9-The Flipped Classroom, Professional Development, and PowerPoint Information

"The Flipped Classroom"
This classroom describes a scenario/routine where the student learns the material at home through an online video of a lecture. Then the student comes to the classroom to complete assignments or work on activities with others. This concept is basically "flipping" the traditional classroom. In the traditional classroom, students sit in a room and listen to a lecture. After a lesson, students are typically given at-home-assignments or homework to complete. "The Flipped Classroom" is simply reversing this concept. Here is an example of a website containing educational videos for kids. http://www.turtlediary.com/videos.html

Web-based Resource for Professional Development
http://www.learningandthebrain.com/teacher-professional-development-conferences
This link guides you to a website containing upcoming conferences for teachers to attend for professional development. After looking at this website for a few minutes, I quickly realized how informative it is. There are many conferences listed and they each include the date, place, featured speaker, and a short description of what will be discussed at the conference. One conference that stuck out to me was The Science of Imagination: Cultivating Curiosity and Creativity in Our Schools. This conference will take place April 7th-9th in Orlando, FL. When I clicked on the event title, it brought me to multiple links about research on this particular topic. This can be extremely helpful for teacher professional development. This resource provides information that can help prepare for the conference before attending.

PowerPoint Interaction Assignment
This PowerPoint assignment was so much fun! The template that Nova and I found for Family Feud was so easy to use. We were able to create our very own game for our 4th grade science class in about an hour. After doing the PowerPoint for Information Dissemination I learned a lot of new skills that I was able to use when creating this PowerPoint Interaction game. I think it is really cool how I can create the navigation kiosk to control what comes next in the show. This provides so much creativity for creating PowerPoint games! This was definitely my favorite skill learned during this assignment. There really wasn't anything I disliked about this assignment!
In my future career as a school speech therapist, I can use these skills a lot. For example, when practicing certain speech sounds with a group of students, I can create a game through PowerPoint. I think one of the most important parts about speech therapy is building confidence to speak out loud to others. An interactive game could help encourage this. Students can earn points for the team by saying challenging words out loud. I look forward to creating games similar to this one in my future career.

8-Emerging Technologies, The Digital Divide, and PowerPoint

Emerging Technologies

After reading chapter 12, I think that personal learning environments hold the biggest promise for education. Giving students the opportunity to have their own goals and different techniques to accomplish them allows for a lot of growth. One of the biggest problems with today’s classrooms is the different levels within a grade level. As a student, I felt that I was held back from learning throughout elementary and middle school. Many students struggle with this. Some may be way behind the majority of the class and this can really affect their self-confidence and self-efficacy in school. This just leads to further retention. Personal learning environments embrace the diversity of the classroom and allow each student to work at their own pace. They create personal learning spaces adapted for individual learners. The technologies allow students to personalize their learning environment while still having the support and sanction of educational institutions.

The Digital Divide
The Digital Divide describes the students who have computers and other technology at home and those who do not. This can be a great challenge in the classroom. Technology is always talked about as being so great and the future of the classroom but this can cause many problems for students who do not have access at home. Growing up, I always had a home computer and when I graduated high school I was given my own laptop. This made it easier for my parents to contact my teacher and check my grades multiple times throughout the week. I think this made a huge difference in my school experience. As a teacher, it is important to recognize that not every student or parent will have these opportunities. To make sure that these students do not fall behind in digital literacy, I will give them adequate time to use computers and technology throughout the school year. The Digital Divide makes it even more crucial for teachers to integrate technology in the classroom every chance they get.

PowerPoint
The PowerPoint for Information Dissemination assignment was a lot of fun. Before working on this assignment, I thought I knew all there was to know about PowerPoint presentations. I quickly learned that I was wrong. PowerPoint has so many features to help make an amazing presentation. The new skill I learned was how to record a presentation show with audio. At first, I thought this would be really difficult but it ended up being super easy. I think this could be really helpful for presentations given at a distance. If the speaker is unable to attend, he/she can simply record the show with their voice and send it to the conference or meeting. In my future career, I know I will use PowerPoint.

The only thing I did not like about this assignment was the master slide tool. It was really hard for me to figure out. I still do not fully understand the point of having a master slide. But hopefully I can continue to practice and talk to my instructor about what the advantages of a master slide are. I really liked using a template online, I had no idea there were that many free options! I will definitely be using those in the future.

As a speech therapist, I might not use it every day to teach my students like a teacher would, but I will use it in other ways. I can use it to present my techniques to my colleagues or parents. One really cool application would be to record the child’s voice and speech pronunciations. Throughout the PowerPoint, the listener (parent or colleague) could listen to the different speech sounds the child has improved on. Speech therapy takes a lot of work and sometimes the accomplishments are too small to notice. But making a PowerPoint show could help accent the accomplishments and show what the child has worked on throughout the therapy sessions.

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QZv57tzBGjbUvfaIhDU0VdurGHMuNpCyoCd2zfwEmKI/embed?start=true&loop=true&delayms=3000" frameborder="0" width="272" height="182" allowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

7- PowerPoint, Adaptive Technologies, Web Page Design

              PowerPoint can be a very useful tool to support student learning in a particular lesson. At the first level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, knowledge, I would present my student’s with a slide on terms and key information they need to recall before the new lesson. The second level, comprehension, has to do with translating information. In the PowerPoint I could include a short video clip that demonstrates the definitions and key terms being used in context. Application is the third level and it can be applied in the PowerPoint through multiple slides containing specific examples of the subject. The analysis level is used to differentiate things. As the teacher, I would include a PowerPoint slide asking the students to explain the difference between two similar, yet different, components. The PowerPoint can also contain multiple articles from various sources that allows the students to synthesize and relate all of the information together. At the end of the PowerPoint I would have a section for evaluation. This would give my students the opportunity to gather all of their thoughts on the subject and then reflect on it. Higher-order questioning would be important to evaluate how well the students comprehend the material.

Adaptive technologies are used to support diverse learners. Students who have physical disabilities and cannot use a mouse, type, or read can use different output or input devices to allow them to operate a computer. An input device they can use voice recognition software instead of typing. An output device that can be used is a braille printer. Students with dyslexia or other learning disabilities can use spell check programs to help them write papers. The textbook mentions text-to-speech programs which provides auditory feedback to what they have written. This can be extremely useful for students with a visual impairment. I have not used any of these technologies and I do not know anyone personally who has used them. I hope that sometime in the near future I can see, in person, how these adaptive technologies are used and how they enhance every students learning. There are some challenges that could come with using adaptive technologies, but the positive effects they have on learning are worth the challenges. Some challenges I perceive happening include lack of time, financial support to provide the expensive technologies, and making the student user feel comfortable using them.

              While working on the Web Page Design assignment, I learned how to change font size, font color, and header pictures. But the overall best skill I learned was how to add a questionnaire. I loved being able to add this to connect with parents and get feedback about chaperones for the field trip. Sending papers home can usually be complicated, especially with students who may misplace or lose their papers before their parents see them. This weebly feature seems to be so useful in communicating with parents and I think I would definitely use it in my future career. A web page seems to be extremely simple to operate and update and is the perfect way to connect the physical classroom with the home classroom. I really liked the format of weebly and all of the different customization tools that it contains. There really wasn’t anything I didn’t like about this assignment. It’s my favorite one so far! Check it out! http://savanaheme2040.weebly.com/

(2) ILP "Design" - Edmodo

https://www.edmodo.com/home#
Edmodo Group Code: kyiw8e
1st grade science
SC.1.E.5.1 Observe and discuss that there are more stars in the sky than anyone can easily count and that they are not scattered evenly in the sky.

Before this class, I had never heard of Edmodo. It took a bit of playing around with the website to fully understand how it works. But soon after creating my classroom, I was quickly able to post quizzes, notes, and pictures to my students and parents. Being able to communicate with both students and parents is probably my favorite feature of Edmodo. I think it can help connect with parents who live busy lives and do not have time to observe the physical classroom or go through a ton of paperwork.

Slide Share - Watch this!

Slides 16-23 give a good tip on how to avoid bullet points. The difference it makes is crazy. I am definitely one who always says "That many slides will take too long!" But actually, it's pretty clear that it won't take any longer to do a single point on each slide than several bullet points on one slide.

6 Ways to Quit Bullet Points with Style from Podium Wisdom