The final Blog... WOW

My my my...how the time has flown on by. In all honestly I think that this particular class was probably the most beneficial for me. I learnt probably the most in this class AND most importantly wanted to learn the most in this class. No matter where my life takes me I will have these technological tools in my back pocket that can prove to help me in the future. If I decide to one day open a gym.. BOOM I know how to make a website. If I one day become an administrator BOOM my organisational skills for my staff can be creatively documented or as I hope: I become a teacher and BOOM my students are engaged the entire time. I think the thing I enjoyed the most was making my coaching website. I think that having a website is so important to whatever it is that you do. The internet is evidently a funnel for knowledge and that's how the students that I will be teaching are going to learn the best. The key is to engage students to want to check the Website.

SO thank-you blog world.

My educational blogging era is now over perhaps a more personal blog will be the next step.

ADIOS!

So this week we spent an afternoon creating a 45 second video for our ICT class. This video was a lot of fun and it is acting at the introduction to our final ICT project. This video involves mass amount of embarrassment and memorisation of ridiculous lines that just don't seem to stick in my head. But nonetheless after our long hard day of work our video was complete. A member of our group took it home to do some brief editing and we thought it would be complete. The next day I find out that even a 45 second video took about 2 hours to edit. To add music, noises and effects it took a really long time. Can you imagine how long it takes to make a movie? After this experience I have new found respect for directors and editors.  

This brings me to a student that is an aspiring director or editor. It is awesome that there are media courses at various school that can teach these students how to use technology  I wonder if in the future there will be more advanced classes. "How to use Twitter" Haha. Okay that is maybe a bit extreme but things like that. Because being able to use certain technology will help students after school is over and throughout their educational ride.

Well thats all for today!
Adios Blog World
-E

How valuable is the internet?

That is the real question.

It was a blistery sunday afternoon and my internet crashed. By crashed I mean stopped working, shut off, no blinking light, crashed. After about 20 minutes of trial and error, power on and power off I finally came to the conclusion that my beloved inter-web was down. En-light of the fact that there was an arctic blizzard outside I had thought that a legally streamed movie was the ticket to pass such a day however this new predicament posed as a problem. What will I ever do with 3 hour chunk of time that normally would have dedicated to social networks and online tv shows and movies. I told myself not to panic and decided this was the perfect opportunity to re-hash my love for reading. After snuggling up with a book for what seemed like 3 hours I got bored. I could usually sit there for hours and be fully encompassed in a novel and yet now I couldn't even sit through 20 minutes. I then proceeded to switch gears to the possibility of doing homework. Homework. Great idea, very productive. I haul out what seemed like a bag of bricks and started pulling out my books and textbooks to begin my scholar journey. After about 10 minutes of organizing what it is I was going to work on I realized that ALL my selected homework needed internet. FAIL. Is the what my life is coming to? I can't even survive without internet for an afternoon? Unfortunately this was the sad truth and i found myself in my car, in a storm, driving to the public library to get myself back on track.

This awareness has gotten me to thinking that the students walking into my classroom are going to have the same, if not more, dependance on this thing we call the internet. Their entire lives, socially and academically may or may not need internet to truly function properly. As teachers it is of utmost importance for us to be in tune with every gadget in order to be in tune with our students needs.

Well thats all for today.

Adios Blog World,
-E

I came across this little comic the other day and it struck me to be very interesting. Being a die-hard "reader" it really reminded about how the concept of "curling up to a good book" has kind of phased out. This sudden realisation that our youth no longer truly READ for just the pleasure, made me quite sad. I remember as a child just loving to make a bowl of popcorn and cover each page with my greasy fingers. In saying that, teenagers these days are being adorned with series such as "twilight" and "Harry Potter" that have brought back the beauty of reading. Whether or not these are educational reads is another can of worms but they are nonetheless READING. We need to encourage and promote our youth to not forget about the beauty of reading. It is necessary for each child, student or adult to set aside some of their technological friends and maybe go back to the basics.

Food for thought: feelings on the e-reader or kindle? These are essentially electronic books and yes it promotes reading and you're able to carry hundreds of books in merely a small tablet. Eliminates the bulky baggage that books promotes however does it take away for the page-turning fun? I sought to try out a KOBO and found that I miss the beauty of a book, I really do!

That's all for now... Adios Blog-World!

-E

Hi Blog,

I just read another blog on NING (not cheating I promise) and it truly compelled me to really go the extra mile on this thing. It was an entire blog basically preaching about how engagement is captured the best in kindergarten and drops significantly by the time they reach high school . It was a full on debate (one sided), with charts and lists and a general opinion that won me over. Which made me realize that when you blog you can change peoples opinions and alter peoples thought processes, which I think is something we as teachers and as people need to take advantage of. Our world, right now, at this moment is a very opinion-driven place. It is whether or not you chose to be open minded enough to explore all those ideas and creativity out there!

How does a teacher promote creativity? Well how about by showing your students the proper way to use technology. In class we talked about BYOD: bring your own decide. Interesting concept: a little too close to BYOB but nonetheless a good notion. If students can bring their own devices and we can show them and teach them how to use their devices in a "educational way" then perhaps they will be prone to use it outside of the classroom.  BOOM! everyone is learning and learning how they want to! Its inevitable, students will always and I mean always have their phones/computers on them: perfect opportunity to show them they are carrying around an extra brain!

good talk blog!

Adios!
-E

Hello!

This week was a work week for me. I started to feel in the groove in terms of basic concepts and I have started to create my website. The fact that we have learnt how to create a website will open so many doors and my over organised-self feels quite excited about what I can do with this new concept. I spent a great deal of time thinking about what type of website I would make for this class:

- Would a student actually check a website for gym class?

Since becoming a full time assistant coach for the women's university team I have realised that coaching is a passion and that it is something I want to do in the near future. SO I stumbled upon the idea of creating a coaching website for the teams that I coach. I will be creating a fake team but just so I have a template for my real future teams. Here are a couple thoughts that I had for my website:

- Should parents have access to a TEAM only website?
- Is there a way to have a page where my players can post comments and thoughts on games? Perhaps I could use Worrdle?
- Is it a bad idea to have stats readily available for everyone to see? That could be interesting as team mates do tend to compete with each other for playing time etc.

ALSO I have stumbled upon something called TED. (It is also a phone APP)  If you haven't heard of or haven't used it before I would strongly suggest it. This is a website where you can find inspirational, educational videos that pertain to students and educators. Each clip is very interesting and can prove to be quite uplifting.

http://www.ted.com/ CHECK IT OUT!

Adios Blog World
-E

I wonder if it were to be possible to teach an entire class of funny you-tube videos and clips. Honestly! I mean, I know it basically defeats the entire concept of "hands-on teaching" but I we watched a couple of YouTube videos this week and well they were absolutely hilarious and frankly just straight up engaging. I wonder if we could figure out a way to engage students about learning, like the way I felt when watching a clip of a teacher with a baby's voice dubbed over it. I think we laughed and watched about 2 or 3 clips with full enthusiasm. Again, I'm not really sure there was educational value in such a YouTube clip but if a teacher could find ways to locate funny/clever YouTube clips to begin a lesson I think its a great way to start a lesson. It promotes laughter and enthusiasm and will overall create a positive atmosphere. I decided after seeing the enclosed YouTube clip, that I was maybe going to put a daily YouTube video into my classroom routine. It can be educational or not, just something that is witty and clever that brings an everyday student enjoyment to walk into a classroom and begin a lesson.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdxEAt91D7k

We also had 2 teachers come in and discuss with us further ways to use technology in the classroom. We specifically worked on using a picture editing website : http://pixlr.com/. This was really interesting and promoted individuality and creativity  The task was simple and yet broad in how far each person could take it. What do you think matters? Chose a word, chose a picture that represents it and bedazzle it using this picture editing website. It was something completely out of my comfort zone in terms of copying, pasting, downloading, cutting etc, but nonetheless I learned something new that day. It was also great because at the end each student was able to present their word/photo and why they chose it. the amount of creativity in the classroom was ridiculous! We got some creative up and coming teachers out there. LOOK OUT!

ADIOS blog world!

-E

Well the time has finally come... my walls are down and I'm joining the blog bandwagon. Due to my wide variety of experiences I always had the urge to join the blogger world and who knew I would be pushed to this limit through a ICT course here at BU. Nonetheless here I am, ready and eager to get this thing started! Enjoy!

TECHNOLOGY... hmmm. Now this is somewhat of a foreign concept to me. My technological skills pretty much stop and start at Microsoft word and perhaps if I'm feeling particularly daring: power point. However after my first week in this course I'm having this harsh realisation that maybe this techno-world is not that scary. It seems with the proper instructions and proper tools using technology can be more helpful then burdening. So far, my eyes have been opened to a world of wall whisher, worddle and smart boards all of which will act as tools for my classroom and surprisingly enough for my own enjoyment.  Today we even started to talk about our e-profiles!!! Which was really interesting and does make a lot of sense for relaying important information in an organised fashion. It's funny because my environmentally friendly-self does feel great joy from all these on-line tricks because we are saving our trees! I love the fact that some of my classes at BU have the course syllabus on-line and most of our assignments and marks are posted on moodle. It just makes the most sense to embrace our generation of technology and its benefits!

With that ill conclude my first post with a big :

ADIOS blog world!

-E