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.

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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.

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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").

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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.

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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.

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MS Word is a program that I've used extensively throughout my educational experience. A majority of this usage was to write essays for various projects. Another large percentage is taken up by notes, especially as I go further into my college experience. I have also used it extensively in order to plan out projects. These include brainstorming, creating outlines, creating schedules, and saving sources.

I do not have a lot of experience with copyright or fair use. Largely, my experience runs more along the lines of plagiarism i.e. "make sure when you use it that you cite any and all sources you use, do not portray it as your own work." I would attempt to resolve these issues by taking it on a case-by-case basis of what I can use and researching anything I am unsure of before I used it.

I would attempt to address sexting by pointing out the legal implications and what could happen to my students should they be caught doing this. Another issue that would be addressed would be privacy. I would encourage students to not share their personal information with people they meet online or, if they do, then not to share more than just their first name and a few very vague facts. Cyberstalking would be addressed by encouraging students to privatize their personal social media accounts and monitoring their friends list to only include people they actually know.

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Teacher's are motivated to use technology in the classroom by the necessity to prepare students to be able to effectively use technology in a world that has increasingly become more reliant on technology. Students use technology because it is something they have grown up with and are used to it. To them it is another part of everyday life and it would be akin to some older generations not using pencil and paper in their work.

The ISTE Standard that resonated the most with me was how teachers have to continually learn about new technologies and practice with them. I've known a lot of teachers throughout my educational experience as a student who were unfamiliar with technology. It can get distracting, especially when you know how to do it better. It can also keep students from becoming engaged because they will usually use such technology to the bare minimum of its potential.

I do personally agree with the term "digital native". "Digital natives", in my own opinion, are those who have grown up not just completely surrounded by technology, but also using and interacting with it from a young age. I've noticed that a lot of my teachers don't really know as how to use some of the features of technology that people my age use very often, largely noticeable on programs like social media or Microsoft Office. In the future, I anticipate that I will likely fall into the same pitfalls if I am unable to keep up with the changing technology unless I take the time to learn how to use new resources extensively.

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My experiences using technology in education are varied and largely positive. I've used several different types of devices and software throughout my school career. Projectors were used most often with Microsoft Office Powerpoint when I was younger but as I got older and advanced in school the technology and software became more varied. During my last few years of high school I started to use Microsoft Office Word much more often to type out various papers for my classes. Additionally, my math classes began to be exclusively taught on SmartBoards in my sophmore year. Document cameras and Prezi software were added in when I began college as well. This technology has been used to great effect to enhance the lessons and my own assignments as well. Using the projectors and SmartBoards my instructors were able to bring in more sources from websites to YouTube videos that really helped to reinforce the information they were teaching. The Prezi software as well was much more eye-catching than the normal powerpoint software which helped to capture the students' attention.

I hope to learn how to use all of this technology in a more advanced manner than the bare basics I currently know. This will help me to more efficiently teach my students in the future as I will be able to use these resources to their full effects. It will also help me to make their appearance a bit more interesting visually which will be helpful in capturing students' attention. 

This questionnaire helped me to realize I was a largely verbal learner. For the most part I had never truly thought about how I processed information and how to present it to myself in order to make it easier to absorb and understand. I may go on to use this newfound knowledge in my own studies. I also learned that most people are largely visual learners when I went in to read the information in the links. This information will be useful in the future as I begin to make lessons and presentations, taking in to account for how to best help more of my students absorb the material.