Final Class Reflection blog

My final reflection for this class is that, first of all, I liked the class material very much. I think this is the heart of the classes about using technology to enhance my classroom, which is essentially why I enrolled in this program in the first place. I really enjoyed learning about all the different technologies in the classroom--and specifically, some things to have students do with technology. I enjoyed finding cool technological tools, I enjoyed (as much as one can enjoy research) researching copyright laws for my digital citizenship project. (Or at least I learned a lot about a topic I had wanted to know more about.) I thought the technology imlementation project was worthwhile--as far as requiring us to require our students to use technology. The textbook was ok--could have been a little better, but as far as the class itself, it has been one of the more enjoyable classes I've taken so far.
I think what I will take out of this class is the idea that it's not enough as a teacher to use technology in the classroom for our students--we really ought to teach and require them to use it as well. That LoTi Level survey we took helped me to realize that while I use technology, I don't require my students to as often as I could or should. I hope this makes me think more often about how to encourage and require my students to use technology more, and more effectively.

Digital Citizenship Projects

I thought all the digital citizenship project presentations were very cool, well thought-out and informative. I think my favorite of all had to be the social networking site one--not that I necessarily learned a whole lot--most of the stuff I already knew from experienc--but I thought it was very cute and creative how they made the background for their PowerPoint that had our pictures as their "friends" on facebook. I laughed out loud at that. Their presentation was good as well--if I were not already on facebook, I would have found it useful to learn about what it is like, what you can do with it, and what the pros and cons are of using it. It was also good they included information about being responsible with it and what can happen (especially to teachers) if they are not responsible with what they put on facebook.
My second favorite demonstration was the one Katy and Lance & Sarah did about netiquette. I mostly knew most of the information already, but I did think they presented it in a very creative and clever way. I thought it was a good idea to include that little quiz at the end and I thought the David Letterman style introduction was very well done.
Overall, I found all the projects informative and creative. I thought it was good to teach people about responsible uses of technology.

GaETC conference

On Thursday, I went to the GaETC conference for the first time. It was a very "new but old" experience--meaning that tough I've been to conferences before, they have been related to my subject matter--foreign language--and not technology. It was interesting to see teachers of all levels and fields rather than simply foreign language teachers. I really enjoyed the exhibit hall the most, I think, but some of the sessions were really informative as well. The sessions I went to included one about a guy who used FileMaker Pro to make a database to manage his students' projects and rubrics. I thought it was a very good and very useful idea--the one unfortunate thing is that he does not have the ability to give or sell this software yet, so it's useful for him, but not for others. I also went to a session about google applications, which was a very popular session. It was neat to find out about the google calendar and some of the other applications available through google. After lunch, I went to the exhibit hall for a bit, where I saw Chrissi. We went outside to chat for a bit about our digital citizenship project and when we went back, we attended a session that gave us some good insight about it--the session was about legal issues related to students' and teachers' use of technology in schools. It was very good because it was given by a guy who works in our system (Gwinnett) so it was very relevant. Finally, I went to a session about Photoshop elements, and that session made me really want to get that program! You can do all sorts of stuff much more easily in PSe than in Photoshop itself.
Overall, the conference was worthwhile to attend--I saw a lot of cool uses of technology in the classroom and I feel "in the loop" about what technologies we may see soon in the future at our schools.

Critical thinking

On the topic of critical thinking, I suppose I really don't do nearly as much with encouraging critical thinking as I should in my classroom. I suppose teaching a first and second year language course, I imply focus on the more verbal skills that is simply memorization and application of concepts rather than much with critical thinking. There are occasionally "categorizing" and higher level thinking skills like trying to group items into categories and figuring out what doesn't belong in the category, but other than those sorts of activities, I suppose there's not very much critical thinking. I think they are very important for students, and I guess I just think my subject matter doesn't lend itself to critical thinking as other subjects do. I'm sure that's probably false and I could do as much with it as any other subject could, but I can't think offhand of many ways to make it more critical-thinking based. Maybe I should have some peer revisions of written language paragraphs, which I do use on occasion, but I'm sure I could do more and I just don't. Any suggestions would be welcomed!

Cool Tools

Of all the cool tools I am citing, I know that I will use www.homeworknow.com the most. I use this literally every day to update homework assignments. I ask my students to check it for their homework and often include links on it to resources for them. It is much easier to maintain than posting to the school's web site (for which I have to ask our school's technology coordinator to update every time I make changes to my professional page). My school has an account with homeworknow.com and many of the other teachers use it, and so our students are familiar with the site. This is not, perhaps, the most creative or original use of technology to support the classroom, but it is very very useful and very very practical. It not only helps students who have been absent and want to check what work they missed, but it also is a place for the students to go if they forget what their homework is, or if they want a "one stop shop" for links to other online resources. I have lots of links from there to handouts, other helpful web sites, online review, etc. I definitely could NOT imagine not having that site. If your schools do not use it, I would strongly recommend you talk to your principals about getting a school account.

Revising Project

The project I have finally decided on is to have my Spanish 2 students make a movie, narrated PowerPoint, or printed picture book illustrating what they do during the day. This project is supposed to demonstrate their knowledge of reflexive verbs, and one of the requirements is they use at least 8 reflexive verbs. I have thought about ways to increase creativity with this, and have decided that with the three options of project possibilities, that might be enough wiggle room for creativity in and of itself. I would rather not decrease the amount of reflexive verbs used, to allow for more creativity: the reflexive verbs is the grammatical purpose of this project. I have told them they may use pictures they've taken themselves from their digital cameras, which hopefully many of them will do. We will be in the computer lab this coming Wednesday to work on the project, at which time I'll tell them how to use the narration feature of PowerPoint, and teach them how to make movies and/or record sounds. I will allow them (and encourage them) to actually use video from their digital cameras and will encourage them to add music to their videos if they chooses. Without having to teach them how to use Audacity, however (which I think would be superflous and not a good use of instructional time), I'm afraid their projects will be a little long (as they don't know how to "shorten" songs), and I will strongly encourage their narration to be at the beginning of the project ( so I can grade their pronunciation and content first, and then skim through the rest of the video.) I think with these options, there will be enough room for the students to be creative with it, but still accomplish the language goals of the project. I hope these turn out well: I have done this project many times in the past, but it was always just the print "Daily Routine" book and I'm glad I'm requiring more elements of technology this year. At a minimum their project must be typed, include digital photos or other computerized graphics (printed in color for more credit) and include a digital narration of their project. (Yes, this narration, which was not formerly part of the project, will add time to my grading it, but I will feel like they've gotten more speaking practice and will be ultimately a good idea, as I have a hard time implementing many speaking activities.)

Assessing student learning

I have a feeling this may be a somewhat contraversial topic: assessing student learning, especially with PBL. My personal thought is that PBL learning is much more time consuming to assess and that it can and should be used, but should probably be used sparingly, as it is so time consuming to assess. Creating real products are a great authentic idea, but take a lot longer to assess than a standard pen-and-paper test. In real life, teachers have lives outside of school and cannot grade every unit as a PBL--it's just not realistic. I think PBL is good to use (in my case as a high school teacher) once or maybe twice a semester. More than this and I think the teacher will get burned out having to grade assignments that require a lot of thought to score correctly. In an ideal situation, PBL would be a great method to use all the time, but given reality with time constraints and the reality of standardized testing, there's only so much time available for assessing PBL projects.