Lesson Planning

This week we learned about lesson planning and specifically, integrating technology into our lessons. We discussed the backwards design for creating a lesson as one method of creating our plans. We learned about the three important pieces of a lesson plan being creating an objective, finding a form of assessment, and planning instructional strategies that will bring all students to a competency level.
We also discussed our digital stories in more detail. We discussed the 10 commandments of multimedia projects, and were reminded not to run applications directly from a server, to save early and often, and reviewed other tips for successful projects.
We also practiced our lesson plan techniques with imaginary teachers planning various lessons. The biggest take-aways from our group were to make sure we plan ahead for our lessons, know the materials and tools we are using, and monitor students' activities often. These are all very important things to keep in mind while teaching in general, but specifically apply to using technology with children.

The 10 commandments for multimedia projects are always useful to review. They should be used whenever we are working with technology on our projects or lessons. These are great things to review with our students as well if they will be using the same technology in the classroom. In order to successfully teach our classes, the students will need to learn the rules.
Practicing our lesson planning while using technology is a very practical activity. I have begun creating lesson plans for some of my classes, but there has not been much emphasis on technology as a main piece of the lesson. I really liked practicing with this, as it will help us diversify our lessons when we are teaching.

After reviewing our lesson planning teacher in class and discussing his misjudgements/errors in his planning, I wonder how much extra time and planning it will take for us to plan lessons using technology. Hopefully we will be comfortable with the technology we are learning in class and can apply these to our lessons without too much further review. I think it would be difficult to learn a new tool ourselves and try to apply it in our classes.

Digital Storytelling

This week we learned about digital storytelling, which we will be working on as one of our projects.

We began by discussing a few elements of storytelling. While we read about 7 elements, we focused on 3 that are unique to digital storytelling. The 3 elements are the gift of your voice, images that convey emotional content, and the power of the soundtrack. These will be elements that we will be using in creating our digital stories. The gift of voice is unique, as we will be able to record ourselves narrating our own stories. This will make the story reflect our emotions. The pictures we use can help tell the story as well as add more emotion to the story itself. The soundtrack can be a variety of sounds and the sounds can change with each motion of the story. This will help set the tone of the story.
We also discussed how to find images for our stories. The main ways we discussed to show our story were by using photographs we already have, perhaps from a trip, by drawing the pictures to illustrate our story, by going out and taking pictures to go along with the narration, or downloading images from the internet. We watched examples using all of these methods, and they all seemed to work really well.
We then learned how to use PhotoStory3. This is the tool we will be using to create our stories for class. The program seems pretty easy to use. It will be a great tool to check our work, set our pictures to our narration, add titles, etc. I think that I will really like using this tool.

This information can be used in the classroom in the future. Learning about PhotoStory3 was great because this tool can be used with students. I think that with older/more mature students, it could be a tool for them to use individually to create their own stories. They would be able to use a variety of methods of picking pictures. It would be a great, unique way to teach a lesson, perhaps an English writing lesson to students. This could also be used with younger children, perhaps as a class project. Each child could illustrate a picture and narrate it, and we as teachers could put the story together for the class. It might be fun to use this after a field trip with the class to narrate the trip.
This tool could also be used as an instructional tool by the teacher alone. Rather than having the students create a story, we could use this as teachers to present material in a new and interesting way for the students. We could create a story as a narrative that teaches history lesson, or any subject really. It would be a great way to keep students motivated to watch and learn. After using it like this, the teacher may be able to introduce it as a tool the students can use themselves as well.

I think that it is difficult to decide on and create a story to share with others. I have started to think about my story for class, but am having trouble deciding how to illustrate them or find illustrations that would tell the story well. I wonder if there are certain types of stories that seem to work better when matched with certain types of illustrations. Hopefully I will be able to figure this question out in creating my story!

Fair Use/UDL - Week 3

This week we learned about fair use and Universal Design for Learning. We also continued work on our websites and learned about menu bars and some additional formatting information.

Fair use has four major characteristics that we can use to determine whether our use of a material is "fair". The characteristics are the purpose of the use, nature of work, amount taken, and effect on the market. Using this information, we can use a scale to determine whether something is okay to use on a website, in class, etc. For example, it would not be fair use to put a full song in a podcast or on our websites for "the whole world" to see/use/download. The reason for this is that although we may be using for educational value, it is a creative work, we have taken the song in its entirety, and it could potentially have an effect on sales of CD's of the song.

We learned about the creative commons license, which states that others can use your work as long as it meets certain criteria: it must be used for non-commerical purposes, the user must give credit to the producer of the work, and the user cannot alter it. This helps explain how we can use many items of creative work for educational purposes without breaking any fair use laws.

We also discussed Universal Design for Learning. The concept of this idea is that we want to create and use materials that accomodate the widest spectrum of users possible without the need for specializing the design or adapting the materials for certain users. The three principles that support UDL are recognition learning, strategic learning, and affective learning. Recognition learning refers to ways to take knowledge in, strategic learning refers to how we are able to express what we learned, and affective learning is centered around motivation; students should be able to choose networks to engage themselves in a topic that are motivating to them.

These ideas can be easily related to concepts we will use as teachers in the future. Fair use laws are extremely important to understand, as we will be using many types of media and references in our teaching. We need to know what we can record off of tv and show to our classes, how much of a poem or book we can copy to share with the class, as well as other materials we may use. It is also important to relay this information to our students, so that they know what they are allowed to use in creating various projects. I remember from when I was in school, that teachers often brought videos, taped shows, and copied literature to class for use. We will need to consider these rules carefully in determining what to bring to class.

UDL is a very important concept for teachers to understand. There is increasing diversity found in the classroom currently. We are seeing increases in multi-cultural classrooms as well as learners with disabilities in the class. We will need to make sure we are using materials that will help reach the most students possible. We must understand that students learn in very different ways, and the best way to help a whole class learn is to have outlets for them to learn in the ways that best suit them. We should keep this in mind while planning lessons for our future classes.

Regarding fair use, I am wondering who the best person to ask is if we are not sure whether our use of a material is "fair" or not. We discussed talking to the author/producer directly or a media specialist in a school, if available, but it seems to me that they will not know about every material we may want to use in the classroom. Is there a board or other governing group that moderates these rules? Who is it that takes action if they see unfair use of a material?

Web Publishing/Design - Week 2

This week we started learning how to publish our own websites and learned how to update our home page. We learned about the editors and transfer clients needed to publish information on our personal sites. We focused on NVU and Home directory. Once we learned about these tools, we put them into practice and were able to open up our websites in class to use these tools. I had never heard of NVU, and think it will be extremely useful. It seems very user-friendly.
We talked about the network and some language that we will need to be more aware of, including http, html, and URL. We learned the parts of a URL so that we will know the specific paths we are taking to pull up documents online.
We learned about protocol, including how to name our sites and documents, which extensions should be used (html, htm), and that the extensions used really do matter. If we use an incorrect extension label, others will not be able to successfully pull up our websites. For this reason, we need to be careful not to use capital letters, spaces, or symbols other than letters and numbers.
We also talked about web design, and learned what we should and should not do to make our websites more user-friendly and visually attractive. The four basic design principles to keep in mind are alignment, proximity, contrast, and repetition. One big theme I took from this was to make sure there is continuity within our site.

I think that these concepts are great to know and can be easily applied to the classroom once we are teaching. It would be a good idea to have a class webpage that can be given to both students and parents. As teachers, we can put assignments and schedules online. Parents would then be aware of what we are doing in class, and students can check their assignments and other class information online. For the use of parents, it would be a good idea to link the site to a school website or other useful links. For students, it would be a good place to store other resources they may want to use in completing assignments.
Depending on the age of students we work with, a website could also be a good tool for the students to create jointly in class. They could save and load class projects, especially those activities done in groups onto the website. A good example might be a group science project. They can take pictures of projects, write up explanations and hypotheses, and load them onto their websites. The students would then all have access to their projects outside of the classroom. Often, if a group project is done, the teacher or one of the students in the group might have much of the information. If the information is shared online, the students could access the information from home to complete other assignments, or even show them off to their parents.

The one question I do still have is how would we be able to create a website like the ones we are working on outside of UVA. We are currently using home directory to store our public files. As we saw in class, if a picture is put on the website directly from another area of our computer, but is not actually stored in our public file on home directory, the image does not load when the site is opened. This makes sense to me, but is there something like a home directory we can use once we leave UVA? Or is there another way to produce websites that others can view?

Introduction to Blogs

This week in class we were introduced to the class and we discussed blogs. The purpose of our blogs will be to comment or reflect on experiences we have in class each week.
We also discussed our class online discussion board, which we will use to comment on class topics, ask questions of each other, and hopefully be able to help each other with issues we may have.
While I am new to blogging, it seems to me that a blog will be a great tool for us as students currently, and will be a great tool when we are teachers ourselves. A blog could be used as a site for parents of our students. They would be able to log in and see what we are doing in class on a given day/week/unit. Depending on the age of the students we are teaching, a blog could be used for them to post their own thoughts in an online journal. They would be able to interact with each other and comment on each others' ideas. It may be a resource for them to give comments on homework assignments as well.
I do wonder how many children use or have their own blogs. At what age does this become an appropriate learning tool for them?