EPortfolio

I've learned a lot this semester and am surprised that I was able to bild this portfolio and link it by myself. If it published without a hangup I will be ecstatic. Thank you Ms. Davis. Without further ado: My Learning Portfolio

Weblogs

I was very confused by weblogs at first but now enjoy them. I was completely unaware of their presence before this class. Now, every time I pick up the paper, some article refers to blogging. I think this technique would be especially useful in an English class to generate discussion about a book, poem, or news article. Students would be encouraged to blog each other, posting their opinions on events or chapters. They IM all the time, so why not put this technology to educational use.

Final Reflection Paper

Jane Henley
It 3210

After nearly completing this course, I have learned quite a bit of technology that will be useful both in and out of the classroom. Before the commencement of this course, I had several misconceptions concerning technology. I viewed technology as a cumbersome and time consuming discovery. While a lot of fun for young people, it appeared to take too much time and too much money to stay current in this area. Now my view has changed.
Beginning with our first lesson on blogging, I discovered an entire network invented for the dispersion of ideas and communications. With this new information, I began to realize that failure to embrace this technology is tantamount to isolation from knowledge. Teachers, particularly, cannot afford to remain cut off from this knowledge base.
It 3210 has prepared me adequately for the classroom. I say adequately because this technology is moving so rapidly that one year from now (before I enter a classroom), every program I have learned may already be obsolete. It has done a good job of making me realize this and had also done an excellent job of teaching me the programs that are in use today. As a result I know that it is up to me from this point to stay current on new programs and integrations. I plan to become best friends with the technology support professional at whatever school employs me. This person will be essential in learning to operate the systems in the school as well as keeping me abreast of new programs and integrations. Hopefully, this person will keep me apprised of workshops and seminars available for teachers in our district as well as nationally.
I certainly plan to integrate technology into my classroom as much as possible. IT 3210 has also done an excellent job of producing confident students in the technological area and has made us realize that this technology is a tool just like the blackboard and eraser. With technology, a teacher can bring the world into the classroom. He/she can also make the lecture much more interactive and student driven. Students today are more visual learners than they were even a generation ago and that needs to be recognized. The students we will teach do not know a time when computers, IM, cell phones, and Power Points did not exist. To not use this technology would be equivalent to asking me to write with quill pens—it can be done but why would you want to do it that way?
My only concern centers on the availability of these technological resources in the classroom. This technology becomes obsolete quickly and requires a great deal of expert maintenance to work properly. Programs are expensive and continually require faster and faster computers to run them. I know there are no easy answers to this problem. Even with more and more schools actively spending funds for this technology, the constant expense of replacing obsolete equipment is mind boggling. Much as the United States had, as a nation, to mandate education for every child and not just ones that could be spared from work, the time may come when technology for every classroom ( not just ones in affluent districts or states) may too need to be mandated and supported on a federal level. As we leave the industrialized economy for an information based one, we owe our future generations an education based on the technology and work environment that they will use.
This has been a very enjoyable and educational class. Its content will be very beneficial in a classroom as well as at home and other areas of the workforce. I look forward to using this base throughout my teaching blocks and integrating it into my lesson plans for my substitute teaching.

Website and Software program

I evaluated Kid Pix and thoroughly enjoyed it. This program has been around for years and is constantly updated. Kids really enjoy using it and it is one of the few that offers (though rfather simplistically) an animations program for school age children.
The website I evaluated was http:// newslink.org This site provides links to newspapers all over the country and is useful across the curriculum.

The Next Decade of Educational Media

The article The Next Decade of Educational Media presents a wellbalanced and realistic glimpse ito the future of digital educational. Author Cedar Pruitt looks at the technology shapping kids today and extrapolates this into the future. He postulates that a very different learning environment will be present in our society within a decade. I agree with him. While parents are still (in frustration) telling their children to turn off the cell phones, Ipods, computers, IMs, and study, the war it slowly being lost. Perhaps a realization that this is a fast informational world where the majority of time will not be used in deep thought about a subject but will instead be be dispensed across multiple topics in a shorter period of time is something parents need to address. Just as farmers adjusted to the Industrial Revolution, we may need to realize that, in this country in particular, we are seeing the end of an Industrial Society and the advent of an Informational One. To survive and succeed in this, the adults of tomorrow may very well need to be able to multitask and, instead of being an authority in one area, will be able to quickly become familiar with several areas simultaneously. While this sound shallow at first, this may well be the way the world operates for this next generation.

Journalistic Writing

Project Name

Journalistic Writing


Description of Learning Goals

Access is useful in teaching students to organize their thoughts before writing. This is a program where one definitely needs to have the finished goal in mind before one begins.
The Standards met for this project are:· 5—Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.· 6—Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (spelling and punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and create, critique, and discuss print and nonprint texts.· 8—Students use a variety of technological and information resources (libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.


Rationale for Technology

Tools such as Access are great for organizing a tremendous amount of data into one format that can be easily retrieved. Students would enjoy being able to organize their music by author, song, recording label, genre. This technology really makes a student organize their thoughts before beginning implementation. Otherwise, halfway through the process, they will discover that there are no relationships to be made with the data.



Description of Lesson Implementation

The “Create a Newspaper” does not lend itself well to Access from a student standpoint. If I were going to teach this, I would have everyone use the same database, such as my classroom books. I would use an overhead for instruction. We would:
decide what relationships we want to have documented. We could organize by author or genre, or difficulty level
walk through the procedures step by step with everyone generating the same forms.
generate reports, forms and tables and talk about whether data generated is useful to us. I think I would throw in one “red herring” so they would see how some information is useless

This program is over the heads of most Middle Schoolers so I think the classroom would have to be carefully managed for frustration.

Assessment

Access is a great program for someone that has a lot of data that needs to be organized and stored. It is really more a teacher than student driven program. I would use it to organize lesson plans by topic, goals, or website.

Other Places to Use this Solution

This program can be used at home or in the office as well as school. Recording all your music by genre or artist; recipes by type, low cal, or region; It is used in offices everywhere to store data business for inventory, addresses, etc.

What I Learned and What I Would Improve on Next Time

I learned that this is a complicated program that I would need to work with a lot before I felt comfortable teaching it in a classroom. I need to think through what types of information I want synthesized before I begin the program and be aware that even having thought through it, it still might not work. I think this works best with very simple projects. Unless this were high school, I would only use this program for teacher support. I think it is beyond the grasp of elementary and most middle schoolers.


References/Resources Used

Microsoft Access
Georgia QCCs
Professional Help Provided by Ms. Anne Davis

Pope's Death

Pope John Paul's death brings into focus the fact that over half the people living have known no other Pope. Combining this with the facts that he was from Communist Poland and caused shock throughout Poland and the Soviet Union could be the basis for a great history lesson plan. So many students do not remember the stunned broadcasters announcing his election and the carefully worded statements from the Communist bloc countries nor do they understand the reason for these careful statements. I think this could be a very dyamic history lesson combining the fall of Communism with a study of his papacy.

EXCEL Project

Project Name

How We Spend Our Day

Description of Learning Goals and Standards

This project ties in nicely with the “Create a Newspaper” Lesson Plan. As one of their news articles, students will interview students concerning one particular topic (How we spend our day), collect and analyze data, and extract statistical data using the Excel software program. This lesson helps students with their analytical skills, communication and writing skills as well as strengthening their technological abilities. It is important that students be able to integrate several skills into one larger project. They will need to be proficient in this in increasingly more difficult projects as they progress through high school, college and the work world.
The Standards met for this project are:
· 5—Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
· 6—Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (spelling and punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and create, critique, and discuss print and nonprint texts.
· 8—Students use a variety of technological and information resources (libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.
· 11—Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.
· 13—Students use basic research techniques with teacher guidance.

Rationale for Technology

Conducting interviews and then analyzing one’s data is an excellent way for students to learn to gather information and pull it together into a report that correctly communicates this data. The EXCEL spreadsheet helps them organize the data in a logical manner and the graphs that are produced helps the students visualize the results. They should be able to use the program to determine if their data is correct and if results make sense.
EXCEL also allows them to check their math computations for accuracy which is great reinforcement.

Description of Lesson Implementation

The “reporters” are given Interview sheets that are used to question their fellow classmates on a given topic. The information is entered into the Excel program. Students must understand how to enter formulas and how to arrange data so that the answers are relevant to their question. Students manually calculate the averages and then use Excel to check their answers. Charts are produced that visualize the results. A news article is written concerning this analytical interview and the charts are entered alongside the article in the newspaper.

Assessment

Again, I am finding this lesson plan extremely useful across the curriculum. Students work on writing skills with their article, technology skills using Excel, math skills calculating the averages et al, and thinking skills when they determine whether their spreadsheet conveys the data correctly.

Other Places to Use this Solution

EXCELcan be used in every subject area and inside and outside of the classroom. It is a great tool for organizing data. The charts provide a quick study of data that can be helpful in the classroom, PTA, home budgets, work presentations—anywhere that a lot of data needs to be synthesized.

What I Learned and What I Would Improve on Next Time

I did learn to KISS. My first EXCEL project was based on an intermediate project in the EXCEL kit. Halfway through I realized that generating the formulas using EXCELwas beyond my immediate knowledge and I had to start over with a simpler project for my first try. This reinforced the need to keep my projects simple the first time I try this with students. What works manually mathematically may become frustrating for a student trying to integrate the technology and math skills together into a project. Becoming bogged down in a multilevel math formula defeats the lessons that can be learned by this project.

References

Excel spreadsheet
Excel Kit Interview Worksheets
Georgia QCCs

Bloom's Toxonomy

Knowledge: List the as many different parts of a newspaper as you can remember

Comprehension: Contrast the way an author writes a short story to the way that same story would be written as a news article.

Application: Write an article for a newspaper using the Inverted Pyramid Format

Analysis: Explain why you ordered the facts in your article the way that you did

Synthesis: Publish your article in the correct section of the paper

Evaluate: Consider the quote: "you can't believe everything you read in the paper". Having written an article, do you agree or disagree and why or why not?

Microsoft Publisher

Project Name

Henley’s Happenings—A Classroom Newsletter

Description of Learning Goals and Standards

The learning goals are multifaceted in this lesson. Working on a project from start to finish helps children process, organize and prioritize new information. Transforming students into reporters and editors causes them to become effective users of technology in order to publish their own class newspaper. Additionally, editing articles to be published incorporates critical thinking skills as well as reading and writing proficiency. The Standards that are met for this lesson are:
· 4—Students adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.
· 5—Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
· 6—Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (spelling and punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and create, critique, and discuss print and nonprint texts.
· 8—Students use a variety of technological and information resources (libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.
· 11—Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.


Rationale for Technology

Even though my lesson plan calls for the ReadWriteThink Printing Press publishing program, Microsoft Publisher works just as well for creating a newspaper for a class and would cut down on incremental costs of buying that program. I think the ReadWriteThink Printing Press may actually have a newspaper format for the project but this may not be worth the extra cost if the school keeps Publisher on their network. This technology is great for students to learn to work on a project from beginning to end. It helps with organization skills, editing proficiency, working as a team to put together a newsletter. The technology provides a fun way for students to learn reporting skills and the fact that their work will be shown in a professional manner using Publisher should make them want to work hard on their articles and the actual layout to produce a high quality final product. It is great to have a computer program that allows the students to take their hard work and format it into a professional looking product.

Description of Lesson Implementation

This plan follows Days 8 & 9 of the Lesson Plan I- Creating a Newspaper-where the students take the articles that they have written and edit and format them for a newspaper. They will layout the articles, insert pictures, make sure their headlines grab a reader’s attention and that their articles adhere to the reporting lessons that were learned in previous weeks.
This newsletter would become a monthly project in the classroom. Students would rotate staff positions to increase their proficiency in different types of news reporting. Students would learn to take other articles and reports that they have written and summarize them for a news report. Students would take turns being on the publishing staff that actually formats the articles for the paper. Rotation of positions should allow all students to understand the entire process of news reporting. It also allows the newspaper format to vary from month to month based on the creativity of the staff.

Assessment

Microsoft Publisher is a great computer program for school and is a very powerful tool for language arts as well as other subjects. Students should take pride in having a polished finished product and should want to work hard to make sure their published product (that will be seen by other students and classes) is their best work. It should help them improve their editing and vocabulary skills. The word processing portion makes it so much easier to do this. Researching articles on a monthly basis should increase their research skills. Using the computer program Publisher helps hone their technological abilities while having fun on the computer.
While I would use a rubric to grade individual articles, I think peer pressure to produce the best newspaper would be enough feedback for the students. The actual formatting of the paper should be a fun activity and not one to be graded. Sometimes the less academic students can shine in this area and knowing that they are not going to be graded on this part of the project could allow them to be more creative. If the finished product fell off in quality, I of course, would institute some sort of evaluation system. I would probably individually meet with the staff and talk about how they could improve their product. I would still not want this part of the project to be graded--some things need to exist for a student's own personal satisfaction and not for comparison purposes.

Other Places to Use this Solution

Publisher can be used across the curriculum as students could use reports they wrote in other subjects such as science or history and summarize them for the newsletter. It, of course, could also be used as a teacher tool to send newsletters to parents. It can be used as a web page so that parents can get weekly updates on what is happening in the class. The uses for this program are endless.

What I Learned and What I Would Improve Next
Time

I learned that Publisher is a very easy computer program to use. While formatting my “newspaper”, I realized that this is a very powerful tool for teaching Language Arts and for keeping students interested in writing.
I did have some problem with the columns and I would have to use this a lot before I had students format their own layout. A template is the best way to go at first.
I never could get a caption inserted next to a picture but other people were also having the same problem. I need to experiment with that part further. I think this is a great program that should be on every school’s network.

References/Resources Used

Microsoft Publisher computer program

http://www.msn.com--online/ news service

Various photos found on internet