Blog Assignment #6

Personal Learning Networks (PLNs)

A Personal Learning Network is basically a global network of educators and other professionals that can help you throughout your career. It is a space where people can collaborate ideas and share information through Twitter, blogs, and other social sites. As we learned previously in this class, teachers have to be learners. Through this network, we are able to connect with people we can learn from so we can become better teachers. As Steven Anderson said in Building Your PLN- A Primer for Anyone teachers do not have to know everything, or feel like they have to know everything. (Just as Dr. Strange always says, "I Don't Know. Let's Find Out.") They are able to ask the other people in their network to get the best and most well-informed answer. Michael Fawcett pointed out in PLN- Michael Fawcett (@TeacherNZ) Offers His Insights, a student in his classroom wanted to know the exact time Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. Fawcett tweeted out the question, and NASA replied in about thirty minutes! I would say that is a pretty well-informed answer! I think this could become extremely useful to me as an elementary educator especially. Younger children have the thirst for knowledge and are apt to ask as many questions as possible. Me not knowing the answer is bound to happen more than once, and I can use my PLN to give them the best answer.

PLNs are formed by subscribing to different information, such as conversations on blogs, etc., that intrigues you or what you are currently studying. After seeing the video Welcome to My PLE, I decided to check out Symbaloo. I absolutely love this way of organization. As the 7th grader said in the video, she is able to construct her page in such a way where all of her school resources are together and all of her social media sites are together. I think this is a great idea and can help students stay on task. Especially if they are like me and as soon as they log onto the internet they type in Facebook without even thinking about it. Although I have gotten better about it (mostly because of this class), it still happens from time to time.

To create my own PLN, I will definitely be using Symbaloo and Delicious. The first people I will probably add are Dr. Strange, along with other teachers I will have throughout the education program at the University of South Alabama (such as Dr. Vitulli). I will also add some of my elementary school teachers if they are education-based active on blogs or Twitter. I will also add the teachers I have been assigned to for C4T assignments along with other teachers that are elementary education centered. The last group of people added will be people that I find on the internet that talk/ write about my future profession that I could find useful later on when I start my teaching career.

Personal Learning Networks seem as though they can be extremely helpful, even for those teachers that have been teaching for years. I know I will find it especially useful as a new teacher, and maybe even as I am continuing my education through the University.

Thanks for reading!

Jennah Rose

Project #8 Book Trailer

A Very Hungry Caterpillar Book Trailer

My Sentence Videos

My Sentence Is...


My Passion Is...

Blog Assignment #5

What did I learn from these conversations with Anthony Capps?

I want to start by saying these videos were extremely helpful in a way that is difficult for those of us just getting into our education classes. It is hard to know exactly what we are getting ourselves into, but these videos showed the inside scoop of what it actually means to be a teacher and how to teach effectively. Here are a few things I learned from Dr. Strange's and Anthony Capps's conversations.

Project Based Learning: Part 1
-Create a project that has an audience, student interest, community, and content that follows ACCRS standards.
A project that Capps did was writing letters to congressmen. The students were given a topic that they were able to research and then they peer reviewed each other's letters. Only eight letters were chosen to actually send off. I think this is a great way to incorporate both history and writing, and it also gives the students a feeling of doing something important and being heard.

Project Based Learning: Part 2
-You have to listen and include parents.
-Never limit students' ideas and creativity.
-Take students' opinions about the projects into consideration for future classes.
I think parents are always the ultimate "say-so". If they are not comfortable with their children researching a specific topic, then as the teacher you have to respect that (as Capps had to do). Also, you should never limit a student. Let them dream and create in their own way.

iCurio

iCurio is basically an online search engine that is safe and appropriate for school-aged children. It has texts, pictures, and videos. It also has a storage capacity so students can save certain resources to look at later. I think that is my favorite part about iCurio because it enables students to start becoming more organized. I also thought it was pretty cool how there was a read-along feature. If a student comes across a word they do not know how to pronounce, this feature could help them.

Discovery Education
I think this is a great tool. (My mother has even told me about this before-she loves it!) It enables the teacher to bring experts into the classroom via video and it can help bring certain texts to life for the students. Most students are listeners and watchers, which Dr. Strange pointed out in the video, so these types of things can really help positively impact student participation.

The Anthony-Strange List of Tips for Teacher Part 1
1. Be interested in learning as a teacher!
2. Teaching is a constant process. It does not stop once you get home.
3. You have to be creative and flexible when things go wrong.
4. Start with an end goal, but sometimes you have to flexible to get there.
5. You need 100% student engagement in everything you do! Figure out a way to make this happen!
6. Have time to reflect your work or your students' work with an audience.

Use Tech, Don't Teach It
You cannot teach technology in the classroom; allow the students to figure it out for themselves. Because you should not teach the technology, do NOT expect perfection. Throughout your lessons, use one tool at a time like building blocks. One week might have a lesson that needs to be researched by the students. The next week, allow them to research and then make a video of their reflections, etc. Lastly, always do it yourself first. You cannot know if it works, if you have not tried it. This is the best way to use technology in the classroom.

Additional Thoughts About Lessons
I though this was a great video. It helped put things in perspective for me. Capps described to the viewers that a lesson is at least four layers thick. The all-inclusive layer is meeting the Alabama standards for the year. Every lesson should be centered on this. The next lesson is the unit size- how long will it take to cover this one standard? The next layer is the week- what can you do over that week to ensure students are getting what they need? The final layer is the daily lesson. Is this lesson going to help a student master this one aspect and put it towards the lesson tomorrow? The way Capps described lessons makes it not seem so overwhelming, which is extremely helpful to me.

All of these videos help me understand what it really means to be a teacher- all of the work and the progress that has to be made every step of the way. I feel as though being a teacher is one of the most important professions out there. We are shaping the future, and we better do it right. The videos above have pushed us in the right direction to be able to do this.

As always, thanks for reading!

Jennah Rose

Project #3 Presentation

Blog Assignment #4

What do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher?

I have never actually thought about what kind of questions are best to ask in a classroom. Now that I am looking back at my experiences as a student, I realize that many teachers do not ask the class questions that are capable of gauging the extent of the class's knowledge. The general questions most teachers ask, only benefit those students who are actually listening, which as The Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom pointed out, is very rarely the entire class. From the resources provided for us, there are a couple of things we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher.

1. Ask open-ended questions
By asking open-ended questions, students have time to answer questions in a logical way. It also gets everyone in the classroom to start thinking istead of a select few. This was best described in Asking Better Questions in the Classroom.
2. Prepare Questions
Three Ways to Ask Better Questions in the Classroom explained this way the best. I have never thought about actually preparing questions to ask my students, but it made complete sense. If a teacher does not prepare before-hand, how is he or she able to effectively find out if their students understand the material or not?
3. Do Not Interrupt Student's Answers
I think this is extremely important in the classroom. Interrupting students can lead to low confidence. By allowing students to completely finish their answer, the teacher shows them that he or she cares about what the student has to say. And that can be one of the most important things in classroom. This point is best explained in Asking Questions to Improve Learning

As there are many things that can aid a teacher in the classroom, asking the right kind of questions could be the most helpful. Asking the right kind of questions in the classroom can open a student's mind and thought process. This could lead to them being better students and gaining a thirst to learn- which in turn, turns the teacher to be an effective teacher.

Thanks for reading!

Jennah Rose

C4T #1

C4T #1, commment 1

"The Greatest Stories Never Told: Showcasing Our Gifted Classrooms Through Social Media & WebTools" by Elvira G. Deyamport is my first C4T assignment. She traveled to Indianapolis, Indiana to the 60th National Association for Gifted Children Conference. Her presentation focused on how she integrated social media and technology in her classroom. She had a twitter account and a blog for her class and allowed the students to contribute to the blog. Along with how to integrate these things in the modern day classroom, she also talked about important safety measures such as monitoring the tweets and the comments that others leave. Deyamport gave me a lot of great ideas for my future classroom.

C4T #1, comment 2

The second blog of Deyamport's I commented on was "Animal Research Poems." In this blog she talked about how she gave her students templates to write poems about endangered species. I like how she was able to incorporate both poetry and environmental science. She also showed some poems that her students did and they were really good! Once again she opened my eyes to some great ideas for my future classroom.

Blog Assignment #3

Peer Editing. It has been used in schools as long as I can remember. As much as some students dreaded it, I was okay with it- probably because I was (still sometimes am) a "Grammar Nazi." My mother is an English teacher, after all. However, no one is perfect. I have a habit of putting too many commas in my writing and sometimes I get confused on where to put punctuation marks, whether inside the quotation marks or outside. Anyways, peer editing and review can be tricky. Like the presentations communicated, constructive criticism is very important. As the video What is Peer Editing? and the presentation Peer Edit with Perfection Tutorial stressed, staying positive, being specific, and following the three steps are very important to peer editing. The three steps are compliments, suggestions, and corrections. Peer Editing is very useful. It allows others to view your work and see mistakes that you might not have seen yourself.

Peer editing is a useful tool, when used correctly. The video Writing Peer Review Top 10 Mistakes outlines the do's and don't's of peer editing. I found this video absolutely hilarious and extremely helpful- I even sent it to my mother so she could show her classes. But let's face it, we have all been paired with one of the types of people outlined in the video. Their criticisms are often unhelpful and hurtful. It is very important to stay positive throughout the whole process! Even when you see someone's work that has numerous errors, go through one by one with them and show them the correct way. All of these presentations were extremely helpful in reviewing a peer's work.

Thanks for reading!

Jennah Rose