Course Summary

I am tired--but excited! There are too many things that I learned to list what I received from each one. Besides, there's too much to go back to that I didn't explore as fully as I would have liked. Kudos to the staff for offering true diversified learning instead of the follow-me that I received in other technology courses. Yes, Yes, Yes, I would enroll in another course of this type.

In six weeks (that seem short now that I'm finished) I have reconnected with my extended family through Facebook, I have created documents through Google Docs to use next year, I have started a wiki to share with my fellow math teachers on our campus, I have found a plethora of sites where I can connect with Special ed. teachers or math teachers to help with diversity in my classroom, and I know where to go to get help or inspiration when I need it. That's just a small part of what I will take with me from this course

Thank You!!!!!!!!!!!

Thing #23

I think I may have enjoyed this "thing" the most and you can color me surprised. In joining Facebook, I have more mail than I can say grace over in just 24 hours. I can't believe that it actually excited my children, sister, and various and sundry cousins. I haven't even told them all that I'm on yet!

In the 23rd thing, I found that Facebook has groups of teachers that I can collaborate with to further my technology skills or to share classroom resources or tips. That will be easy to keep up with--can't wait to join a group.

I'm still waiting for my membership in Classroom 2.0 to be approved, but that site also has groups that would be fun to participate in.

I'm still thinking about how to use these sites with my students. I've toyed with the idea of inviting my students to join me on Facebook. I can see how this might help me connect to them on a level other than the classroom thus helping to build relationships. I can also see how I might come to regret the action--we'll see. Again, there are sites on Facebook that will give me suggestions on how to involve my students.

Thing 7b

While visiting my google reader, I found an article on what to expect when the court begins to examine Arizona's immigration stance. I'm sure many Americans are like me--confused. According to the article, the Supreme Court has already ruled that "federal authority can pre-empt state law when the federal interest is dominant and where there already exists a system of federal regulations."

I have wondered why there was such a big deal and the article went on to say that it doesn't matter that the federal government hasn't done a good job in enforcing the immigration laws, it only matters that the laws are in place.

I look forward to hearing the news today.

Thing #22

MySpace and Facebook are areas that are so foreign to me that I always think "what's the point?" My children, my sister, my sister-in-law all wanted me to join so I guess I'm glad I did for that reason. I have to admit, though, that the first thing I did was Google the security issues which were huge--kind of scares me. Also, I find it kind of scary for people I went to high school with 40 years ago to find me--what could we possibly have in common? I'm one of those people who went to 12 schools before I graduated high school--I'm used to moving on.

I'm not sure I would want to use either of these social networks for my students in teaching math. I really feel that too much time is wasted in a day with these sites--much like gaming. My children tell me of students who spent so much time on these sites that they failed out of school. The one useful feature I found on facebook (and I assume MySpace has the same feature) was the ability to connect to other special education teachers.

Thing #21

Thing 21 was interesting and I found that I had already started a calendar for my summer classes so I just finished it--daunting schedule! I had also used Picassa when I did the pictures for my collage and slide show. I got into iGoogle and made a web page but would really like to spend more time with it and see how I might customize it more. It has more "junk" in it than I would like.

Google has a lot of tools--some good and some not so good. As a teacher I will definitely use the Picassa tool and add more and more math pictures to use in math papers that I create. I'm really scared any more of using student pictures for anything. The calendar will come in handy next year in lieu of a hand written copy. I wish I had my printer here at home so I could print some of these things to see what they look like offline. IGoogle is just fun and it may be fun to have it come up--I can see the temperature and any breaking news before I come home in the evening.

Thing 20

This "thing" will eventually be useful but will take some work to find everything. In my profession of teaching math, I don't create very many word documents. I tried creating a math worksheet and could not find the math symbols (I assume they are there somewhere). Finally, I decided to work on my teacher letter that goes home with the kids on the first day of school. I used a newsletter template and it looks alright for a first draft. I'm sure something will need to be changed before it's time to send it out.

Welcome to Mrs. Peters' Basic Math Class

August 23, 2010

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News Flash! We use calculators in our class. Your student will have homework and will need a calculator for homework. Please do not buy an expensive calculator! If it will add, subtract, multiply and divide, it will be adequate. Walmart usually sells them for under $5.00. They will also use a calculator on TAKS. School Supplies There won't be a lot of supplies to purchase for my class. Mostly, each student should have a pencil every day. Not having a pencil was quite a problem last year. Students will also need paper for every class. I do not purchase tissue. I hope that each student can bring a box. Lastly, each student is expected to have a binder with index tabs to hold information for all their classes. Inspiration! GO MCDONALD MUSTANGS

It's Fall Again! Another summer has passed, our kids are another year older--we won't talk about what happened to us in that time (ha,ha). I'll take just a little time to tell you about me. I'm a 14 year veteran teacher and I'll receive my masters degree in December of this year. I have raised four children ages 29 to 23. The first three are girls and all have college degrees and my youngest is a boy who is serving with the Air Force in Afghanistan. What's Happening This Year This year we will use worksheets, computers, and projects to reinforce our math skills. Worksheets will be used in conjunction with notes to learn the basic skills. We have a computer program that will reinforce those skills. Your student will have access to that program from your home computer. If you don't have a home computer, he/she can stay after school to work on the classroom computers. More information on access from home will follow once every student is signed in to the system. Open House Middle School will host an Open House on September 16. It usually starts around 6:00 p.m. and runs through 8:00 p.m. (more information on exact times will follow). Please try to come! I'd love to meet you! Discipline I try not to need a principal in my discipline program. Most of the time, I am successful. I have found through experience that my students learn best when the class is orderly and quiet. That does not mean that we will not work in groups--sometimes we will. It also doesn't mean that we won't engage in a variety of learning experiences--we will. It does mean that all students will be expected to flow from one activity to another in a way that does not disturb other students and that does not interfere with my ability to teach. If I find that your student is having a problem controlling his behavior, I hope I can call on you for help. I truly believe that education is a team effort. The attachment to this newsletter asks for general information that will help me contact you. Please fill out the page and return it to school with your student. I love e-mails, so if you have access to one, please provide that also. Phone calls must happen from time to time, but we all work and I try to keep them to a minimum. Carol Peters Basic Math 972-882-5700 cpeters@mesquiteisd.org

I was really disappointed that I could not embed or link the page to my blog and I'm not sure I should have copied/pasted.

The newsletter application was great because it would have taken a special program for me to do it in Word. I will probably use the spreadsheet to track the academic progress for my students. I can also see using excell spreadsheets to track money and permission slips for field trips. That was the one collaborative use I could think of--each teacher on the team could input the data into the document for the students in her home room instead of having to take all the information to the team leader to input.

And, yes, it was very time consuming--but, interesting.

P.S. After viewing this blog post, I see why cut/paste is not a good thing to do. The formatting isn't compatible. Ah Ha!!

Thing #19

I was able to embed a voice thread into the sidebar of my blog and that was empowering. I would really like to come back to this section to see how to make my own voice thread. I tried joining the free group for teachers but was not successful. Next time, I'll join the discussion group and get their advice.

I definitely see benefit in using the voice thread in my classroom as a section wrap-up--every time we learn something new, add a comment about it to the voice thread. By the 6 weeks test, it could be used as a study document--especially since these voice threads can be accessed from home.

If I do my own, I would need to explore the screen. A picture would not be good enough--I would want to create something having to do with the math objective we were exploring at the time. Since we would be adding to it, a slide show seems like it might work. I could add a new slide each time we started something new. Sounds huge, and maybe it's unrealistic. Time will tell.

Thing #18

YouTube and TeacherTube can best be described as "you have to look through a lot of trash to find a treasure."

My excursion through YouTube didn't last long--way to much trash for me. TeacherTube was also full of trash but it was because most of the videos I looked at were very amateur. On my first search, I used the tags free, math, videos, and middle school. I got a lot of trash from elementary, middle school and high school--I guess the middle school tag is "iffy." I got tired of that so I refined my search to include a specific math subject such as Pythagorean Theorum. I think that would be a better set of criteria, but you still have to wade through a great deal of trash.

I like to use videos to introduce or reinforce a lesson just to vary the learning experience. Most of the videos I viewed would not impress my resource math students. If they don't get humor, or learning, or enjoyment of some kind, it's a waste of time.

This is a good resource and I can see math videos getting better as time goes on and more teachers learn to use the resource. This was one of two "things" so far that was not new to me.

Thing #17

Podcasts were confusing to me--I really don't know why you would use the ones I viewed in the math section in a math class. Math factor was a music video and the relation to math was so abstract that my resource math students would not understand the relationship--maybe a few gifted students might. Mathgrad was taught by a college professor and related to college concepts, some that I would have trouble with especially since it was all audio and no pictures or visual explanations at all. The third video was Dansmathcast and again it was college level and without visual explanation.

My students need a great deal of visual and kinestetic stimulation and video does that. I am pretty sure that videos are also a form of podcast because they call TeacherTube a podcast. TeacherTube has videos that are cute, even though you have to look pretty hard to find them in math. I would only use one to vary instruction.

Thing #16

I was kind of glad to find the Library Thing. Every year I go to inservice trainings that share the cutest books that I would like to share with my students and every year the list seems to get lost. I just attended the class "Start Small: Just Don't Stand Still" and I just joined the Library Thing and saved the books I thought my students might like.

Great quick resource!

Thing #15

Delicious was very interesting. I'm not sure how I would use it yet. If my math department chooses to use the math wiki to store teaching tools as a group, then I think the wiki would be the most efficient way to share resources. If not, I will probably use delicious because it would probably be easier to get to in a hurry. Of course, the wiki would have each tool separated by objective, so maybe I'll just use both.

I liked the way I could edit using delicious and I liked the ease of getting to my bookmarks. There are a lot more things I can do with it and I'm sure that will just take practice. My next goal is to see how google reader and delicious can work together to save me time in researching math videos.

All in all, I am learning a great many things in this course that I feel I will be able to use in my classroom next year.

7a

Since my son deployed to Afghanistan last week, I've been very interested in any news I can get from the region. I have a feed to my reader that gives me all the news. They come under attack at Khandahar every day, so I want to see what General Petreus is planning for the region since he is due to officially take over on Sunday.

The newest post is a speech he gave in Kabul to the troops and to NATO officials where he calls for unity in the region. He seems to be an important player because he did the same thing in Iraq.

Thing #14 (or Thing #12)

I chose to make a web page for my class. My hope is that parents would connect to the web site to see what they need to know to help their student be successful in my class. I chose the Weebly site to make the web page. So far, it is fairly easy to navigate, but I'm sure I will learn more as I go along.

This past year was exciting because most of my students had access to a computer and even more had parents who had access to a computer at work. Each year, the internet becomes a more practical tool for my class. Many of my parents prefer an e-mail to a phone call--as a past parent, this would have been more convenient for me as well.

If this web page works, in addition to class rules and supplies, I could add the math notes that go along with homework assignments so that parents can have access to material they may have forgotten over the years or never learned at all. I truly believe that the parents are the key to teaching today's student--if the parents believe in what we're doing, they will see that their children do also.

Thing #13

My cartoon was taken from the comic generator. This one was easy to create--not so easy to save. All you have to do is choose the comic strip you like and follow the prompts to input the text you like. I saved it to my document file and then couldn't open it. I still don't know why it let me add it to my blog today????

This is a very interesting section. I've never made pictures before or included them in anything I've posted on the internet. This picture was taken from the Shape Collage generator. The only thing I had to do was download the program, drag the pictures to the window, and create the collage. Then I saved the collage to my documents. Many of the pictures I made would not open once I saved them because I didn't have the right programs on my computer. This one was really simple.

Thing #12

This section was relatively easy. I chose to do a slide show on Khandahar, Afghanistan. My son was deployed there last week and I'm trying to get used to the idea. We survived Anaconda, north of Baghdad and I'm sure we'll survive this too. I tried to include pictures of the base, the surrounding area, and some of the people.

Thing #11

This section was certainly full of information--more information than I will be able to digest during this course. I'm still old fashioned in that I keep my photos in albums. The Flickr site alone will take months for me to become proficient with. Groups and Tags were also interesting. If I were to store my pictures online, I'd definitely need these features to be able to find the ones I wanted again.

We were asked to research a theme in Flickr and download photos for this blog entry. This time, the mother in me got the best of the teacher. My son shipped out to Kandahar, Afghanistan last week and I just had to spend time researching pictures of the area to see where he was.

I still do not fully understand the formatting and sizing of the pictures, but I guess that will come with time. PRAY FOR OUR TROOPS!

Thing #10

Learning about the new fair use doctrine was great. I hope I'm not the only one out here that didn't know about it. I've been working under the old copyright rules that were extremely restrictive--either you got it from the library or bought materials that could be reproduced.

When it comes to my students, I am absolutely sure they don't know or care about copyrights--anything on the internet is free unless they tell you to pay for it--don't you know! Seriously, though, I am glad so much work has gone into making it easier (and cheaper) to educate our students.

In addition to books and worksheets (either owned by the district or me), I use math videos from the internet. I never questioned whether they were copyrighted or not--I guess I'm like my students in that way. I also use math web sites that the district purchases. For these, the name of the student has to be loaded into the data base.

All in all, I guess I'm glad the fair use guidelines are in place. These days, my material comes from so many places that the fair use guidelines make creating varied lessons easier.

Thing #9

The section on wikis has been the most difficult so far, but also the most rewarding. I may have learned more about my computer in the last two days than ever before. Some of the things I had the most trouble with were pretty common sense things--after I figured them out. Before that, they were just frustrating. I'm an older user and most of the creation process on a computer is foreign to me.

The most rewarding part of the sandbox experience is gaining the knowledge that I can put my professional wiki together in a useable format, and I'm pretty sure that the other math teachers won't mind using it.

The lessons I still need are mostly in the area of pictures--I really haven't used my computer for pictures, personal or otherwise. I visited some of the sites, but I think I will need more intensive instruction to gain the necessary knowledge.

Thing #8

Wiki Wiki Teaching was empowering. I really felt excited as I read through the post. Vicki Davis's wiki, Westwood Schools Computer Science, was even more enlightening. The things she has the students doing on the wiki are phenomenal. She is definitely a "guru" when it comes to using the web as an educational tool. I'm not sure I'm ready to introduce blogging and wikis to my resource math class, but I can definitely see a professional wiki my future.

We have 11 math teachers on our campus and we all have a cache of math tools. I would love to create a wiki where we could deposit that wealth of information to use as a web library. I can envision a navigator on the side broken up into math objectives and each objective broken into areas for videos, Promethian slates, interesting papers with a new twist on teaching an objective, etc. It would take the first year to load all the information we have in our separate caches, but the following year we could benefit greatly. I see an important advantage for new teachers. One place to look to enrich their lessons. So much time is spent that first year just trying to find everything you need.

One of the best wikis on the list was the Room 15 Wiki. I am in awe of the quality of work he is getting from 4th graders. He must have them do most of their work on a computer. Their use of computer tools was great and I even noticed their spelling and grammar were great.

Math 12V Outcomes was another great wiki but not as surprising as the 4th grade class. This was a 12th grade Advanced Math class that totally outlined the course into their wiki for everyone to access. I'm sure the teacher taught, but the students did the reteach by dividing the sections among themselves and providing notes, instructions, and any other relevant tools necessary for mastery.

All in all, I think I like wikis more than blogs.

Thing #7

Commenting...hmmm...!?? I read many comments that left me wondering why the people bothered. I also read some blogs that had astronomical comments to one posting (336). I was curious so I visited the post to see what was so great. Many of the comments were one word--great, thanks, etc. That blog made me wonder if it wasn't more about competition to get the most comments than about sharing ideas.

Yes, I believe commenting is good, but only if you have something constructive to add. It's O.K. to comment that you find the post helpful and how you might use the information, but please be more specific than "thanks."

As for my experience with commenting, it seemed to be easier to comment to my fellow classmates because we're all working off the same information base and sharing different aspects. I found the links to be very interesting. We all received the same page of instructions but we all came up with different information from the same exercise--cool!

Thing #6

RSS feeds and my reader took a long time for me to complete. There's so much out there--I just can't believe how much. The required feeds were full of information but not very much fun. Then we got to the part where we could tailor our searches and I had a lot more fun. I found a way to get every news article from the Times on Obama and nothing else--that was fun.

The educational blogs left me somewhat cold. Too much opinion in some and too much technology for me in others. When I did my own google search on resource math, I found much more to interest me. Some of the blogs were political but most were on teaching and resources and problems faced by teachers of disabled students. One very exciting resource was homeschooling parents blogging about educating their children.

The homeschool lesson on math analogies was particularly interesting. Many of my students have trouble with patterns and sequencing. This particular homeschool parent was teaching analogies using geometric shapes to seven and eight year old boys. Wow!

Thing #5

The article that interested me most came from the TechLearning feed. It was about the 10 "no-nos" of teaching with a projector and whiteboard. Mesquite must have read the article or one like it because it said that a slate was just as good as a white board and much less expensive. He also said that the position of my projector is probably wrong. My setup has me at the back of the room and the writer's advice is to set up at the front of the room so we are speaking to the front of the class and not the back of their heads.

Another good tip was to leave the lights on. He says we should never teach in a dark room--it makes some people sleepy to turn the lights off. He says turning a bank of lights off in front of the screen is acceptable but not all the lights.

He also said to use a pointer (I'm assuming he means the lighted pointer) when getting the students to focus on a particular part of the presentation.

Lastly, he suggests that the projector should not run the entire period. If we're leaving the projector on just for instructions, he suggests copying those and handing them out to save the very expensive bulb.

Thing #4

Blogging is a new form of communication. Many blogs are diaries or logs of happenings in one's life. When the comments are added to the post, it resembles the responses to an editorial in the newspaper.

Blogging can be used for almost anything. One blog I read was used to communicate the trials and tribulations of gutting a home a rebuilding it complete with before and after pictures and a commentary of all the steps and surprises from start to finish.

From an educational standpoint, blogging can be used to facilitate homework, to communicate with parents, to create diversity with writing in the classroom, and to communicate problems and enlist the help of others in solving those problems.

If I were teaching literature, blogging would be an integral part of students' communicating their understanding of the concepts in the reading and for having my students communicate with each other by sharing their ideas through blog comments.

Thing #2

Web 2.0 information is extremely overwhelming. I can only assume that if I tune in next month it will only be worse due to the rapid pace that the information is changing. I hope to tune in to many of the ways to impart information to my students. I also hope that our math coordinator will begin to use the blog or wiki format to get information to us. If she starts the move, I am sure that our math teachers will get on board and begin to use the conveyances for communication about techniques that they have found beneficial.

I learned in the past that many of the disabled learners that I teach do tend to read better from a computer screen than from the pages of a book. I can only guess that the computer screen lends itself to dyslexic tendencies. I discovered last year that the students I teach that had two class periods of math (one dedicated to teaching math in another way with computer reinforcement) scored better on TAKS and TAKS-M than the class that did not received two classes and computer reinforcement. I know from teaching the students, that they endured the lessons from Monday through Thursday to get to the computer class on Friday. Many of my special education students even practiced at home through the Voyager online program. Next year, we will be using Study Island Math. The program may not be in depth as much as Voyager, but the results should be the same. We'll know when they take TAKS next year.

Thing #1

Getting started is always the hardest part of anything we do. The habit that would be hardest for me is having confidence. I may be the oldest person taking this course and computers are, of course, new in the span of my life. I seem to be always afraid of doing something I cannot get out of or of making the problem worse. I have no problem accepting responsibility for my learning or I would not have taken this course. I have taken other technology courses and find that I do not learn from the "follow me" approach. I tend to get lost easily and definitely do not have the skills to catch up once I'm lost. I am hoping that this trial and error approach on my own time will bridge the gap. The most important habit I hope to gain is the filling of my toolbox. My goal is to use these computer skills to help my students learn math. I teach Basic Math to 7th and 8th graders in middle school. Many of the skills they need were not learned when they should have been learned. This may be due to a learning disability, but my hope is that the skills were not presented in a way that enabled learning. If my hope comes true, stimulation through computers may help them bridge the gap.