3.7 Day 3 Reflection

In reflecting on my third day of tech academy, the first thing I can think of saying is “It’s been a whirl wind and I’m glad I have finally made it to the end of this day.” Today seemed to be much more work than the first two days seemed like, many more technical road blocks than the first two days for sure, but definitely much more visual progress made that the previous two days. I’m glad I got to learn how to use the Aurasma app, I think it will be a great motivational tool to use with my students not only for learning and reviewing, but also as an incentive to want to learn. Getting things to load from the iPad to a computer was a total hot mess, I hope I can learn how to get fool proof at that part. This week has been very stressful for me as an apparently non tech geek. It has to be very long and hard on our instructor also. Looking forward to seeing how things went with the rest of the class tomorrow. 

Day 2 Reflection

In reflecting on Day 2 of Tech Academy, I am really excited to create and eventually use the lesson that I am working on for this week’s class credit. I was thrilled that the instructor helped me find the Aurasma app and will help me tomorrow to know how to use it well not only for myself but well enough that I can help my students be able to use it to create their product and use it all year long!

The flipped classroom webinar was great! I would love to be a student in Todd Nesloney’s class as well as sit in on his class as a teacher to be able to know and use the technology in the way that his has become capable of.

The lesson that I am going to create will be instructions on getting students to create their own review material on each letter of the alphabet, including how to say it, the corresponding sound, and words using that letter.  The Aurasma app will be used to show them how to use the class iPad to refer back to their own student created material when they forget the information that they made about each letter of the alphabet. 

Crushing Barriers

The first barrier that I feel impedes me from having my students use technology more than we do is time. I was hired at Castleberry ISD in September after another teacher quit. I think I missed out on a alot of prep time at the beginning of the year that other teachers had before starting class with their students. I'm hoping to get to spend more time this summer researching the internet, hearing from the CISD technology department, and hopefully hearing from my coworkers for more resources in software, apps, and ideas to have a better start for the beginning of this next school year. The other barriers that I think hinder my use of more and better technology with my students is the make up of my students being Resource, and the fact that my primary goal is to work on each individual students individual goals according to their IEP. I think I have come a long way in getting to know my individual students and getting them to put out a little honest academic effort with using the right incentives that work for each one. For this upcoming school year, I think using technology is a wonderful way to improve my students personal efforts, as opposed to pencil and paper work, if I can find a lot of child friendly, useful things for them to do on a computer. I am open to any and all help that the district has to offer!!! I plan on doing a lot of searching on my own but would love all the help I can get. This is why I chose to attend Tech Academy after my first year teaching in CISD instead of waiting another year.

Four Barriers Post

 

  My first thought as to thinking of four barriers that make infusion of technology a barrier in my particular classroom would be time. My class setting is different from most teachers because I teach various children from all elementary grade levels and only see some children for 45 minutes in an entire day, and some of those may only come to my class 2 times per week. My first priority in teaching my particular students is achieving their Sped IEP goals. 

   My second thought as to a barrier in using technology is that I have students of different ability levels in my classroom at one time and may not only be working on different ELA concepts but possibly even Math at the same time that another student is working on an ELA subject.

   A third barrier for using technology in my classroom is the varying technology abilities of my students, due to their diagnosed learning disabilities. I have some students who can't write their own name correctly from day to day, for example,  and we are constantly having to suddenly drop what we are working and going back and work on a basic skill that the student was able to do just the day before. 

   The fourth barrier I can think of in using technology would be the behavior barriers that many of my Sped students have that are often tied to their learning disability. I teach students that will become frustrated very easily and aggressively to the point of damaging technical equipment in acting out the frustrations. 

My initial thoughts on blogging, before I started my own teacher blog, was that it was mainly for people younger than myself who grew up typing most of their thoughts and actions on a computer. These personal airings in cyberspace are publicly for the whole world to see, and most of them are not so much for the betterment of the world.

The course has changed my mind a little bit in that I can see if I can pick the few ‘needle out of the haystack’ of blogs out there, I might be able to get some useful professional information from them.

I will use my blog to communicate my wonderful successes, and probably my epic failures as well, to other educators who want new, innovative, child appealing lessons to use in the classroom. I hope to help our students open their minds, reach beyond their current bubble of knowledge, and discover that learning isn’t just hard, but can also be fun and desirable.

My blog posts will probably be mostly just professional communications. I’m not one to keep a hand written diary, much less a public one on the world wide web . I’m always amazed that there are so many people out there that seem to have SO much time on their hands to sit for hours spilling their souls out into their computer, and publicly to the whole world. I’m not knocking that at all, but I don’t seem to have enough hours in my day to complete the things that I have to get done to try to do a good job, much less endless hours to sit at my computer.

I really am hopeful that I can connect with other elementary teachers that have a feeling of friendship and would like to communicate with me as well as others to help each other out with ideas and solutions for teaching our students.

I hope my blog doesn’t get limited by my time constraints, and that I do find other educator friends out there that I don’t know now who want build a larger network of friends to bounce ideas off of, and encourage each other that we CAN make a difference in the lives of children we come in contact with.

Maybe the more I blog the faster and easier it will become and I will eventually see that it isn’t as time consuming as I see it to be right now.

Creating this blog has forced me to use several technology applications that I had in existence but never use such as my google account and twitter, This was a good exercise for me to stretch beyond my daily uses of technology and refresh my mind that integrating multiple technology applications does have potential to make me a better teacher to my students,

Tech Infused Lesson Poetry Slam

What I did for my tech infused lesson...
We did a unit on different types of poetry. We ended the unit with a poetry slam thru a web chat, with another class in another school, in the buildings distance learning labs. The students from each class took turns reading their poems. After all the poems were read, each student reread one line from their poem while the other class tried to figure out which element of poetry was used.



How it was assessed...
Principals from each school were invited in to the poetry slam to assess the credibility of the tech infused lesson.
Lesson Reflection...
The students were very nervous to be talking live with students at another school that they didn't know but when we were finished they were very proud of their achievement and asking when they would get to do another one.
Do you have any neat tech lessons to share?...