ILP Participation - Programming Foundations : Fundamentals

The course began with an introduction and then segued into a quick quiz to test our prior knowledge. At this point the course began for real. An in-depth discussion of what, exactly, programming is followed before we learned the specifics of JavaScript. Following this, was a lesson on the use of different basics of programming. Then there were lessons on the different types of coding (conditional and modular) and different coding arrangements. The lesson ended with a segment on debugging before going into an overview of some more advanced topics and the different types of coding "languages". 

My learning experience was very good and I enjoyed this. I had some very minor experience in coding before from a previous class so it was interesting to learn more. The speaker was very clear and easy to follow as well. I look forward to using these lessons to enhance my experience using different websites in my personal life as well since this lesson will allow me to use the more advanced options with them. 

From the pre-test

There are several types of adaptive technologies. I know screen readers can help those with visual impairments. A braille printer can also help these students keep up with the rest of the class by printing handouts that students are going to be using immediately so that they have all the same materials as their classmates. Certain types of keyboards can help those who have difficulty typing with their special design. There's a type of keyboard that's two orbs which, when working together, type letters. This keyboard can help students who have difficulty typing as a result of impaired fine motor movement and can also assist autistic students as the order of the letters is both alphabetic and color coded as opposed to the seemingly random order of the normal QWERTY keyboard. I've never used any of these myself, nor do I know anyone who has used them. I see that it's possible that other students may want to use them because they're "interesting" in the beginning, and cost may be a negative in getting such tools.

Link

You can use facebook to keep up with technology trends. As a social networking site facebook often has interesting videos on new technology, it's where I learned of several types of adaptive keyboards that can help students with disabilities. Also, you can network with other educators to keep up with specifically educational technology or how to use "regular" technology educationally.

Blog Post 7

While using Twitter I've learned to communicate with others more effectively. It's interesting to communicate with people on such a restricted basis. One of the perks of Twitter is that it's fast communication. It doesn't take long to type out or read a tweet so it's a quick form of communication with a large group of people. One of the issues I've been experiencing, however, directly relates to this. I'm by nature a very wordy person and it can be rather difficult on occasion to reduce the character count of my whole thought enough that it fits in a single Tweet. It makes for an interesting experience if nothing else.
I do, actually, enjoy web site design. It rather fun to watch your abstract ideas come together in a coherent image that looks wonderful. What I don't like about it is just the general busy work of it, inserting and aligning the various media was time consuming and frustrating. In the future I will definitely be using the ruler tool more often, a tool which I unfortunately only learned of late in the project and which caused me to have to go back over every page of my website and recheck the alignment.

https://elainemcoleman.wixsite.com/eme2040-website

Diigo has helped me learn better annotation skills and a better way to save all the various interesting articles that happen across my laptop screen. It's also given me a wonderful collaboration platform that will be available for use in the future. I look forward to using it with my future colleagues in order to share helpful articles and other websites between each other to improve our work.

Blog Post 6

I visited the webpage of my old high school English teacher. She has a lot of information available online for her students. There's a link to a general rundown of the class. Additionally, she has a page where she records the activities they did in class in order for absent students to be able to keep up with class. There was also a page where she posted all of the papers she would give out in class for those who were absent or lost the paper. A page where her contact information was visibly displayed and where students could sign up for extra tutoring as needed were also present. She teaches high school duel enrollment Composition 1 & 2 to eleventh and twelfth graders.

Link to Website

I envision myself using technology in the future to create a website similar to the one my old teacher had used. Although, I would add more external links to references and possibly incentives (extra resources, possibly extra credit opportunities) on the website in order to encourage student participation.

The Smartboards are the most immediately useful in a classroom. They can make presentations much more interactive and can allow students who learn by doing to join in. They also allow users to record any notes that they take during class time so that those who are absent don't fall behind. They can also record any questions the students had during the presentation so that it can be improved to be more comprehensive or understandable for future use.

(1) ILP Participation

I completed the Lymda.com course "Time Management Fundamentals" by Dave Crenshaw. Some of the major activities I performed during this course included completing downloaded worksheets and taking quizzes embedded within the presentation. During this course I learned several techniques on how to effectively mange my time better (i.e. managing my email inbox effectively). However, more importantly, I learned to avoid techniques which seemed as if they were more productive but in truth actually took more time to do the same amoint of work (i.e. "switch tasking").

Blog Post 5

2. A web 2.0 tool that I'm excited to use in the classroom is a website creator called Wix. I've used it in the classroom as a student during a project and I'm really interested in seeing how using it as a teacher would be. It could help me provide easy access for my students to many resources.

Blog Post 3

Unfortunately I was unable to find the information in my textbook to be able to answer the first two questions.

While doing the Newsletter assignment, I learned how to work with columns. I've tried using the columns in Word in the past before. Unfortunately, I was unable to get it to work properly and as it was not a requirement of the other assignments I stopped using them and stuck with the more traditional style. Since they were a requirement of this assignment, I finally put in the effort to learn how to properly use them so that they did not break up the flow of the paper.