iPad transforming education! (Blog #8)

Every time a new technology device becomes available to education it is analyzed to test its effectiveness or if it will only be another shiny distracting device.  iPads were released back in 2010, yet presently (almost two years later) not all school districts count with one.  In my district only 10 teachers were selected to conduct a pilot program which means they are the only ones that have one that can be used in the classroom.  Based on their experiences, we might get more iPads or the district might decided not to get iPads.  

Reasons to why use iPads in the classroom:

Overall, iPads are a great compliment to education by providing motivation, engagement, storage capacity, Internet access, portability, and a wide variety of educational apps.  Many apps are evaluated and since there many out there, some for free and other for a minimal fee, I have provided a list of several favorite educational apps.  


English Language Arts 

• How Rocket Learned to Read
• Shakespeare in Bits: Romeo & Juliet
• Grammar Up HD

Mathematics

• MathBoard
• Math Bingo
• Wolfram Algebra Course Assistant

Science

• Britannica Kids: Volcanoes
• Monster Anatomy
• Star Walk

History and Geography:

• History: Maps of World
• Virtual History ROMA
• AP US History 5 Steps to a 5

iPads are to be used as a reinforcement tool, it should not replace instruction.  Which apps have you used and worked wonders in your class?

See you later, virtually!

-Becky

Reference

Youtube(2011).  Apple education learning with ipad us. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24R1QJAXL4s

Welcome to Blogosphere (Blog#7)

Probably all of you reading this blog know the meaning of blogging, however, not all educators believe in the benefits of implementing blogs in their classroom.  I was once in that situation where I would see blogging like a social tool and that is it. Unfortunately, many in my campus had a million of excuses of why not using blogs.  Blogs are a crucial component of the Web 2.0 technologies and they exist for several important reasons.  Digital natives need to:




#1 - Practice their communication skills.   Students are given a voice and it's a way of expressing their ideas.


#2 - Practice their reading skills.


#3 - Use technology to share knowledge. Using blogs will permit cooperative learning.


#4 - Be motivated.   When students feel a sense of ownership they are motivated to create more.


#5 - Collaborate.  Presently, collaboration skills are one of the most demanding skills in our workforce.


#6 - Be engage.  Blogs are interacting, students discuss with each other permitting them to be engage in the lesson.


#7 - Participate. Blogs give learners an audience, a purpose to participate.


#8 - Be creative. When they are blogging no one will tell them what to do so they need to apply creativity.


#9 - Apply critical thinking. Participating in blogs or creating a blog will require  reflection to what they will do.  Blogging is a process!


#10 - Become culturally aware.


How many more reasons do you need? Blogs give students a learning environment which is open 24/7.  All these are skills needed for their digital future!  The following video gives you some statistics to why blogs are needed tool in education.

If your school district does not count with a web-based publishing system, here are some free web-based publishing and hosting sites that will help you incorporate blogs in your class:

• Blogger http://www.blogger.com
• Edublogs http://edublogs.org/
• LiveJournal http://www.livejournal.com/

You are minutes away to set up your blog.  Let me know your experiences with blogs in your classroom.

See you later, virtually!

-Becky

Reference:

Youtube(2009).  Blogs in Education.  Retrieved from http://youtu.be/rJ1JVGdUxkc.

Motivation is the key to learning! Blog #6

Many of us, if not all, have confronted reality of students not being motivated to learn.  When students are not motivated they will not participate in the lesson, therefore they will not learn.  Many times I have asked myself, what can I do?  It seems nothing works, but research shows that if we follow several strategies this negative effect can diminish drastically and help us with our objective- teach!

I have summarize the video's (found below) motivation theory which points out a few strategies we can implement:



#1  Demonstrate high expectations.
Never tell a student that they cannot learn or that they will not change because by doing so we are destroying their self-concept.  Students will start to believe that they can't, so always expect the best from them and let them about your expectation.  Expectations should clear, positive, and high.

#2  Help students set and monitor goals.
Students need to be taught that they need a roadmap to follow to achieve success.  If they don't have goals, they have nothing to follow and no force to drive them forward.    When they set goals they will try hard to achieve their highest potential.

#3  Model excitement for learning.
Many times, teachers try to find an excuse to why their class is boring and so you they will tell students something like, "I know this topic is boring, but it is important!".  Students then won't be expecting any excitement so will have no interest in learning.  These teachers are already telling students the lesson is boring, so what should teachers expect?  As we all know, all subjects have a purpose and so lets just demonstrate excitement.  Tone of voice and energy play a crucial role to modeling excitement.

#4  Challenge students.
Teachers should get a child to think for themselves, to evaluate higher order thinking instruction, and have them create/construct, not only answer yes or no questions.  Students should be innovative and creative.


#5  Create a safe environment
Promote team work.  Students want and deserve a pleasant learning environment where they feel secure and are happy to be there. We need to place a great emphasis against bullying!


#6  Engage
Technology is one the tools that will help educators engage students.  For example, using educational games to reinforce concept will capture student's attention and keep them engage.

#7  Make learning relevant to them.
Students need the reason to why they need to achieve a learning outcome. They need to see how content is going to help them or how they can apply it to their lives.  Don't we all want to learn things that we believe it has a purpose?  There has to be a motive behind learning.

There are also many other factors that will impact learning, however, applying motivational strategies in advance will help enhance learning.    Classroom management goes hand in hand with motivation.  What other strategies work for you?

See you later, virtually!
-Becky

Reference:

Youtube (2008).  Motivating Students in the Classroom. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtIMpLbOxAA

Online testing! Blog #5

Technological advances should be used to help us as educators.  And there are many tools out there that help us in many ways.  Time is always an issue because there seems to never be enough time either to teach, grade, or manage.  If you have never been introduced to online testing, today is the day.  Online testing is the way to save time, make virtual appealing tests, and manage data easily.

Online testing will help you by:

• Saving time when creating tests (most of test generators will create a quiz in minutes)
• Identifying strengths and weaknesses of students (will let you adjust teaching as necessary)
• Offering visual appealing tests (students are interested in taking tests that are visually appealing)
• Grading test and keeping record of it
• Generating instant reports of results
• Provide immediate feedback to students
• Save time when wanting to shuffle questions to avoid cheating (most generators will do this with just a click)
• Developing many different type of quizzes (multiple-choice, fill in the blanks, etc..).

Here is an example of a sample question:

Image provided by http://online-quiz-maker.net

There are many online test generators and most of them are free of charge or some will charge a minimal fee which is certainly worth paying for all the benefits they can offer.  Please check the following websites and try out their tutorials to discover how good they are:

• http://online.quiz-maker.net/
• http://www.thatquiz.org/
• http://www.classmarker.com/
• http://quizstar.4teachers.org/

Here is a video of some features Classmarker has to offer..

I have provided several online testing generators, take advantage of technology and apply them in your classroom.  The generator I prefer is www.thatquiz.org because of its simplicity and I have been able to enjoy without paying a fee.  Visit all of these and choose the one that fits your style, let it do all the time consuming work for you so you can focus time on other more demanding issues such as teaching.  Please post any comments of any other online test generator you might use, which you will like to recommend.  

See you later, virtually!

- Becky

Reference

YouTube (2011). Classmarker.com - At a glance. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojSngu0Qp8E.

Clicking imagination! Blog #4

As as I was browsing the web, I found a technology that has been rising in popularity during the last few years --Clickers! Clickers are also known as a personal response system, classroom communication system, interactive system, and other terms are used interchangeable to describe what clickers are.  Clickers are handheld devices used to collect students answers and clicker software will create instant feedback by generating reports or graphs. Unfortunately, I don't count with one in my classroom, but they seem like a great interactive, engaging option.
They are not a magic tool, but used effectively will help in the learning process.


The following video gives you an introduction to what a clickers are
:

Once we know what clickers are, now how can you use clickers in the classroom?  This following video is great giving you ideas to how to implement them:

Many good reasons to why use clickers:

• Great to teach collaboration skills
• Can do more than multiple choice questions
• Keep students involved and make them accountable
• Students are engage and their learning is enhance
• Paper reduction - Go Green!
• Easier to point out weaknesses and strengths.

Have you use clickers?  Let me know your experience....

See you later, virtually!

- Becky

References:

YouTube (2007). What are Clickers? Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4A62QyAUHM

YouTube (2010).  Using Clickers in the Classroom.  Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnnP0uCqD4k

Copyright issues

Mr. Copyright in action!

"I read your paper and I search for the name of person whom you are writing about and I found an essay almost exactly the same as yours, what can you say about that?"  Does this phrase sound familiar?

It is extremely important to have our student know about copyright laws.  When I first asked for a presentation, many students went go off the board copying and pasting pictures and when I asked for a report they also copied and pasted, they will do this even if I specify in the instructions that they cannot copy and paste.  There has to be another way of having them recognize the importance of following copyright laws. I had omitted the most important lesson, they might not have known the term copyright, the consequences of copyright infringements, and impact of these.

First and most important, they need to understand what a copyright is.  As defined by The Copyright Society of the USA, a copyright is a right given to the author or creator to copy, publicly, and modify their work in a certain way.  With this definition, now we can conclude that if they are not the authors or creators then they cannot copy it, modify it, or publicly it.    There is, however, a copyright limitation referred to as fair use.  Fair use permits the copy of copyrighted works if being used for educational or research purposes.  Court will look at several factors when applying fair use, yet some of these factors considered will include: amount of work copied, purpose, and if there is any value gained in the use of the copyrighted work.

Lets make our students aware that they cannot:

• Copy all pictures found online even if not blocked
• Download "free" music
• Copy essays or reports as it were their work

Instead we can give them ideas to where they can find resources without breaking the law.  Here are some websites that can be used to download, in which they will charge a minimal amount to choose from a variety of resources or some depending on the use it might permit the usage of resources at no cost.

• www.dreamstime.com
• http://www1.free-clipart.net/net
• http://freedigitalphotos.net
  
• www.cartoonstock.com

This video can also be used to explain what copyright is:

And students can go to http://www.copyrightkids.org to learn about copyrights, how to ask for permission,  and even take a quiz.

See you later - virtually!

-Becky

References:

Youtube(2010). Copyright basics. Retrieved from http://youtu.be/Uiq42O6rhW4.

The Copyright Society of the USA(2007). Welcome to Copyright kids. Retrieved from http://www.copyrightkids.org/

Value of Online Games

Digital natives are attracted and motivated when interacting with media.  With the rapid increase of the internet, who knows of a child that doesn't like online games?  Not surprisingly, many children admitted to be addicted to online games.  This is a picture of my son's shirt (a picture says more than words).  This when we as educators need to take advantage of the situation by combining games and education, however how effective and appealing is this combination to children?



A recent study conducted by an operator of virtual education games, ITS (Intelligent Tutoring System), demonstrates this combination is a great opportunity to motivate, entertain, and improve student's performance.  The main components of an ITS are the knowledge, modelling, tutoring, and user interface domains.  In order for a game to be effective they need to have all four components.  Games are used as motivational tool they should not be used to replace instruction, but should only serve as a supplemental tool.

There are some disadvantages and one might be when students find it difficult to navigate through the game than it is to comprehend content, however great improvement demonstrate more an advantage compared to a disadvantage.  A very important note of educational games is that the greatest benefit is for those who need the most help, low performing students achieve more improvement.  Students that are good performers don't show much of an improvement, yet most importantly they don't regress.

Here is a list of some online educational games which you might want to try and make a sound judgement about them:

• http://www.learn4good.com/games/educational-learning-activities.htm
• http://www.funbrain.com/
• http://www.learningplanet.com/
• http://www.starfall.com/

After trying some of them, don't I wish this was available as an alternative to my learning 20 years ago!

See you later, virtually!

-Becky

References:

Virvou, M., Katsionis, G., & Manos, K. (2005). Combining Software Games with Education: Evaluation of its Educational Effectiveness. Educational Technology & Society, 8 (2), 54-65. Retrieved from http://www.ifets.info/journals/8_2/5.pdf