Millennial survey

I was very happy to find out that my Millennial age was 82. I think in terms of my own teaching and my students that means that I will never be afraid to try new things or use new technology. I often find that I am never afraid to try to "figure something out" when it comes to new technology. I had my mom take the quiz because I knew that none of the questions really applied to my Kindergartners and her score was 23.

Frand's 10 Characteristics:
1) Computer's Aren't Technology: I am in. I use the internet, my cell phone, anything that is a MAC product. I am always using anything technology based.
2) Internet is better than TV: I think I am in on this one especally since we use the internet to get our TV. We have not had cable at my house in about two years and use netflix and hulu plus for all our TV.
3) Realty is no longer Real:  I am totally in on this. You never believe anything you read on the internet. It is hard to believe anything you read and with youtube is it often hard to believe things you see.
4) Doing Rather Than Knowing: I think I am in on this one. I often want to just know or figure out something I don't need to learn it I just want to do it.
5) Nintendo over Logic: I am so in on this one. I am never afraid to mess around with something and try to figure out what it can do. I love discovering what my iphone can really do.
6) Multitasking way of life: I am so in on this one. I live my life pluged into the internet, listening to music, and studying all at the same time.
7) Typing rather than Handwriting: I am in on this one. I TYPE EVERYTHING!! I took one typing class in middle school and once I started texting and emailing I got really fast.
8) Staying Connected: I am in. I never turn my phone off unless I am on an airplane and I will hear facebook or a text in the middle of the night and feel the need to check it.
9) Zero Tolerance for Delays: I am in. I am very quick to refresh a page on the internet or restart my phone if it is too slow.
10) Consumer/Creator Blurring: I am in. I have burned my fair share of cds and copied and pasted images from the internet.

I think people need to move to a mind set that times are changing. We are only going to become a more technology driven society not less. I think this really opened my eyes that I am right where I should be. I think in terms of the technology standards this is great professional development.

Voki

This was a very cool assignment. I really enjoyed how easy it was just add a little text and my little avatar girl did the rest. I started by just creating a simple introduction in word. I remembered that when I was trying to embed something before that after I coped the code for the avatar all I had to do was click over to "HTML" paste my code and she would be in my blog!

I really think this lesson meets the standards for design and develop digital age learning experiences. I think this would be great for many of the topics we learn about in Kindergarten. It would be great to use for the presidents unit. The avatar could give facts and the students could hold up pictures of Lincoln or Washington depending on the facts given.

Word Clouds

I LOVE Wordle's!!!! I created a bunch to frame as decorations at my rehearsal dinner for my wedding and they were a hit!! I have never used them in my classroom before but I know a lot of teachers do for spelling words. The standards have moved from being teacher centered to being more student centered. The current standards are more focused on giving students the opportunities to grow in this growing digtal age. I like how the wording has changed from just being "Technology" to talking about the "Digital-Age".

The words that appeared the most in the 2008 standards were: learning, digital-age, design, and model. That is why they are the larger in my wordle for the 2008 standards.

The words that appeared the most in the 2000 standards were technology, assessment, and experiences. Check out my wordle!!!

I was thinking about how I could use this in my own classroom. I would love to use this for my holiday unit. Students could work in groups create wordles about the differnt holidays that we learn about in december!

I think if I was to use wordles in my own classroom it would be a great way of expressing standard 1. This site is all about letting students get creative. I am really excited to try this activity out in December in my own classroom. 

Carpe Diem

This was a very interesting webinar. I often wish our school used more technology in the classrooms. I would love for our students to be able to use ipads or itouches. I remember a few years ago when my brother was in elementary school his school was a part of a pilot program for the i pod touch in classrooms. The Carpe Diem school seemed a little extreme. I understand test scores are going up but for one half of the day to be in front of the computer screen I agree with the presenter that they are loosing those critical thinking skills. I think I would be very happy to work in a school like St. Marys. I love the idea of blending the technology with the hands of learning. I don't think I could work in the Carpe Diem school it seems boring to me. The only example of the Carpe Diem model that I can think of that we use in our own school is when the students use the SME math program during the computer lab time to run math drills. I wish we had more technology in our school to do more of the St. Marys model but I plan a lot of lessons using our Promethean board. The other day I taught a lesson about ordinal numbers where as a class the kids took turns playing games on the board to practice these skills. If I had the power I would push our school to invest in class sets of ipads. There is such cool stuff I see about ipads in the classroom on pinterest that I would love to try out. I could see my self very smoothly transitioning into a blend of these two models. I use the Promethean board much more than most teachers at my school and I would love to expose my kids to more.

Excel 2

I have to admit when I first read this assignment I had no idea what it all meant. Luckily, my husband has done all of this before when he was in grad school so he was able to help me understand what I was looking for. I was able to follow the Jing no problem but once it came to interpreting my results I was lost. I think I finally get it.
Due to the fact that my P(T<=t) one-tail is 1.60 that is greater than .05 that means that I do not reject the null so that means that gender is not a factor in 4th grade reading scores.

If I had to look at something for my own class the research question I would like to look at is: does age of kindergarten students effect reading scores? I would love to see if a student who enters kindergarten already having a few months as a five year old score better on their PALS test than a student who turns 5 during the first month of school. My groups would be students that enter kindergarten already having turned 5 and students who turn 5 during the month of September. My independent variable would be student age. My dependent variable would be PALS scores.

Hypothesis:
H0: There is a difference in students PALS scores between students who enter kindergarten at 5 and students that turn 5 during the month of September.

H1: There is no difference. (null hypothesis)

This assignment if applied to my own classroom could really help me with my professional development as a teacher. The idea of really looking into the performance of my students could help in my teaching.

Excel 1

Once I was able to actually open excel on our home computer this assgignment went pretty smoothly. Our computer has been a little wonky ever since our assignment where we were suposed to download photostory. My husband finally figured it out and I was off and running. The jing videos were extreamly helpful and once I was able to export the data to excel it was really easy to compute the descriptive stats:

It was also a breeze to sort the scores in ascending order:

 

If I am reading this right Virginia is ranked 9th. We are above average. I created a scatter plot and I think I was able to find Virginia. I think Virgina is doing very well.

I think if I was still teaching the upper grades I would use this activity as a way to "develop digital age learning experiences". I think it would be great for my 5th graders to do an activity like this in our school computer lab or on the laptops. I was a little unsure working though all of the steps but the jing videos were a great idea. I was able to pause and go between excel and the video to go step by step. 

Google Site

Check Out My Site!

I feel very silly that I am posting this a day late. I had this ready on Monday but I have been fighting with posting from Google Docs. I finally posted about it on the discussion board yesterday and found out that I was not doing anything wrong all I had to do was hit save. Now I have a lovely website with both my resume and my rubric about my writer's workshop project. I have also included our Kindergarten syllabi. It was fun to learn about how to create a website but I don't think I would use a website like this in real life. Though the school we have our own homepages that we can add pages to. I think most parents are used to going to the school homepage to get information about me. Once I discovered all I had to do was hit save to get the Google Document to appear adding pages were really easy to do. I picked the template that I did because let's face it I am stuck in Kindergarten land and that template screams Kindergarten.

In terms of our technology standards having a website can be a way to promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility. It is a good way to show students how to be responsible on the Internet. You could also create an assignment with older students to have them create their own website. I also think this assignment in general is a way for teachers to grow professionally.