1/30/15

These first few classes have gotten me thinking a lot more about the use of technology in the classroom. Until now, I have been of the mind set that technology isn't all that necessary in the classroom. This class has been showing me that there are beneficial ways of incorporating it into lesson plans. Although today I had an interesting thought. I was thinking back to when I was in high school and how my teachers incorporated technology in the classroom. As a student I always dreaded assignments that required me to use a new technology. One of the main reasons was because I struggled with making it work, and I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of my peers. My anxiety about the technology distracted me from what I was supposed to be learning. Looking back I know that I probably wasn't the only student that felt this way. As educators I think we should also be in tune with our students capabilities. I plan on using technology in my classroom, but I don't want it to ever be a stumbling block in the way of my students learning. I hope that when I am a teacher I will be able to discern how much technology is too much. In this class I continue to learn new technologies though that make me super excited to use in the classroom. Last week our tech of the week was Flipboard. When I was in high school I had a science teacher that required us to find an article that involved real life usage of the information we were learning in each chapter. We would then have to write a summary. It was a great way for us to earn points as well as apply information we had learned. Flipboard is the coolest app, that allows you to pick an interest and it will pull articles globally that relate to a topic. I love the idea of having an assignment similar to the ones my science teacher assigned, and then allowing my students to use their phones as a tool  to find articles
 I also look forward to being able to share youtube videos like this one with my students to help them learn a topic.

Tech of the Week

This week our technology of the week is Flipboard. When I first downloaded this app I assumed I would delete it after this class and never use it again. However, this app is actually really cool. I can select my interests and it brings up news articles on those subjects. I don't watch the news very often, so I don't keep up with what is happening in the world as much as I would like. I think this app could be super helpful and an easy way to get news!

Week Two
I finished my Vine experience over the last week. It wasn't really difficult to complete a vine, but it was surprisingly time consuming to make a six second video. We also were asked to tweet over the past week. I have had Twitter for quite a few years now so that was nothing new for me. In class we were assigned groups that share the same subject area majors that we do. We started making an info-graphic on state, national, and technology standards in education.  I think looking at the standards and picking them apart is very interesting and is something I've never looked at before. Putting it into an info-graphic seems to be a little intimidating and challenging to me because I am not tech savvy on any level. In class we also watched a cool video that challenged us to think about how education is being taught. One of my classmates shared that "Technology isn't always learning." A former teacher of his had tweeted him that earlier in the week. I found that to be an awesome thought. Lots of time in high school I can remember the focus being on using our new laptops or this new technology or whatever it may be. Often times though those technologies we as students found ways to be off task with them. I think as a future teacher this is something I'll have to remember when I start trying to incorporate technology into my classroom.
 Roz brought up an interesting idea in class. She mentioned the idea of technology natives and stated how my generation is part of the technology natives, but technology has changed enough that now we are immigrants just like the generations before. This cycle she suggests will always continue. Which brings me to this meme that is most likely the future of my classroom.
 My closing thought is over the past week I have become more aware of technology in general. I also have started thinking about using it in my own classroom. One thing to know about me is I am always on Pinterest, and as I've been surfing Pinterwst I keep finding more and more amazing science apps for teachers. It's gotten me very excited about this class. At some point I will have to select a tech of the week to learn and I will probably use one of the apps I have found on Pinterest so more to come......

Introduction Blog
 I am Melissa Olson and a junior at UNL. My major is Secondary Education with an endorsement in Biology. I am currently taking Teac 259 and learning about different technologies. This class may prove to be a challenge for me because I am not very good with technology. Some facts about me are; I am from Emmetsburg, Iowa. I love science, (hence the endorsement in Biology). In class today we talked a little bit about standards and affordances that new technology provides us. When we were leaving we were asked to grab paper off the white board and write in our blogs about our technology. I grabbed white out. White out is a pretty rad invention.

 If I don't want to write in pencil it's all good I can use pen and if I screw up it's fine I just white it out. Before white out if you made a mistake on a page in pen you had to just scribble it out. That looks messy. The advantages and problems white out solves are called it's affordances. There was a standard that was set that professional writing does not have scribble marks or incorrectly spelled works throughout it. White out was the solution.   This week we were also asked to make a vine, which I have never done before. So to be continued...
Some students even get creative with their white out it would appear!