Berends,+Bridget

Journal #5 The past two weeks have been a crash course. I have learned so much but I feel like I have only scratched the surface. The biggest things I am taking from this course is the belief that even I can use technology well personally and in the classroom. Now that I feel a lot more comfortable with the technology I am more willing to try it in my class. I have also learned that technology is not extra steps or trouble for the teacher it is an awesome way to motivate students and enhance learning. I have realized that technology can really help to make students understand and grasp the concepts a lot better. Going forward I still want to learn about the smart board technology. Now I am excited to get one in my classroom. At the beginning of the course I wanted nothing to do with a smart board.

At the beginning of the course I wanted to learn how use digital photos in my classroom. Through digital story telling I have so many ideas for photos in my classroom. At the beginning of the course I stated I wanted to help students become better at researching. I have learned a lot of tools to help students focus their research and to guide them in the right directions when they are using the internet. I have a much more positive view of technology now then I did at the beginning of the course. I am excited to try the strategies I have learned in this class next school year.

Click the link below for the warm-up for my technology lesson. [|Warm-Up]

Journal #4 Copyright and fair use issues I was familiar with: · Educators can use a portion of copyright materials for educational use only. · You must always give credit to the author for their work even if you have copyright permission. · You must get permission to use copyright materials if you plan to profit off of the material. Example: Charging admission for a school play or chorus getting paid to perform. Copyright and fair use issues that were new to me: · Fair use allows you to copy only 10% of the original work. · I didn’t realize that government works are public domain. · I never heard of the Teach Act. I didn’t even think about how copyright laws are even more of an issue for online classes.

I have heard a lot of teachers talk about how they have to pick between honoring copyright laws and meeting their department budget. The school budgets are very small and buying a class set of books that may only be used in a couple of lessons is usually out of the question. Teachers can stay within their budget if they just copy a class set of the pages they need out of a book but this breaks the copy right laws.

Check with your schools because a lot of school districts pay big money to subscribe to websites that allow teacher to down load and use materials that are all fair use. My school subscribes to clip art websites, websites where you can down load video clips and tons of databases. Your media specialist should have the user names and passwords.

Journal #3

A lot of the web tools I use in my cooking units I also use in my everyday life. For example allrecipes.com will calculate any serving size for all the recipes on their website. This is great when I am having a party. I use web based conversion calculators to convert any recipe measurements I need. There are several websites I use to look up the nutritional information of foods I eat. These cooking web tools are very helpful in the kitchen and save a lot of time. Most of the time when cooking I have my lab top right on the counter for easy assess to all the information I need. With only a couple of clicks you can find nutritional information about foods, cooking techniques, and a variety of recipes. Other Web 2.0 tools I use a lot in my personal life are for scrapbooking. There are many Web 2.0 tools that are wonderful for enhancing, organizing and sharing my photos. Many of the websites will allow you to make a digital scrapbook, digital story book or picture slide show. It is very easy and fast to upload your pictures but there are hundreds of options for editing your photos. You can add boarders, graphics or backgrounds to all of your pictures. Before I know it I can spend over an hour editing just a couple of pictures. Even though the editing is time consuming I enjoy doing it on my free time. After this course I defiantly intend to add more Web 2.0 tools into my classroom. I would love to try a pod cast. I think it is easy enough for middle school students and they would love to hear their own voices. They could make a pod cast to teach other students sewing skills or make a public service announcement about the importance of budgeting and saving your money. Currently I sign up for the computer lab so the students can create a project example brochures or power points. I would like to start signing up for the computer lab to do a lesson that is not project based like blogging about a piece of text the class has read. In the next 5-10 years I see technology only increasing in all classes and content areas. Each year more teachers in my school get smart boards and student computers in their classrooms. The high cost of technology makes the process of integrating it into all classes a lot slower. Despite the high cost, schools do see technology as important and understand that today students respond better and are more interested when technology is used.

My delicious site for book marking: []

Journal #2

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To be honest I have used very little technology in my classes. I have found that a lot of college professors don’t have any more technology knowledge then I do. In undergrad all teachers used power point. Power point was better then taking notes from the teacher's lecture but I always remember writing down the power points and not really focusing on the teacher talking. Also the power points were usually long and boring. In a research grad class I took, the teacher did a power point with almost all pictures, each slide had only one or two words. I found this very beneficial for many reasons. At the end of the power point we even discussed why the picture power was a better option. First, the class was listening to the speaker instead of reading or writing the power point words. Second, the pictures were interested and motivating. Third, I later could use the pictures to remember the content in the presentation. Power point should be an aid in a teachers presentation not be the presentation itself. With only pictures on the power point the teacher was able to have students predict about what the slides would be about, ask questions about each slide, and have group discussions about different slides. The teacher was much more interactive with the students instead of just reading the slides.======

Personal Homepage

1. Why are you taking ISTC 501? I am taking ISTC 501 as an elective for the Secondary Education Masters program.

2. What are three important things you hope to learn while taking this course? I hope to learn some technology tricks that will help motivate my students. Specifically I want to learn how to incorporate pictures and photos into my lessons. I have a classroom camera for the students or me to take pictures. How can I use the camera as a teaching tool? Second, I want to learn how to help students research on the internet. I have done several internet projects with the students and have found they have a hard time finding quality information on the internet. Third, I would like to learn about smart boards/white boards. Smart boards are the new hot technology in education and I may be getting one in my classroom in the next couple of years.

3. In what ways do you think taking this course will help you in your other college coursework and future professional practice? I don’t use technology as much in my classroom as I should. This course will help me to move out of my comfort zone and teach a different way. I hope this course will help me to make my classroom more interactive.

4. Basic, interesting information about yourself. I grew up in Harford County and currently live in Belcamp. I have been married for two years to my husband Jay. I graduated from Bel Air High School and completed my undergrad at University of Delaware. My first teaching job was at Perryville High School in Cecil County. I worked at Perryville for three years teaching child development. Currently I teach at Aberdeen Middle School in Harford County. Next year will be my four year teaching Family and Consumer Science at Aberdeen. My job is a little different because I only have students for one quarter then I get a new group of students. I teach about 500 students each year. Other things I enjoy are scrapbooking, cooking, reading and volunteering. I just got back from volunteering for Extreme Make-Over Home Edition, it was tons of fun. 5. A photo of yourself.

Journal #1

I would say my technology skills are about average. I can do the basics like Microsoft programs, email, and search the web. My technology history started in fifth grade when I first used a computer in school to play Oregon Trail. I remember getting a computer in our house a couple years later when I was in middle school. It wasn’t until high school that we were connected to the internet. My parents still to this day don’t know how to use a computer so they were no help in teaching me technology. I am the oldest child in my family so I learned the basics through self teaching and a computer/typing course in 9th grade. I forced my self to not look at the keys. At the beginning all my friends were laughing at how slow I was typing. By the end of the course I had the fastest typing time in the class. In college my skills increased as computers became more widely used. When I was in college power point was the new exciting program. At the beginning of my teaching career technology was not a big part of my lessons. The reality is computer lab time is slim to none and my first three years of teaching I didn’t have a projector connected to my computer. To my surprise, my third year of teaching my principal told me I was going to teach a computer class called Design and Presentation. I informed him I have no qualifications to teach about computers and was not the best computer user myself. He told me that I would figure it out and I would do fine. The course was mostly on Microsoft programs and all I had to do was follow the curriculum. Things are always easier said then done but I was able to survive that class. I think I learned more about technology then the students did. My last three years of teaching I have had a LCD projector in my room. I have forced myself to use it as much as possible. I like showing students good websites and creating games to go along with my lessons. Technology is not really in my comfort zone so every time I use it in the classroom I get a little nervous. The new technology in education right now is smart boards. I am avoiding getting one in my classroom because I think it is beyond my technology level. In my personal life I use technology almost every day. I check e-mails and facebook, search the internet, and upload my pictures to snap fish. My biggest problem with technology is when something goes wrong I have no idea how to fix it. This problem has become much worse in the last couple of years because my husband works for the Office of Technology for Harford County Public Schools. When anything, big or small goes wrong I get him to fix it instead of trying to figure it out myself. I have become very technology dependent on my husband. I need to learn how to fix my own technology because my husband is not in the classroom to help me when things go wrong. I have always been very eager to learn new technology and hope in the future I will be able to incorporate new and interesting technology into my class.

Comment #1

The Oregon Trail reference is awesome. That game was so sweet. I was always the banker because you could buy the most bullets and shoot the most animals. I also enjoyed scripting my own gravestones with profanity.

I'm worried about using technology in the classroom too. It seems like you are doing well with it even though you aren't tech savvy. I hope I can get a grasp on it soon. I have no sense of these new gadgets coming out. I want to use them; I just need to learn how.