Chapter 8: Technology Planning (Friday, Oct. 28)

I visited the site Technology Planning.  This site was created by Doug Johnson. He is a consultant for school technology and for this particular write-up he did, he incorporates Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs into Mankato's Hierarchy of Educational Technology Needs.  For the technology hierarchy, he gives the following categories starting at the bottom: established infrastructure, effective administration, extensive resources, enhanced teaching, and empowered students.  The Johnson goes into detail about each one of those categories.  I like that under the Enhanced Teaching heading, he gives you tips and suggestions that teachers can use for incorporating technology into their classrooms to most benefit the students.  Then under the Empowered Students heading he gives another hierarchy.  Mankato's Hierarchy of Student Technology use looks like this starting with the bottom: simple use, basic skill use, non-applied use of productivity software, academic use of productivity software, and use as a tool for genuine problem-solving.
This site would be helpful to teachers because it goes beyond just telling teachers they need to incorporate technology or giving them strategies to incorporate.; not that those things are bad, because that is good information for teachers to have.  But this does a great job of explaining the importance of technology in the classroom and does a great job of displaying that visually through the different hierarchy need pyramids.  That also kind of shows the stages a student will go through with technology in the classroom, starting with the most basic and moving up to empowering them.  This site might help the reluctant teachers who might have been just going through the motions because their principal told them to incorporate technology, and after reading this they might put more effort after seeing the importance of technology.

Chapter 7: Grants and Funding (Thursday, Oct. 27)

For this chapter I went to the website Grants and Funding.  This is a great site to help teachers with grants.  This site primarily provides links about grants and funding for teachers to use.  One of the links is about the current news circulating about grants, non-profits, support, assistance, among other stuff.  Another link is a grant index where teachers can search by subject area, grade, or name of different grants.  The goal of this link is to help teachers find support.  One of the links it provides is for the Foundation Center.   The Foundation Center will collect requests and send out alerts when new funding becomes available.  GrantAlert.com is another link.  Through this site you can search for different opportunities for funding.  These links are only a few of the sites this one provides.
This site would be very helpful as a teacher.  Grants are a pretty important part of teaching, especially with the growing emphasis on incorporating technology in the classroom.  Technology doesn't come cheap, and money for that needs to come from somewhere and it more than likely won't be from the teacher's pockets.  Grants are a great way to help get more resources for the students.  This site is a great resource for teachers to find assistance with getting the funding.

Chapter 6: Cyberethics for Kids

I looked at the website Cyberethics for Kids.  This site is definitely geared towards kids, but it also has a link for teachers. In the section "Are You a Good Cybercitizen?", it talks to kids about a good cyber citizen looks like and then it gives the kids different scenarios to choose from and they can pick from different outcomes.  It is kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure in a way.  The next section is the "Rules in Cyberspace."  This gives kids the Do's and Don'ts  of Internet use.  I like that on some of the Do's it gives examples of them.  For example, of them is that kids can do visit museum websites.  Then it gives links to famous museums for kids to go visit their websites, like the Louvre.  The last section for kids is "You Can Get in Real Trouble for Hacking!"  This section teaches kids why they shouldn't hack onto sites or accounts.
The Cyberethics for Teachers site was overall pretty helpful.  It talks about strangers and hacking.  There is lots of information of computer crime, and it also includes a glossary of terms.  I could see this site be useful more from the kids section.  This would be a great site to use at the beginning of the year to kind of set up the rules for computer and Internet use in the classroom.  Of course there would be some discussion with the whole class to make sure everyone understands all the rules, but that site would be a great reteaching tool to make sure everyone not only understands the rules, but through the repetition of the website it would also help them to remember the rules.

Chapter 5: Blog-Technology and Learning

Just from simply skimming the title of the blogs, this seem like a great resource for teachers to use for ideas on how to incorporate technology into their classroom, most of which are in a cost effective manner.  The first blog that caught my eye was "20 Things Students Want the Nation to Know about Education."  A panelists of about 8 former and current students were on NBC sharing what they believe people need to know about education from their perspective.  They brought up points like skills that aren't being addressed that are needed in college, like critical thinking; teachers need to do more than us teach by the book; and incorporating technology can make learning more interesting and more meaningful to them.  I found this particular blog to be very insightful as a future teacher.
The next blog that caught my eye was "Make and Publish Books for Free Using a Cell Phone and Flickr." This is a great idea to help students publish their own works.  The only downfall would be that you need a phone capable of taking pictures and sending/emailing them.  This probably wouldn't be a problem at the high school level but will most definitely be problematic at the elementary level (or at least I hope it would be).  However you can still get around that by using the teacher's phone and sending them to Flickr that way.  I do love this idea, because students love when their works can be published and anytime you can do that for free is a great opportunity.
This would be a blog I actually wouldn't mind following.  It seems that it gets new posts fairly regularly, so the information would be pretty recent.  It has some great ideas on different things you can do with technology in the classroom.

Chapter 2 edutopia.org

This website can really help teachers shift their classroom to a student-centered classroom as well as incorporate technology into the classroom. The first thing that caught my eye was at the very top of the website. There is a link for a quiz about what your learning stle is. This is a great tool to use at the beginning of the year to inventory the preferred learning styles in your classroom.
There are a vast amount of videos for teachers to look at as well. Some of these include what differentiated instruction looks like, how to make time for every student, how to teach critical thinking, among many, many others. Simply based off these titles you can see how these videos would be beneficial for teachers to watch and how they would help teachers. Create a good learning environment for all of their students.
The last thing I want to talk about is the feature that allows you to look at schools that work. This lets you look at actual schools around the country and see what they are doing really well. Some of these include how schools have incorporated differentiated instruction, integrated arts and politics, merging career tech and college prep, as well as many others.
This site can be useful teachers. There are numerous resources and tools on there to help teachers set up an atmosphere or environment that would be most beneficial for students.

Adam's Presentation

My favorite thing that Adam mentioned today was that technology had to support what was going on in the classroom. It does not need to be the main focus or the driving point. But on the other hand,it cannot just sit in the room not being utilized. You need to have the happy medium in order to effectively implement technology in the classroom and make the most of each learning opportunity For the students.
I like that he addressed what classroom teachers can do to work with the technology director. This made his presentation a lot more meaningful to me. I have no desire to ever take on a role of the technology directed or anything like it. I do want to help out the technology director as much as possible and try to make their life a little easier since it seems they have a lot on their plate. I also liked that he brought in some examples of what he was talking about. That really puts i to perspective what all he has going on. That clearly takes some planning and a lot of time. Not mention all the other tasks he has to do, for example when he said that he had seven different screens up in his office. I definitely have a lot of respect for him and other people in his field.

Polly Brake's Presention

There were a couple of things I found to be quite useful from Molly Brake's presentation. The first is the thing she told us about getting the gift card from Walmart each month. I had no idea that it was available and it is so easy to get. As long as I can remember that, I definitely plan on taking advantage of that. Unfortunately I don't have the best memory, so hopefully this works out for me.
The second thing I found useful would be to see what the technology coordinator is offering that would qualify for CEU credit and to take advantage of it. It would very convenient to have those right at the school you are working at, and hopefully it would also be free of charge.
I guess I also kind of took away that I should maybe try to troubleshoot problems on my own first because it seems that technology coordinators have a lot on their plate. I don't reallythink that was a point she was trying to make, but I kind of felt sorry for her a little bit, especially when she put the work into planning those classes and then she had to cancel them. I would like to think that I would take advantage of technology classes that are offered even if I don't need the credit for it.

Chapter 4- Rubrics at Teach-nology

Assessment is a huge part of teacher's careers.  They are required to do some form of assessment all the time whether it's formative or summative.  Incorporating technology into these assessments can make a teachers' life so much easier.  One website that can help is Teach-nology. This site provides an efficient way to create rubrics for your classes.  As this site claims, rubrics are an easy way for teachers grade faster and let's the students know exactly what your expectations are for the specific project.  This site provides an extensive list of pre-made rubrics.  You can search this out by category to make it easier to find the one that suits your assignment.  It also provides templates so you can create a rubric if you do not find one that suits your needs.

I can see where this site will be very helpful as a teacher.  Teachers have so much on their plates and a lot of that stuff can be very time consuming.  I think teachers need to take advantage of any time savers because if they spend too much time in the classroom after school hours that it a recipe for getting burnt out quickly.  I love the idea of using rubrics to grade.  I like it because it helps the teacher stay consistent with their grading and I really like that you can give it to the students before hand and they know exactly what is expected of them.  I can definitely see myself using this site.

Chapter 3- "Engage Me or Enrage Me"

This article does a great job of explaining why kids are tuning teachers out in class.  When kids go home they have Internet, video games, television, and other forms of media.  They are very engaged in those activities and very interested in them.  It's no surprise that when kids come into the classroom they are shutting down.  Even some of the most engaging teachers cannot reach these kids if they are just sticking to the old curriculum.  The British government has actually given a large sum of money for the development of a digital curriculum.  I thought it was interesting when the article noted that kids don't have short attention spans when it comes to video games, music, television, or movies.  As educators, we need to do these kids better and teach them in a meaningful way.  I love the challenge this article concluded with: "I'm the tuned-out kid in the back row with the headphones. Are you going to engage me today or enrage me? The choice is yours."

I loved reading this article, and I think many other teachers (no offense, but especially some of the older teachers) would benefit greatly from this article.  When kids are playing these video games, they are actually displaying some great problem solving strategies.  We need to recognize their ability and relate those same ideas to what is going on in the classroom.  Incorporating technology is not a difficult task.  It might take more planning time and might even result in spending more time grading something, but would that be time well spent if it meant a more meaningful and learning experience for the students.  Wouldn't it be worth it to have a room full  of engaged students instead of having some of the enraged students?

ISTE Chapter 1

The technology facilitator can sometimes have a lot on their plate.  In the chapter, it says that technology skills and concepts cannot be neglected, instead they should be integrated into professional learning.  This gives an excellent opportunity for the technology faciliator to run an in-service day for the teachers to help them feel more comfortable using technology as a curriculum tool.  To help the facilitator plan their in-service, they can use a site called profilerpro.com.  This site gives a simple survey that looks at a person's knowledge, attitude and skill of technology.  This would help the facilitator get a feel for where the staff stands with technology, help them plan based on their needs, and let them know who can be some of the strong ones to be some other "go-to" people to help the rest of the staff get on board.  This site not only allows the facilitator to see the individual results but it also allows them to compare the group's results.

I completely agree with Williamson and Redish when they say that technology can help transfer knowledge in a meaning and authentic way.  Kids today are surrounded by technology.  Why not let them use it in the classroom too.  Incorporating technology can help increase interest in lessons and make learning a little more fun for the students.  There is a good chance that once these students are finished with school, they will be using technology is some form with whatever job they get.  We need to take advantage of the fact that these students are natives to the technology today and encourage them to use in many creative ways.