Presentations

I loved all of the presentations today. However, the one that really stuck out to me was Stephanie's. I don't know what it was about it; the information was extremely interesting but the way she carried through the presentation was also fantastic. She sounded like a true teacher. Good job, Stephanie!

It's Been So Long!

Sorry I have not been updating my blog very often. I can't believe how fast this semester has gone by. I have to admit, I was extremely wary taking an online class for a technology class, but Jennie provided all of the right tools to make this class a success. I am looking forward to seeing all of the presentations this weekend, and hope to share my thoughts in this blog on Saturday after them!

Video Conferencing Web Based Tools

While browsing through the seven video conferencing tools, one of them really caught my eye. But first, I want to go through the other six and talk about them. 

The first tool I looked at was Skype. I've used Skype before so I was very familiar with it. This is probably the most basic video conferencing tool I had to look at. You can use it on your computer, tablet, phone, or TV. This is a tool that a lot of people use to just keep in touch with family and friends. It is simple to use and also free. 

The next tool I looked at was Adobe Connect Now. I couldn't figure out if this was a video conferencing tool or just a file sharing tool. I searched the website and couldn't find anywhere that had the video option (if anyone found it, where is it?). With this tool, you can send big files, use workspaces to create shared online folders where anyone on your work team can access the files, and can also set up permissions which only allows certain people to view the files. 

After I browsed Adobe, I looked at Tiny Chat. Tiny Chat is a 99 cent app or a free app online where you can join specific rooms to talk about a certain topic. When you first get on the website, there are a lot of different chat rooms about hundreds of different topics. You can also create your own personalized room for others to join. Although this is a cool idea, I wouldn't recommend using this in the classroom because some of the chat rooms that showed up on the homepage were inappropriate for the classroom.

After Tiny Chat, I looked at Go To Meeting. With Go To Meeting, you can host unlimited meetings, webinars, or trainings. With a webinar, you can host up to 1000 people, in a training session, up to 200 people, and in a meeting, you can have up to 25. This would work really well in a classroom because if you set up a meeting, say at 6:00 at night for all students to attend a discussion, all of your students from your classes could attend it. That would be fun because classes could see what others in their grade had to say about a certain topic. 

The next tool I looked at was WebEx. This was just another basic tool that allows you to share information and files. There wasn't anything too special about this tool.

My favorite tool of them all was Yugma. There are so many features on Yugma! You can host meetings for up to 500 people, can actually share your computer screen while video chatting, there is a whiteboard feature that allows brainstorming to happen, there's Skype integration, and you can record and playback meetings! I swear this tool was created especially for teachers. This is so worth the money spent because of all of the great features. I would LOVE to use this tool in my future classroom! This is the future of video chatting!

12 Academic Search Engines

While browsing through the "12 Academic Search Engines," I noticed a few that were a lot similar and like search engines I have used in the past, but I also saw a few that I wish I knew about through high school and undergrad! Archival Research Catalogue, BASE, Eric, Refseek and The Virtual LRC are all pretty similar and like the search engines I'm used to. In BASE, when I searched "authors," it brought me to a lot of Wikibooks. I know I've always been told to never use Wiki anything since anyone can add information to it. Is it the same for Wikibooks? In Eric, I randomly searched "history of China," and it allows me to narrow the articles by date of publication, descriptor source, etc. Eric also has a thesaurus readily available. In "The Virtual LRC," it has a tab for "search tips" to help students with the process. There were engines I wish I had known of years ago such as "CiteULike," "Academic Info," "Google Scholar," "Infomine," and "Infotopia." What I liked about Academic Info was that there were so many topics and they were all very specific. Topics ranging from authors to wars to religions to geography to literally everything. If you know exactly what you're looking for, this is a great tool. Infotopia and Infomine were pretty similar in the sense that they had different categories to search from and then can search your topic from there. These two sites also had cool designs which could make searching for a topic potentially fun. Lib Guides Community was different from anything I've used, too. I couldn't figure out if it gave lib guides from libraries all around here or if they were libraries from around the country because there were so many to look at. Overall, I really enjoyed browsing through these search engines and will definitely be using some of them for my next papers and recommending them to my future students!

VoiceThread

https://voicethread.com/share/5065287/ This website seems like it would be a cool idea, but I'm not 100% sure what I would use it for. Maybe if I became a little more familiar with it, I would be able to think of cool uses for this in the classroom. :)

Animoto

I hope this link works for my video! http://animoto.com/play/d657m8NO30r1JVzPYQfSXg# This would be an awesome website to use for classrooms. Students could use this website at the beginning of the year for a "Get To Know Me" lesson. They could put pictures of their favorite things on here, and then present it to the class.

Word Cloud

I used this at work the other day! I had a team meeting so I put all of the cashiers' names on a word cloud to be displayed. :) Everyone loved it.

Microsoft Access

To be honest, I've never used Microsoft Access before. All I knew about it was that it was like Excel. After exploring it a little and going through the tutorials, I realized what an asset it would be in the classroom. Microsoft Access would be great to use for grades and for keeping parents' phone numbers and emails. However, it's kind of intimidating. I searched a bunch of reviews online for Microsoft Access just to see what other people were using it for. One man, Dan, said, I'm well versed in all aspects of Access including SQL, VBA, and building through the interface." My thoughts: "What in the world did he just say?!" Looks like I will have to get a little more acquainted with it before actually using it!

Technology Tools for Teaching & Learning

After browsing through "Technology Tools for Teaching and Learning," I was really surprised at how many things for school can be done online. I'm so used to my professors in college and my teachers in high school only teaching one way- through lecture and maybe the occasional PowerPoint lesson. This makes me even more excited about getting my degree in Educational Technology because I will be able to bring so much to the table for my future students; class will never be boring if I incorporate any of these tools into my lessons. Out of all of these tools, the section that really stuck out to me was the section about students creating comics online. How cool would that be?! This could be used in so many ways. Especially in English, after reading a book, students could recreate their favorite scene and present it to the class. It would be interesting to see how students see the scenes in their own minds. I am definitely bookmarking all of those sites to be used in my future classroom!

The Best of Web 2.0

After looking at the list of the best Web 2.0 classroom tools, the first one that I saw that looked interesting was “Eyejot.” I think the whole idea of being able to take videos and send them is so cool, especially for kids nowadays. It would be very fun to use something like this for maybe a Social Studies class where students could communicate with people across the world about their culture. This would also be fun in an English class at the end of a Shakespeare play. Students could dress up and act out a play while being recorded. One feature I don’t like about “Eyejot” is that you can only use it through a mobile phone. It would be better if there were an actual device that schools could buy for this. The second tool that really stuck out to me was “Cel.ly.” What a great idea! I think it has always been a challenge for teachers to get into contact with students/parents outside of work, and this tool makes it fairly easy. As sneaky as this may sound, I think it would be a great tool to send parents the homework for the night. That extra reminder from the parent could really go a long way. I remember telling my parents all the time, "I have no homework" when I really did (guilty). If parents received a mass text message from the teacher, the student could never really get away with that line again. However, this may also not work well because not all students (however, most do nowadays), have a cell phone. I'm sure by the time I get my own classroom students will have cell phones by the age of 5! The next tool that really caught my eye was "IcoFX." Especially in an English classroom, this tool would be very useful. For teaching vocabulary, English teachers (or any subject, for that matter) could have the students create icons for the words they just learned. This would definitely help them to remember the word more. As a visual learner myself, I would have definitely benefited from this tool. The only downfall that I see from the website is you have to pay for it! I really like the tool called "Trendsmap." I was actually playing around with it myself for a little while. It shows you the latest trends from on Twitter all around the world. I dont think this tool would work well for an English, Math or Science class, but for a Social Studies class it would be great. Maybe once a week when class starts, students could explore this tool and talk about what is going on in the world. This is a really interesting tool; I'm very nosy and like to see what other people are tweeting! The last tool that I really enjoyed was the "Teaching Channel." This reminded me a lot of Pinterest (and I LOVE Pinterest!) except for with teaching ideas and questions only. This obviously wouldn't benefit students at all, but I think it would be a really great way as a teacher to keep up with the latest trends with teaching.

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel has always confused me to no end. I work at Wegmans and my manager asked me to create a sales sheet one day using Microsoft Excel. He wanted me to add in sales from previous years and how they connect with hours used at the store. I literally sat and stared at the blank screen for an hour until I started to get to work. Eventually, with a little help from other employees, I was able to start and finish the sheet my manager wanted (which ended up taking me my whole eight hour shift). After I did that, I thought to myself, "thank God I went to school for teaching English and will never have to deal with putting numbers in Excel ever again." I guess I was wrong! I didn't realize how much you really can use Excel for in the classroom. Keeping phone numbers/ email addresses of all the parents of the students and also keeping grades are two great examples of Excel in the classroom. Luckily, I won't have to do any sort of extensive sales sheet again, but I know now to not be so scared of Microsoft Excel.
For the assignment we had to do for Excel, I chose the crossword puzzle. I always wondered how people created crossword puzzles! Does everyone use Excel to create them? I based my crossword puzzle on Halloween. It was very easy to make the boxes and questions/answers, but making it so the boxes all fit together perfectly was tricky. I had to draw one on a piece of paper first before I could do it on Excel. Is there any easier way to do that?

Microsoft Word

I was searching the Internet for cool ways to use Microsoft Word in the classroom, and came across this really fun website:
Check it out!

This website is a great example of how to truly engage readers. Instead of words, it uses pictures from Microsoft Word to show examples of 60 ways to use Word in the classroom.