Melissa+R

Melissa R

 I was really excited to take this course this semester. I always thought I was pretty good with technology and I knew what I was doing. But, when I sat down to think of the things I could do in my classroom using technology I noticed I really did not know. I have always used PowerPoint to present information while I was in school. But I would notice that other students would use different things to show us information. Leaving this class I know different ways I can present information whether it is when I am a teacher or a student. I realized how much stuff there is out there to help students learn. Whether it is something to do with assistive technology or a cool app on the Ipad, there are so many things I never knew about.  I think the best part was learning the different ways to teach in the classroom. Many of my classes at SJC before have said not to use worksheets because they are boring and the students hate learning this way. With the information provided in this class I feel I can teach my students using many different technology pieces. I learned new ways to help my student, I am with now, to study for his tests in a fun and exciting way. He hates to reread parts of the book, or really read at all and the worksheets he has to do in order to study. I thought right away that there are games on the internet I could use or create to help him learn how to learn the required material. Unfortunately, I was only able to play a game with him once because I only work part time with him and his study hall is not during the time I am with him. But, I know when I have my own classroom I am going to play fun games with them on days where we should be studying for a test of quiz. I am making sure that I never turn into the teacher who sits in the front of the room and lectures for 40 minutes. Especially when I know that the students are not learning, or even listening.  At first I did not like the idea of a live binder. I am not really sure why, I think I thought it was going to be much more difficult to do and I would get confused and eventually forget about it. I thought that every time Nicole showed us something cool I would post the website or whatever it was just right on my twitter. I figured this way I was sharing it with people as well. I did not really think about the fact that eventually I was going to have to search for these tweets to try and remember what they all did. For the last project, I decided I was going to make a live binder of videos that had to do with bullying. In this class, I realized how many good videos were out there about bullying. The best part was I found videos that came from so many different kinds of people. I found that athletes, movie starts, TV stars, singers, and groups were posting about bullying. I realized that so many different kids can get the message about bullying through their favorite celebrities. I am going to use my live binder in the future to show my students about bullying, rather than just tell them about it. The link is below:

http://www.livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit?id=374219    Before this class, I thought that twitter was a place where you could say random things to celebrities and little posts to your friends who actually had an account. I had no idea what the hash tag was for and I really did not care, I just did not use them. I was amazed that you could have conversations through twitter and even hold a class! I was very interested in going to the education chats, although I was turned off because many of the people were not very welcoming of everyone. Sometimes I will see a post about one of the topics and I will say a few things, but I haven’t really involved myself in a conversation.  When I was reading the book LOL OMG I was completely shocked by a lot of the things I had learned. I even made my best friend read the book because I know some of the things in the book she was doing. I never really thought about employees looking at your pages, I was always under the impression they were just going to look at your pictures to try and get an idea of what you were like. I never thought in a million years that they would look at what you “liked” on Facebook and most of the time makes a false impression of you. I immediately went home and “unliked” several things on my page because I did not want people to get the wrong idea about me. I was not aware that Facebook likes to change the settings often and not warn you that they are putting your profile nonprivate. I checked all my settings and I noticed that anyone could see a few of my things on Facebook. All my pictures were blocked except my tagged ones.  This class really made me look at the teachers that I have come into contact with, basically my whole life. Not many teachers at all have used technology in the class. The most many teachers will do is use PowerPoint, even then they are just using slides and writing too much information on them and expecting the students to copy off of them. I have even seen a teacher use just a work document and had the students copy the information. I was very excited to hear that one of the social studies teachers in my school used the Stack a States app on her Ipad with her class this week. I was so excited that I went out of my way to tell her how awesome I thought that was and how much the students loved it.