friend. I am so excited about being able to share documents with other people. This makes life so much easier because I don't always have to meet with people in my group to do assignments. I can just do my share and combine it with other people's information and have a completed assignment. This will be nice in the classroom to be able to work with other teachers and to have effective communication. I also really liked the calendar lesson because I feel like I can be a lot more organized and share my information with my cohort partner. This will make our field experience so much easier.

I liked the video this week a lot. I really like the WWW idea and I'm more than willing to incorporate that into my classroom. I realized I'm one of the 76% that never uses wikis and I rarely use podcasts. The video didn't change how I want to teach students because I already have a desire to teach them about technology but it gave me more ideas on how I will incorporate technology and a stronger drive to learn about it so I can implement it in the classroom.

Week 3

I learned a lot from class from this week. I'm really grateful to the friend sitting next to me who could help guide me through a couple of things. I learned all about creating an iGoogle which has already made my life easier. I don't have to remember websites anymore and I can go bookmark them once and have them on my site to remember. I love that! I also learned about adding links to my website and how to make it more fun for the people who will be reading it. These tips I've learned just tonight have made me feel like my eyes are just a little bit more opened to the many possibilities to technology and how far we've come already. For some people this is literally child's play but I feel like I'm learning a lot. the only muddy part for me will be remembering how to do everything we learned this week but with more practice I think I'll get the hang of it.

"The Machine is Using Us" video seemed way over my head. I understand the concept but I'm not clear on the jargon used or exactly how the machine uses us. A lot of this technology information makes me feel like I'm 253 years old on the inside. I feel so out of date! I'm trying to learn as much as I can but this video was a little discouraging for me.

Reflection Week 3

In our class discussion this week it was really interesting for me to see how a lot of us all agreed on the videos and articles we liked from our Professional Development assignment. It's nice to be on the same page as other future educators when it come to the importance of technology in the classroom. I think we're all trying to find that perfect balance of sticking to some of the basics in school and developing important social skills and other important skills that technology can't teach students that they need for the real world. I'm excited about taking some of the ideas from WWW and applying that to my future classroom. There wasn't anything that I didn't really understand this week from class but I liked our discussions and they funny video about going from a scroll to a book. : )

The entire time I watched "Did you know?" my jaw was opened. I know this class is going to help me a lot to be a better proactive teacher for technology in the class. I am blown away at several of the facts. Like how Bermuda is number one in the world for broadband and the US is #19. That cam out of nowhere for me! I was also blown away at the fact that the amount of text messages sent and received in one day is more than the population of the entire earth. That is crazy! Technology is moving at an even more rapid pace than I thought. I'm just worried about keeping up. I think it's pretty amazing but those videos make me feel a little overwhelmed. I'm just going to try and keep up as best I can.