Reflection

I've loved taking this class and learning about how technologies are going to benefit my classroom. I think the most useful thing I have learned in this class is being aware of how to keep your students safe on the internet. I love that classes can have blogs now where students can post their work and collaborate together on things -- the internet is such a good way to get students excited and involved and I'm glad we took the time to learn about keeping them safe because that is really important. The privacy settings are important to know and also basic things like: don't list your full birthday. Things I hadn't thought of before but I see the importance of and things I will definitely teach my students if we use the internet together.

I think blogs and other sites, like a class wiki, are great ways to get students participating in active learning. The one thing I think is really neat and what I want to be able to do with my students is have a class website where they post their writings. I think this would be so fun if we do a poetry unit or any creative writing pieces because those are always so fun to read and when students know that their work will be read by other people rather than just their teacher I think they will be excited to make it worth reading. I know in high school, I kept an online journal and I always wanted it to sound as good as I could make it so my friends would think I was intelligent and a good writer. haha. Think of how that could improve student writing if they felt that way! I want my studnets to share their writing with other students, their friends and family; and I think a class website is a perfect way to help them do that.

I'm excited for being a teacher and having all of these technologies available to enhance my teaching. :)

Personal Technology Project

The technology I learned was Mindmeister.com.
It was fun!!

Lesson Plan:
The Characters in As I Lay Dying
Here's an example of a map my students would make:

Final Project Idea.

For my final project I'm going to learn the mind mapping tools MindMeister.com. I remember hearing about the different mind mapping tools in class and thinking how interesting and hopefully useful it would be to learn how to do those!
I love how relevant technology is to students and how engaged it can get them into the work they do. I think this will be a good tool to use with them and for them :)

I put it on Youtube

And here's the
Youtube Link
to my video.

An Interview Project

I think this is a good way for students to have fun with a project and to explore the themes of whatever they're reading. And I like that it's something that they can involve their peers and family in on to see the views of others, not just themselves. It was fun and easy to make and fun to hear the responses of others.

Cool Website Helps to Incorporate Media

Teachwithmovies.org is a website dedicated to lesson plans and learning guides based on full movies and movie clips. It does cost money to join the website to gain access to all of the ideas presented, but what a cool idea! Sometimes movie clips help enhance the lesson, like we talked about in class, and having this website full of ideas would be so helpful.

I think this would be really helpful if you knew you wanted to incorporate a clip of something to keep the lesson exciting, but you had a hard time thinking of how to tie it in. The website could give you ideas so that you're not just playing a movie just because.

My Storyboard

I've decided to do my video project as a project I would give to my students where they go and interview their friends and family about the topics we are learning/discussing in class about a certain book.

Here is my Storyboard