This class has been so good! I have thoroughly enjoyed all the exposure to different Web 2.0 tools that I have not used and I think I have used a lot of them!  I have particularly enjoyed my new found love of Twitter and what it brings me professionally.  Sometimes I am not sure that I can keep up with it all! One of my favorite educators that I have found and followed through twitter is Cult of Pedagogy.  I have been so inspired to try some activities in my classroom that don’t even require technology. One idea of hers is Chat Stations that are just about the students talking.  Some of the Web 2.0 tools that were peers contributed to our class that I had never heard of were Edpuzzle, Flipgrid, or even Seesaw and I want to check them out.  They all three seem like tools that so many people from our class have had success with.  Unfortunately, our school district does not allow any of them to be on our school ipads that are issued to our students. Basically, we cannot use any apps that allow students to make their own accounts because of that I have not explored them much at all.

When determining if I am going to use a tool, first and for most I look at the terms of service, look for alignment with COPPA and then I use the search feature to see if there is an age restriction.  If there are no restrictions then I move forward with exploring it more.   The most important part of a tool that I look for is my students’ ability to engage and create. I find huge value in students creating with technology. I want them to not just be consumers, but also producers. Also, as I have been on this journey, I have really kinda made a bit of turn in what I do in technology.  I think at one time I would just try anything and everything just to try without the learning standard being at the forefront.  I try and be careful now that I am not using technology just to use it, but that it is serving a greater good and purpose of enhancing the learning goal.  As mentioned in one of the comments made, I want my students to use a few tools well. That way the tools are seamless in lessons. There shouldn’t be so many used that are new and different that it bogs down the goal of learning.

Two of my big ideas in teaching is collaboration and creation. Web 2.0 tools allow for both of those and I believe are a valuable part of what we need to be teaching our students as digital, 21^stcentury learners.

I was hoping that the results would be different professionally, but it was still very similar. (Sadly, there is still the very disturbing amount of personal information that can be found about me) There is not much that comes up pertaining to me when I search my name, even with quotes. There is apparently a pretty notable person who worked for Microsoft—and apparently now works at Apple—with my name and a pretty well-known athletic biker in Europe that seem to get most of the “Laura Massey” searches without my helper words with them.  One change that did occur is my twitter page came up sooner. I can assume that it is because the page has been more active these past few weeks than in the had been in the 6 years of its previous existence.  By far the most results that lead to me in some way or form is when I put my name in quotes and add the name of my school, Lakeland.  I tried TAMUC and nothing. I tried educational technology and nothing.  I tried my name with the new places that we used like Hootsuite, Protopage, and Diigo and I still got nothing.

 

I am encouraged, professionally, that my Twitter comes up sooner.  I feel like I am doing something right to increase that part of my digital footprint. I do think personal information should be as limited as possible and will continue to strive for that. Hopeful,ly I can continue to build the professional party of my footprint.

 

We all know that technology constantly changing and evolving and there is a need for a plan to keep up with it the best we can. We have been tasked to develop a plan for this exact thing.   We have been offered several tools that will help with this.

The plan:

*Twitter (in conjunction with Hootsuite)

* Use our District

*Follow these sites on protopage

****First, I have found a love and respect for twitter and all that it has to offer.  These last few weeks of simply following some of our school technologists have shown me several things. She has added post about Keynote (which I love, and am thankful for more ideas on how to use it), google classroom (ditto from before), and something called PDF candy, which I am gonna check out.

She also added this jewel which needs to be remembered!

The following, ideas, and possibilities for collaboration are large with twitter and I plan to continue to pursue them.

****Our school district offers many opportunities to keep up. As I mentioned before, we have several instructional technology facilitators in our school district. The one I mentioned above at least twice a month and you can request her to come even more often.  She and her colleagues have amazing google sites with lots of info.  The facilitators also plan amazing professional developments in the summer.  When we can look at our summer catalog it is always the first thing I look at.

****I am building a professional protopage with some people/organization I want to follow. One the places to follow on protopage is TCEA (Texas Computer Education Association)—(and possibly, maybe, probably join) I also respect ControlAltAChieve and the ideas they give for using technology.  They are on the protopage as well.  And what about educationaltechnoloyg.net? Follow it! Join it (IT’S FREE)

Having a plan is the first step. Executing the next. Thankfully I love this stuff and enjoying trying to keep up with it.

Click image below for my site

I will admit when this was assigned I wasn’t really looking forward to it.  First, I was a bit confused on how to get started. (It might have been helpful for me to more attentive to the ins and out that Diigo offered us at the beginning after making the account, but I honestly assumed since I feel fairly competent with technology that I could handle this with ease.) Well, that is not how it worked out at the beginning and I had to seek out further directions on us it effectively.

Once I figured out at least the basics of how to manage the page, I liked the idea. I think the idea of being about to bookmark online and have one place that I could reach from any device sounds intriguing and time-saving. On a side note, I have bookmarked officially on a MacBook a bit, but that was only for that one device and I did not keep up with it.  I have also sloppily bookmarked on other devices by just dragging a website to a home screen. This was majorly ineffective because all it was clutter up the home screen with numerous icons and then I would just delete them or drag them all to a folder to look through later—and sadly later, just never came or comes.

When Professor Bigenho gave the “gifts” again it took me a little time to understand the gifts and how I could “receive them.” I then discovered the little bitty disk icon where I could save it to my library.  When I figured it out, I was like “gimme, gimme, gimme” and I think I took too many gifts and had to spend some time organizing it.  I made a couple of my own bookmarks—one for Keynote, financial literacy, PBLs, and Coppa in response to an assignment from this class and assignments from another class. Once I started creating the bookmarks by adding the tags, the ease and usefulness of the site showed itself.  I was able to share a few with our class, ETEC 527. The items I choose to share correlated with the class project.

I do know that I need to continue to work on the organization of it.  Hopefully, I will continue to see the value and use it.

I did just notice the request to join the education in Diigo was granted and there are a ton more places for me to explore here and files for me to save to my library.

Let the adventure continue……….

Aggregated pages was a term I had never heard before so I felt a bit hesitant about this assignment.  I viewed the two pages offered to us Netvibes, and protopage and simply because I liked the look of Netvibes better I thought that is was the direction I was going to head.  Well, I started to use it and it was confusing, I couldn’t really figure out to use it quickly, and plus it indicated that it would be a trial offer making me think that I would have to pay in the future.  So I quickly moved to protopage and after a few guess and checks, I found it very easy to use.  I was able to add the required parts and some additional widgets of my choice.  The only one that seemed a bit frustrating to add was the YouTube links and several classmates offered feedback on our discussion board to help with that. I will say at first I didn’t like it not having many options to personalize and how plain it seemed, but now I do. Too much business, too much cute font, etc can sometimes get in the way of the effectiveness of a tool.  One negative thing I can say about protopage is that if I have more than one page, I have to have more than one login. I would prefer to log in once and be able to access all of my pages, but that is really a very minor complaint.

Click the pic for a link to my ETEC527 protopage.

I can see the advantages of making a page like this with a home base for everything I might need for a number of things like something I am teaching, classes I am taking, or just for personal interest I like to keep up with.  I can certainly see using resources like this with my students as a place for classroom information, a way to give students a place for items to practice or study, or a place that has different sites that are valuable for research.  After viewing the example given to us of a 4th-grade teacher, I made one for my students that includes what we are studying right now in math. My hope is that I will continue to add different tabs to it to include what we are studying.

Click below to link to one I started for my classroom.

I enjoy learning about resources in class that I can literally implement immediately with ease and this is one that I can use quickly with my students and they have access to it, unlike the previous two things we have put together, twitter and youtube.

 

 

You can check my channel out here!

Do you think I have a chance at being a famous one?  I mean when you ask kiddos what they want to be they say a YouTuber and I thought those kids are nuts.  That doesn’t make any money, but recently I found out it does and for some, it is very, very profitable. My experience with YouTube is very limited.  I use it to listen to music when I am doing work on my computer, I have rented movies through it to show at school, and have found quick videos to show my students when teaching a subject. This week I discovered making list and subscribing to some educator/helpful teaching tools that could come in handy.  I made a list that included technology in the classroom, 5th-grade math, 5th-grade science, twitter, PBL Web 2.0, and Web 2.0 Tools. The latter playlist included many that recommended from classmate post of tools I want to investigate further like flipgrid (very popular recommendation) adobe spark, and emaze along with others. I am looking forward to exploring all of them. I also started following mathantics, Matthew Anderson (a Texas 5th grade math teacher, and mtlnQuire.com (5th-grade TEKS math teaching videos). I think these will all help me out in the classroom.

There are some limitations for me. Our students are not allowed to access youtube.  In order for students to view, it will either have to be whole class, I will have to use screencastomitic to record it for them.  (I am not even sure that this is something I should be doing anyway–to be honest) I understand why it is blocked. Even with firewalls, videos get past students. There is a concern with advertisements that are automated and then the suggested videos often don’t match what you would think of would be on the way.

I am continuing to enjoy using twitter combined with HootSuite.  Classmates have posted some people that I now follow and am gleaming ideas off of like Mark Anderson and James McCrary.  I have connected with some teachers in our school to see the great things going on throughout our campus as well as having been more connected to our district.  I have done my goal of tweeting at least two times and have had people who like my post from the school district that I have no idea who they are.  The digital networking that goes on through twitter is valuable.

Looking forward to what is coming next.

I have reconnected with twitter, kicking and screamer. I started this week annoyed with the idea of using it.  My background in Twitter is very limited. I joined a few years ago when twitter was a big initiative in our district. We were encouraged to tweet and use hashtags with locations and such and I played with it some.  I was semi active for a bit, but it was always kinda a headache. I would ask a teammate for help remember the hashtags and ask how to tag whoever with it. It really just seemed like too much work.  The ease wasn’t there for me and I got away from it.  When I used it, it was intentional and just too much work for me.

As an elementary teacher, my students cannot have accounts as it is against the terms of service since they under 13.  So technically there is no way I can use it with them.

The benefits that I see, and saw this week, is professionally.  I can get linked to many resources by following educators I admire, like Ron Clark, Jennifer Serravallo and fellow district employee Nancy Benton. I can also follow organization or ideas that enhance education like flipped learning, nearpod, and district connection math in LISD, LISD science, digital learning is LISD.

Additionally, I can also promote myself more as an educator and what I am able to accomplish in my specific classroom.  As discussed with the Vanity Search, my digital footprint, especially professional is extremely limited. I think pursuing a masters in educational technology leadership, that this should be goal of mine.

This week I was able to reconnect with Twitter, but in a much for positive way.  Although it was assignment, it was assignment I enjoyed. I engaged with Twitter is ease and without it feeling like a chore. I was able to look back at post from the past in my classroom with a smile.  In particular I loved the Hootsuite and the organization of it.  It makes Twitter not look so confusing.  I liked that I was able to put Twitter into categories for easier viewing for me.

I am looking forward to using it more with goals of tweeting professionally at least twice a week and gleaming ideas from other for best practices in my classroom.

 

 

For this post I chose to focus on Content Objects because I think right now where I am as a math and science teacher, I am wanting to look at tools that can be used with students in my classroom right now to help with content. I am always looking for ways to engage and motivate my students in content that might be trying and difficult while trying to find ways they may choose to study and review these items on their own.

Tool Number App Pretty Random

While practicing long division with my students, I was struggling coming up with problems off the top of my head.  So I looked for a random number generator app and found this app Pretty Random. I like this app because as the operator, I was able to set simple parameters on it.  The one that  I used with the my students and then was able to have the students use during independent work/station time is a minimum number of 0 and a maximum number of 9, specifically the digits. Students push the randomize button or can even shake the device to make the next number appear.  It will even repeat digits as well. Using this app I was able to come up with different problems without me having to think about them and thus the students had different computation problems. I feel like this something I could also easily use with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division (if the students are ready for remainders.)  When we get to fractions this tools will be helpful as well. This tool affords the students to independently make up problems for them to calculate. Students do not have to use paper that the teacher has had to copy.  Since a piece of technology is added to the process, for whatever reason it motivates the students.  They seem to like the unknown of knowing what problem they are going to solve.  This tool can be used in multiple grade levels covering many computation standards.  I like this is simple to teach any student and I as the teacher doesn’t have to make up the problems.

Tool Number 2 Quizizz

 

Quizizz is a game based program where students compete with each other.  Teachers can either choose from a large bank of questions (or even edit ones that are already on there) or can create their own.  I will caution that it is best to check through the questions for mistakes if you are choosing one that is already created because there are often mistakes. Students answer questions at their own pace, but there are many optional features. For example, students can earn more points for answer quicker or a teacher can turn that feature off.  Questions AND/OR answer choices can be shuffled to assure students are doing their own work. There are other teacher options as well.  There are some options that the students really enjoy. At the end of the question there an option to have memes and music can be turned on as well.  These are valuable things that make it “fun” for the students while they are review skills. In conclusion, this is a fun way for formative assessments and bonus fun for the kids.

You can read the review of this app from Common Sense Media on the link below.

Common Sense Media Review of Quizizz

 

Tool Number 3 Shadow Puppet

Shadow Puppet was introduced to us this last summer through our math curriculum and so I decided it was time to give it a try.  With this app, students take pictures with their device and then can add them a roll of photos. Then students are able to record their voice and say something.  In our class, we have been struggling through long division, so I had a technology part with Shadow Puppet. The students worked literally step by step through a problem. Students were given this site as a resource:

https://www.mathsisfun.com/long_division.html 

This walks students through a long division computation question step by step. This helped the students not skip a step in the shadow puppet video.  The students worked with a partner, did a problem, took a picture of each step and then added it a shadow puppet.  The hope was this would reinforce long division and help some students understand who were having difficulty.  I can see this app being useful across the curriculum.

Common Sense Media Review of Shadow Puppets

 

TPACK Model for Shadow Puppet

TPACK for effective technology integration should always be considered when deciding it use technology in the classroom. First, Content should be considered–what is being taught. Shadow Puppet appears to be a tool that would allow for many different grade levels and many different topics to be effectively reinforced using this tool. It is very open ended and as long as a teacher know the standard being taught and the grade level expectation, Shadow Puppet can be used for students to share knowledge.  Next, Pedagogical Knowledge should be thought about–the teacher’s knowledge of how the students are going to learn.  I believe when students are able to work together and collaborate, amazing things can happen in the classroom. I also think when students are given the chance to design and create with technology students are motivated to do more and thus learn more.  Lastly, educators should consider the technology knowledge–how the program/device is used.  Shadow Puppet needs to be done on an Ipad or possibly a smart phone.  It is actually very user-friendly. Students take pictures with their device and then upload them to the app. After the pictures are uploaded, students simply push the record button and the microphone picks up their voice.  When completed the saving to the roll is standard and then it can be shared however the teacher chooses.

Could the Tools Accomplish the Same Goal

I do believe that each tool has unique attributes.  Pretty Random and Shadow Puppets could be used together.  Students could create a computation problem using Pretty Random and take a picture of each step and then explain the computation using Shadow Puppet.  Then Quizizz can be used to review that computation. I do think overall, each tool is unique with different affordances.

 

 

 

I was excited to the part of our class, because I thinks students being able to create is one of the keys in showing their learning.  I have used several different apps in the past to create on the ipads like Bookabi, Aurasma, Chatterpix, Educreations, Haiku Deck, ect. Unfortunately these are now no longer allowed for us to use as apps. The district says the most common reason they are not approved is because:

*App is not free

*Terms of Service do not allow for student under 13

*App has features that are not safe like in-app texting

*Does not align with learning standards and district curriculum.

 

I looked at the charts provided, but because of the limitations of our devices I stuck with apps that are actually approved for us to use. Then I searched our approved list for any others that might be creativity tools/apps as well.

 

As I explored these tools I did consider the TPACK model, especially focus on the technology being used and knowledge needed, the pedagogical knowledge (what the teacher must know), and the content knowledge.  Of course I also, explored what the tools could do to truly enhance my students education and if it would be appropriate for my students in the 5th grade.

 

The first tool I looked at is standard on all of our ipads and that is iMovie. I do think that iMovie can be intimidating at first, at least it was for me, but I found that students can figure it out quickly.  I movies allows for students to to create videos or pictures pieced together in the form of a movie. Students can be creative and use green screen with imovie to do a report over something they learning, or even create like a newscast. Students can create books reports or do One thing I have done in the past in a preposition video where students will take a stuffed animal and take pictures of it in different places. The students would then add the picture along with a sentence using the preposition in an iMovie presentation.

I also looked at PuppetPals2. This app allows students to make short videos Students will need to have access the microphone to add their voices and the camera if they are putting an image of themself in it .  Students can either use selected characters or they even use a photo of themselves. (I think students will enjoy this part). Students can choose a setting and music to go in the background (or even no music). Students could do a biography report with this from that person’s point of view with them “talking.” They could just insert a picture of the person. In math students could explain how they solved a problem or explain how to do a specific skill.  Student could also explain a science investigation and what theyy learned using the characters in Puppet Pals.

One last one I looked at was Toontastic.Toontastic begins by students 3 options; short story, classic story, or science report. I began by looking at science report since I do teach science.  Students select a setting (or can draw their own), characters (or can draw their own). Then the students go through 5 steps of an experiment. I think students would enjoy being creative and using this tool to share their information from the investigation. I think this allows students to be creative in different ways. If some are confident in their drawing they can draw. If some students are confident in their verbal skills, they can be showcase that.  Also, students could record stories in Toontastic as well as poems. Students could tell about an historic event using this app.

 

**One thing I want to note will all three of these (iMovie, Toontastic, and PutterPals, there is a component where students are need to use the microphone.  The one drawback to many students using these, is that a classroom needs to be very quiet in order to not pick up the background noises. Another option would be to have students have a quiet place option of the building they could go to.**

 

In the end, I believe devices should be used more for outputting than inputting. Allowing students to create will really show what our students know. Creativity tools also can allow for collaboration with other students