My EDM 310 Blog Assignments are Now Complete

To my fellow classmates,

This has been a great semester. Many of you are starting your candidacy next semester and I wish you well. I will be starting mine in the Fall. I hope to see you around. I enjoyed doing the podcasts with you and experiencing new stuff with you all in class. Good luck next semester!

What I have learned

I have enjoyed this class. I have learned how to use blogger.com to post blogs. Before I took this class I was not well educated on Google. I now feel that I can do more with a computer. :) Thanks Dr. Strange. This has been a great class to take. I would recommend this class to anyone. I think that I will try to keep posting to my blogger account. I may not do it every week but maybe every other week...just for fun!

Access Lab

I visited Mary G. Montgomery and they were very nice and let me visit their access lab. The person I met with was Mr. Rose. He was very nice to us. He showed us the access lab. It was very neat. He showed us how he could zoom in on student not only in his classroom but in other classrooms. The microphone was so advanced that he could talk in his normal voice anywhere in the room and students who were at other school watching him could hear him as if he were standing right in front of them.
Mr. Rose told us that in order to get picked to be an instructor for the access labs that you have to teach something out of the ordinary. It has to be something that most schools don't offer like advanced British Literature. He introduced us to other teachers which I thought was very nice of him.
While we were in his classroom there was another class going on. It was a group of students taking an online course. They had a different teacher than Mr. Rose. I don't remember her name but she was very nice to us. We got to walk around and look at what they doing. The students were very nice to us as well.
Over all the experience went well.

A Classmate's Blog

The blogs that I chose to read belonged to Kerrie Owens. While reading them I realized that we thought the same on a lot of things. It was really neat reading what she had to say about certain topics. Sometimes it put things into a whole new perspective for me because I was reading it from a different persons' point of view and not just mine.

One thing I liked about Kerrie's blogs was that she gave a lot of information and was never quick to the point. She always let the reader know exactly what was going on. Blogs like that are more interesting to read in my opinion because you are more clued in and know whats going on. The more information you have, the more you learn from what you are reading.

Another thing I really liked about Kerrie's blogs was that she used a lot of pictures in her different postings. That also makes it more interesting. Having something else to look at besides a bunch of words all the time spices it up a little bit and "adds flavor". It makes for a great blog!

Ok not the hard part, something I didn't like was...some of the blogs seemed maybe just a tad bit too long. I know earlier I said that it was good that weren't quick to the point and gave a lot of information, but some of the blogs went on and on and gave way too much information I think. But over all I really enjoyed reading Kerrie's blogs and I think she did a great job doing them! If I could grade her I would give her an A+ !!

Duke University

I chose to listen to a podcast called "The Importance and Limitations of Specialization". The speaker was President Richard Brodhead of Duke University. It seams that he was giving the speech to new students attending Duke University. He gave the speech very well. He was too serious and joked around a little bit which I thought was nice.

Our classroom podcasts

I listened to 4 podcasts including mine, all of which were in my class, and I'm just going to post some notes of what I thought about them.

-People spoke very clearly but I did notice there were a lot of "hmm's" and "umm's"

-In every podcast it seemed like there was never a "conversation"; it was always just one person talking. That is fine, but it is better to me to have two or more people talking. It makes it more interesting.

-When talking about the different topics, I think sometimes we stayed on one topic too long.

Over all I think we did a good job on the podcast considering it was our first time doing them.

Maine Department of Eduacation and Mathematics and Technology

Maine Department of Education
I chose to listen to the podcast "Time to Think About the Accessibility of PDF Files". The speaker is Cynthia Curry. She is letting the listeners know how easy it is to access PDF files for students with disabilities. She has a whole bunch of podcasts that talks about different topics students with disabilities have.

Mathematics with Technology
The speaker is Judy Chandler. She is a teacher and in her podcast she says she has spoken with other mathematics teachers. Judy says that teachers should be more engaging in the math activities and that this along with a few other things will bring the students' grades up.

I really wasn't very interested in either of the pocasts that I listened to. They just didn't spark any interest.

The Stanford University

I chose the podcast that talks about teaching science. The speaker Donald Kennedy talks about how the world needs to understand how important science is. He also said the we needed faculty to back us up. The podcast had many different speakers that pretty much were saying that science needed to be taught in not only K-12 but also on the college level.

It was kind of boring but I plan on getting my masters in the science field so it's something I need and should be very interested in. When I start teaching I am going to make sure I let my students know how important science is and I am going to make it fun and interesting for them.

Teachers Domain

Through the iTunes University I went to the teachers domain and looked under grades K-5 and watched two different podcasts. The first one was called A Night in the Coral Reef. It was very interesting. It was a very short film on fish and a coral reef. I would use it in my class if I was teaching science. I think the students would really enjoy it. It had a lot of pretty colors and interesting fish.

The second podcast i watched was called What is a Planet? This one was a little bit longer and it was, to me, a lot more interesting. It talked about the planets and how they determined what was a planet. I would again use this my science class.

Edible Schoolyard?? Hmm...Sounds Tastey!!

I watched a six minute video on The Edible Schoolyard and it was very interesting. It was about a school by the name of Martin Luther King Junior Middle School in California that literally had an edible schoolyard. HA! First period students would come outside and plant gardens and grow vegetables and other sorts of foods and then use them to cook all kinds of yummy foods! They would cook them during class in the classroom. It was very interesting how well the kids worked together. The person who started this was a lady by the name of Alice Waters and she did this to serve the kids better food in the lunch room and it just became this thing where the kids took it over and it became a class. The teachers integrate all subjects into this class from math to science. The kids love it, they have fun and learn at the same time. It also teaches them how to work together. It would be nice if I could do something like this in my classroom when I begin to teach but that is wishful thinking!

A I watched a video called A Night in the Global Village. It was about a group of students who took a field trip with their teachers to this village at the Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Arkansas. They were trading one night as an American for one night of the less fortunate of the world. They were divided up into groups and some stayed in refugee camps, while others where in Thailand homes ...etc. It was very interesting to watch the students try to get through the night and cook their food. The next morning when they woke up they were very excited and ready to talk about everything they had experienced. I really liked this video!

Listening to Different Podcasts

I listened to four different podcasts and they were all very interesting. Some were good where other were very boring. The first podcast I listened to was the SmartBoard Lessons Podcast. There were two people who hosted the show; Ben Hazzard and Joan Badger. It worked well for them. At the beginning of the podcast they introduced themselves and the topic they would be discussing. There would be music at various times during the podcast which made it enjoyable. There was never a time where I could remember that there was a period of silence. They also brought in special guest that would talk during the podcast. I really enjoyed listening to their podcast!

The second podcast I listened to was the KidCast. There was one host named Dan Schmit. The podcast didn't have any music, at least the few I listened to didn't! Being there was only one host, I think it might have been hard for Dan to find words to fit the time. It seemed really boring at times. I am assuming that this pidcast is for teachers only because in one of his podcasts he talks about "99 bottles of beer on the wall" and I would not fit that appropriate for children. Which brings me to my next point...why would he call it "KidCast"? Why not call it TeacherCast? Who knows! I really didn't care to much for this particular series of podcasts.

The third podcast I listend to was the MacBreak Weekly. There were four hosts. There names are Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Scott Bourne, and Alex Lindsay. They seemed to work real well together, always finding something to say. One person would say something and then another person would find something to say off what the first person said. Never a silent moment. There was music in various moments. Anytime someone said something funny they would play funny noises in the backgrounds. It seemed more like a morning show on the radio, nothing for kids. I really enjoyed listening to it.

The fourth and final podcast I listened to was This Week in Photography. The hosts were Scott Bourne and Alex Linsday who are also hosts on the MacBreak Weekly. I didn't really care too much for this series of podcasts. There was music in the background. They did bring in special guests during some of the podcasts. The series focuses on gadgets so most of the podcasts talks about photography. I'm not really into photography, but if you like taking pictures, then this would be really interesting to you.

Randy Pausch

I really enjoyed watching this video. It was very inspirational. I loved how he achieved most of his childhood dreams. Wanting to be at zero gravity and then finally getting through all obstacles to get there was great!

Then I loved how he tried and tried to be a Disney Imagineer and finally he got to work with the Disney team on the Aladdin project. Wow, looking back on that he must have been very proud of himself. Being a part of the Disney team and getting to work with some of the most talented people in the world must have been something really special.

I really liked how he taught his classes. He would keep telling them, " I know you can do better!", and sure enough they would! His classes would built virtual worlds and it got to be such a big deal that they would set up events for this where family and friends could attend to watch and see the projects.

I would defiantly recommend everyone watching this, just as a inspirational video. All kids should follow their dreams no matter how big or how small they are. Our dreams are what gives us hope and without hope what are we living for?

I tunes University

The website I found was Apple Education where I read about the I tunes university. It had four main points. The first point was that you could access the university anytime...(24/7). The second point was that you could sync your I pod with the I tunes store and learn while you were eating a meal or doing something else besides sitting at a computer. The third point was that it had vivid learning because it has audio and video. The fourth and final point was that school could open all or part of their content to the public and anyone who wanted to learn could get on and read what the school had put on it.

I think that I would use this if I was teaching middle school or high school, but not elementary school. I think that kids are too young to be exploring the internet in that way. I posted a blog a couple of weeks ago expressing my feeling about this subject. Let kids be kids! So no, I will not use I tunes university in my elementary classes unless it is required.

iPods

I read up on how Duke University was using iPods to help in the classrooms. Duke University gave each freshman (1,650 students) a free iPod. Each iPod will be preloaded with course material, campus events,...etc. This will be a trial to see how they will be affective. They anticipate the students will find numerous ways of using the iPods to benefit learning classroom material. In addition to giving the freshmen iPods, the upperclassmen will be able to share 150 iPods for which the course requires. On the website it explains how students can use the iPod to record lectures and are able to pause and rewind.

It goes on saying that other school are using ipods and some even have agreements with Napster. I think using iPods in the classrooms is a great idea. Especially if it's FREE! haha I think this would and will be a great tool for students.

To view this website click here.

My Presentation

Geocaching

I was looking over Dr. Christie's website wondering what I was going to find to write two paragraphs on when I came across a podcast and I thought...what a great time to watch one since that is what we are about to be doing in class. Her podcast was on geocaching; something I had NEVER heard of! I was very interested!!!
Geocaching is when you use a tracking device to locate "cach" There are satellites in space that send signals to these gps tracking devices and help us find the geocach. People can travel all over the world looking for the cach. Dr. Christie says that teachers can use this in classrooms by giving the students gps devices and letting them find cach's of their own. The teacher would of course hide the cachs to where the student could find them. I really like this idea and I think the students would find it fun. Since resess has been taken away from the students, having them outside doing this activity would be something they would really enjoy. If you would like to learn more about geocaching, you can visit this page HERE.

Wikipedia

First of all let me just say that if I were doing a report and needed information off the internet, I would not do my research on Wikipedia. What I just read and listened to about people changing the information on wiki just makes me not want to use it even more. YES, it does have a lot of information on it, but who wants to accidentally get wrong information? NOT ME! My brother looks up stuff on Wikipedia and he will tell you that he loves it, but I guess everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Not sure if I'd tell my students to use Wikipedia as a reliable source.

180 Days??

I went to fischbowl and picked April. It talks about how there are supposed to be 180 days in the school year in Colorado that are instructional days, but for some reason the students never get all of the 180 days. There was a slide show that gives a list of everything that takes place during a typical school year, with "testing days" and student and teacher absences, and many other different things. Please look at the slide show-HERE. I agree with this. Students says there just isn't enough time to get everything done and this proves them right.

Best of 2007

"If a teacher today is not technologically literate - and is unwilling to make the effort to learn more - it's equivalent to a teacher 30 years ago who didn't know how to read and write."-Karl Fisch

Hmm...not sure if I totally agree with this statement. Yes teachers do need to know how computers work, but it's very over-rated if you ask me. When I was in elementary school I certainly did not use a computer. I might have thought it was cool but I was doing what kids did before this technology ma ham started...playing with dolls and coloring and just BEING A KID! I have a daughter and when she gets in elementary school I don't know if I'll want her knowing how to use a computer. Kids need to be kids. This is what Karls whole blog boils down too...teachers being computer literate so that they can teach their students to be computer literate...but when exactly does it gross the line!? Does it cross the line when your child plays on the computer too much and fails a grade...or does it cross the line when your child is innocently playing on a kid website and porn pops up? I just don't know about all this computer crap! I'm really aggravated with this guys outlook on the whole thing!

International Blogs

Once I did the last assignment it wasn't that hard to do this one. The first blog I found was a website ran by BBC World Service and it allowed international students to sign on and write a blog about their life and then a teacher would sign on and tell them what they could work on with their writing and English. I thought this was an excellent website. There are students from all over the world, it's great! BBC World Service

My second international blog a found was a man by the name of Stevie. He was born in Beverley, England and is not teaching English in South Korea. His blog talks about his everyday life in Korea and his experiences teaching English in South Korea. He seems like he's really intelligent and I like his style in the way he posts his blogs. Stevie

United States Teachers Using Blogs

The first blog I picked was a professor by the name of Anne Davis. She works for Georgia State University as an Information Systems Training Specialist in the College of Education. She has lots of different projects going on and one of them was visiting fourth and fifth graders at an elementary school. She introduced them to blogging and they loved it! She said that she was very impressed with both of the grades at how well they picked up everything. The students have their own blogs and anyone can go and read them. http://itc.blogs.com/newsquest/








The second blog I found was a first grade teacher named Kathy Cassidy. At first I was a little confused because I didn't know how in the world a first grader was going to "blog" but as I read the entries I started to understand it. What the teacher did was she selected a topic, then she asked the student what they thought about the topic and she helped them type it out on the computer and then finally she put at the end what the first grader was trying to say. She did an excellent job! You can read the blog entries at this website-Click Here

Fisch Bowl

I thought that was an excellent video! At first I wasn't too sure what to think about it, but as it neared the end I thought it had a great message. Pretty much what I got out of the video was that the world is growing in technology and we are using computers for a lot of things. So we need to be making sure that our future generations are up to date with these technologies. We need to be making sure that our schools are teaching kids how to correctly use computers.
Having computers in schools will help our kids learn how to operate them. I think that it is our jobs to make sure our kids' schools have the computers in them. We need to be making sure that our school boards are putting computers in the schools for the kids to learn off of. Overall I think that computers will be a great thing for our future and our kids future.

ACCESS

As I read the power point for Access, I was a little confused. I'm not really sure if this is meant for actual highschool students or college students. In part of the power point presentation it seemed that through this organization they were hiring "e-teachers" and so I'm thinking that high school or college students can register online for a course and then sign on the web to see an e-teacher and get the lesson that way.
I think this is taking away from how the school are already set up. In high school, I think that a student should be in class to get a hands on experience and then in college, they already have online courses, so I don't see how this new organization is really going to change a students grade level by having an e-teacher on the screen. I would not recommend this to anyone.

My Thoughts on ALEX

I think ALEX is a great program for both students and teachers. It is well outlined and the website is very easy to get around. The website has eight areas to explore. The first area is Courses of Study. Here you can find different subjects with detailed lesson plans for grades K-12. The second area is Web Links. On this page there are websites that students and teachers can visit to help them out in school. The third area you can click on is Lesson Plans. This is another way to get lesson plans by subject and grade level. The fourth area is Search. Here you can search the website for certain things you are looking for. The fifth area is Personal Workspace. Here you can create lesson plans and create your own website. The sixth area is Professional Training. This is a page where teachers can get access to more up-to-date material, such as new methods for teaching. The seventh area you can visit on this website is Distance Learning. Here you can learn through the web. To do this you would click on a link that will navigate you from Alex.com to Access (Alabama Connecting Classroom, Educators and Students Statewide). The eighth and last area is HELP. Here you can get help on problems you may have throughout the website.
I really enjoyed this website. I will defiantly use this when I start teaching. I find it very beneficial to me and probably the student as well.

Get to know me

As you already know my name is Ashley. I'm a junior majoring in Elementary Education. I've been attending South since 2003. I was previously majoring in Nursing but I changed my mind. I work at Providence Hospital as a nursing assistant and working there lead me not to want to be a nurse. I hope to graduate Spring of 2010. I will have been in college for 7 years! HA! I hope to teach in the public schools.
A little on my personal life...I have a two year old. I'm a single mother. I was born in Orange, Texas but moved to Mobile when I was 3 months. I enjoy going to Disney World. I've been 5 times. Hopefully when my daughter is 5 or 6 I will be able to take her. I graduated from Mobile Christian in 2003. Hmm...Don't really know what else to say. So I'lll end it here.

Welcome!

Hey this is Ashley Wheeler. I'm an elementary education major and I'm excited about taking this class. I hope this semester goes well. Hopefully I will get to know each and every one of you. See you in class!!