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

English Teaching Blog

I don't know if you guys have seen this blog, but it's just of English Teachers at BYU.

BYU English Blog

It's for English teaching majors at BYU to post about anything they want. Lesson plans, good ideas, questions, comments....anything. I subscribed to it and I think anyone is welcome to join in and start posting. It's interesting. Take a look around :)

Internet Safety

I read Bednar's talk "Things As They Really Are"
I loved it.
I love that it drew attention to how important our bodies were. It was an interesting way to talk about the internet, I had never considered it being a tool to forget our physical existence before. Our bodies are a gift from God. A gift. We need to realize the importance of them and not miss out on using them. We can't idle away our time forgetting we exist...

I taught my friends who have a little baby.
They use the internet regularly but did not know much about keeping their child safe once he is old enough to use the internet. They have never really encountered cyber bullying so it was never something they thought about. I watched a video on cyber bullying and read tips to keep your child safe from NetSmartz.org. I taught them the tips that I learned. Some of the important things I taught from those tips are:
-Do not respond to the rude or harassing emails or messages
-Delete an email account that is being harassed and get a new one only for those you trust.
-And most importantly, don't forget about the local authorities and your Internet Service Provider to get things removed like bullying websites.
I think after giving these tips, they moved more into the paranoid side of the spectrum and asked questions like, "Well, how do I make sure they're not responding!?"
I told them the best thing they can do is teach correct principles and have faith that their babies will govern themselves (just like Joseph Smith taught).
They calmed down some after that but still felt afraid of letting their child on the internet at all.

In the end, they decided to send their baby to Narnia where the internet is much safer.
But, hopefully they learned something if their child eventually does use the internet. I gave them NetSmartz.org as a resource for them to find out more.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: Making Predictions

The opening scene of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Which we read and discussed today in class. Watch it, is it what you imagined?




Making a prediction is just like making a discovery. Discover the possibilities in your mind. Even if what you guess isn't what happens, it's still right because it exists in your mind. You discovered it.

MAKING PREDICTIONS ASSIGNMENT

Our School

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I teach at Larry A Ryle High School. Home of the Raiders. GO RAIDERS!

About Me

I consider myself a slight nerd and love Star Wars. I was privileged enough to meet the man who cut off Skywalker's hand in person. He's a very tall man, impending and full of doom. So if you ever feel the need to talk nerd while in class one day, I'll be there.
I may be small, but I've got big ideas and big dreams. Dream with me!

You can contact me at my email address
nataliejane@byu.edu
or come into my room anytime I'm there. I'm willing to help those who are willing to ask.

Our Calendar

Creative Commons

I just wanted to comment on the Creative Commons idea. I LOVE that. I love flikr.com and being able to look at photographs taken by all kinds of different people. I love interesting photographs and I think a lot of kids now really relate with that sort of thing: creative, artsy photography. So, I'm really happy there is this creative commons that I can use to pull out those images that kids will like and I can use without worrying if the cops are going to bust down my door. I love when people share. And I love photographs. And so...that makes me happy. Good job, internet world.
This picture was pulled from creative commons off of flikr.com. BOO-YA!

How Teacher Tube Is Holding Up With Copyright Laws...

Looking through Teacher Tube I found our dear old friends The Animaniacs in this video
I looked up the run time of an Animaniacs episode and they ran for 22 minutes. This video takes 2 minutes from an episode...so that's only 10%, which is what is allowed to take from a video. Now, the man in the video did say something about..."unless it's the only 10% that matters..." And this video takes the main song from the episode...so maybe that will come into question when this teacher is taken to court. But really, I think it is okay. This teacher stuck to the 10% rule and was using it to help her students study for the test.

I also found this Math Video which is probably the WORST video I've ever seen. Really really poorly made...but...haha. Oh well. They used lots of songs; however, each song was not played for longer than I'd say ten seconds. That is well under the limit of 10% of a song. They also used a lot of pictures. In the "Fair Use" vidoes, he said you can use pictures but usually not more than 5 from the same artist. I'm pretty sure the pictures in this awful video stayed within those guidelines. The video also had a video clip from a Family Guy episode, but only used roughly 30 seconds of a 25 minute show. So, that was good.

One thing I wondered about was citing all the things used in the videos. Does the teacher have to have a list of citations at the end? There were no citations in this video and I know a lot of song clips and pictures were used that could have citations. So..that was a point of interest that I'll tell the judge.

But really. That last video was so awful. Really painful to watch. hahaha. So you don't have to watch it if you don't want. Just atke my word on it.

Plurking Lurking

So I joined Plurk for part of my PLN. At first I felt really creepy, becoming friends with random people I don't know. I still feel kind of creepy...but I'm starting to see how they're using it to share ideas and discuss certain things so, if I keep up with it I think it could be very useful.

Finding Blogs

At first I thought it was going to be kind of pointless to look for blogs on teaching English, but I found quite a few ones. I liked this one in particular. He has some good motivational videos and sometimes lesson ideas. And I'm pretty sure I love anything with lesson plan ideas.

Another blog I found, Free Technology for Teachers, has some neat stuff on it. What I like most about this blog is that it often has applications for education like this post here on just a new search engine. I love that because I was reading it and thinking...yeah this is a neat new technology and then BAM. She gave me the reason why I should be interested. Application for education? You got it. I recommend this blog to follow if you're still searching for a few blogs to put on your Reader.

I think I'll put the blogs/pages I found on this page so you guys can see the things I found. Post yours as well if you're so inclined; I'm interested to see what you've found.

My Technology Background

My background in technology begins in 6th grade when my family upgraded from our green-screen computer to one with internet. INTERNET! American On-Line.
Instant Messenger.
Then I took a typing class and I'm awesome, I'm an awesome, fast typer. And an awesome, fast texter.
Let's see...I'd say my main technology background comes from my job. I work for BYU Info which is located in the Office of IT...so we do a lot with technology. All of our resources are on the computer and if something goes down, we have to fix it. And if I can't fix it, I've gone to all these training classes to learn how the other people fix it and why.
I'm an expert google searcher.
I took all those technology skills assessment tests for my major to learn Word Processing and Spreadsheets and Power Point. So I have a stamp on those. I've been passed off as knowledgeable on those bits of technology.

I like to think I'm a fast learner. Teach me technology and I'll pick up on it most of the time. We live in a digital world full of buttons and clickers and dials and Blackberries and internet and The Clapper...We are trained to click around until we understand.
So my goals for this class is to just ... learn the technology and try to not act like an 80 year old woman who can't send an email. And also hopefully to imagine myself as a teacher using these technologies and say "Oh, yes. I can see how this will be useful..."