Finals Week!!!

Here it is. The time has finally come. The semester is over and we are jam packed full of assignments, projects, and exams. We are finally done with our group project, and now I just need to finish up my technology lesson plans to turn in for our final.

The digital story has come together nicely, and lets face it I am happy it's over. I mean it's cool now, and its fun to say we did it, and know how to do it, but it was just another thing among everything else to get accomplished during the end of field and finals. I am a little nervous about thinking up 2 "totally original ideas", because first of all I am not very good at technology, and secondly thinking up something totally original is a daunting task in and of itself.

Now I am just hoping to have time to do all I need to get done. I am actually really excited to see everyone's digital stories as well. It should be fun how the assignment was interpreted for all different grades. I think it will be cool to see everyone's different spin on the project.

I watched the school house rock video, and lets face it, school house rock is a classic for a reason! The show is so fun and catchy, but really relays a lot of important information that is repeated several times to help you remember it. I think it is really something simple, but really motivating that reminds me to make learning fun and kid friendly.

Final Digital Story

What?
This week in class we brought in our Digital Stories in almost finished. We had found a lot of cool pictures to try to get our point across. We also found some music which we wrapped and had repeat to follow copyright rules.

So What?
It's cool to see it all come together. I think the final product will be cool, and the students would really like it as a lead in to a section on mountain men. I think they would really enjoy it. It's fun for them to see things that they are learning about brought to life in a different way. It would also be fun to have the students make their own as a form of learning about a certain subject.

Now What?
As far as using this in my class room, I think the students would like to see it and it would be fun, but it wouldn't be something that I could do very often because it is so time consuming. I know that as a teacher I will already have a lot of things on my plate to plan and take care of, and making a digital story probablly wont be at the top of my list of valuable things to do. I do think that this would also be a fun activity for my students to create. There are a few things that I would have to watch carefully though. I would want to make sure their were either direct guidlines within the digital story to make sure they had learned the necessary information, or a paper to go along with it. It would also kind of be tough to make sure that the students could run a program to do the actual story. It is a good thing to know, no matter how much I will use it in my own classroom.

Video
This week I watched the NASA video because I couldn't pull it up the othere week when it was assigned. It was really cool to watch about what led up to landing on the moon. I also didn't realize how many different every day technologies have come from NASA. I thought they did a really good job of putting it all together fluidly, even though they talked about a lot of different random things having to do with NASA. It was a really effective video and got a lot across in a short amount of time.

Final Field Reflection

What?

We finished up our last few days of school last week. Still there hasn't been much (more like any) interaction with technology in the classroom. It was really interesting to do the interview because most of the responses to the interview questions proved that we didnt have accessibility to almost all of the technology listed.



So What?

This showed to me that even though technology is a great tool that the students can learn a lot from, sometimes you just don't have the means to engage the students in such learning activities. As good as these technologies are sometimes it just isn't a possibility depending on the school that you are at, and what resources they have available to you. I still think that technology is a great tool to have for learning in the classroom, and that it should be used as much as possible, but sometimes you may not be able to use it as much as you would like to.



Now What?

Whether my school has a lot of technology capabilities or not it is always a good thing to know. I think that even if the school doesn't have the tools you wished they had, it can be something good for you to become educated on so that you could make that more of a possibility for your students by showing the school all the learning that can come from integrating technology into the student's daily learning.

Last Week of Field

What?
This is our last week of field. I have loved field so so much. The kids have been so awesome, the teaching has been so fun, and such a good learning experience, and I really feel like I have learned a lot. It has been so interesting to see the technology that we have in the classroom, or lack thereof.

So What?
The lessons where we have attempted to use technology have kind of been a struggle because of the lack of accessibility to these tools. For example we had a lesson that we had planned to use a video from online. There were quite a few bumps in the road that we had to figure out first though. First our laptops would connect to the internet so we had to use the teachers computer and try to unplug it and reconnect to the projector. YouTube wouldn't pull up so we had to use it form another website. There is more than that as well but those are the most memorable. I feel like when we finally did get the video up that the kids really enjoyed it and learned a lot from it, but if it was just me in the classroom it would be hard to motivate myself to go through the trouble of showing the movie.

Now What?
This has not only shown me some cools that can be done with technology but also how annoying it can be for technology to not be readily accessible. I think technology can be such a key attention getter for the kids be they connect so well with it, but I would definitely check with my technology specialist to make it easy to access for me and my class.

No video today!

Week 1 Field

We started field this last week. I am teaching in a fifth grade class in Spanish Fork. Already it has been a great learning experience. Its cool how I can see ways that the teacher could improve (according to our training so far), and also ways that the teacher is doing really good things.

I think it is really good to notice these things so that I can note them and decide to do better as I begin to teach. One thing that all of my teachers have focused on repeatedly is positive reinforcement. They have stated again and again how important it is to provide your students with positive reinforcement. That is something that both me and my partner noticed is greatly needed in this classroom. I have hardly heard a positive comment said to the students the entire 3 days I have been there, and by no means is this a bad class. Even when she gives a table points, instead of acting like it is positive thing for them, she uses it as a negative thing for the other tables.

As a teacher I want to make sure that my class really believes in themselves. I want them to know that I am rooting for them and that I don't just take note of their misbehavior but of their good behavior. If the students are not rewarded for their positive behavior then they have no incentive to continue to do positive behavior.

There was no movie posted on the Field Experience one page to watch.

My Beliefs

Technology is definitely outside of my comfort zone. It is definitely one of those things that I will gladly let my dad or brother, or for that matter anyone who is willing, completely assist me with. I have started to realize more and more how the integration of technology into my own person life and into my classroom is absolutely neccessary.

I have come to realize what a powerful tool it can be not just for me but for everyone else. It can highly be to my advantage. It help me to engage students by letting them learn from something they would use anyways. It is part of help them engage in, and explore something that is meaningful to them, as a student int the 21st century.

Lessons Learned

There were some really cool things to be learned as I read the articles and looked through the videos. I loved the things that ones that didn't just tell you that you should integrate technology, but that actually showed you how to do that in all different subject areas. I especially loved how they talked about how you need to relate it to their passions, and make it something that is real for them by using real data that they can actually relate. I think it is interesting because in the sense using technology the vidoe presentations stuck out to me far more than the articles that you just had to read.

One of the articles I did really enjoy was the WWW. It talked a lot about how the students are getting bored and how we can use technology in a different way then they are using it by let them be creators rather than just users of the technology. It also talked about the three way people search for happiness and the only one that doesn't work is pursuing pleasure. They said, "Chasing after what we want doesn't make us happy". I think that is really cool and so true. I also just thought it was so interesting to see and hear about all the technological advances that are coming forward and how it is changing our school traditions and system as a whole. I never thought about how having social networking, like Facebook, would decrease the levels of year books sold. These kind of things show how all encompassing this push in technology really is.