Project #8: Book Trailer

The Rainbow Fish

C4K Summary for September

C4K #1

Sela
Sela's post was entitled Sports I Enjoy Playing and it was a presentation she made about all of the athletics she likes. Her favorites were NFL football and Rugby. She explained what each one was and certain details about both. Her favorite team for NFL football is the Pittsburgh Steelers and her favorite Rugby team is the Waikato Chiefs. Since I am unfamiliar about Rugby I asked her a question about the sport.

C4K #2

India
India's post was about the singer Chris Brown and his new album that was coming out. Since I am familiar with this artist it was easy for me to comment about the subject. It even got me interested so I went and bought the album and added it to my phone.  

C4K #3

Caleb
Caleb wrote about how his school had a no backpack rule. He did not agree with this decision and felt that his school could take other steps to ensure safety instead of having a no backpack rule. I commented and said how I understood his point and that I would have a hard time carrying all of my things without a backpack too. 

Blog Post 6

Project Based Learning: Part 1 and Part 2

In the videos concerning Public Based Learning Anthony Capp spoke about how he had his class write letters to send to Congressmen. This is just one example of how we can use project based learning. The students voted and decided to send off only a certain number of letters and when they got responses back they were super excited. Anthony Capp seems to really care about his students and being a great educator. He and Dr. Strange gave me many ideas that I can incorporate into my classroom one day, and the idea of PBL will definitely be one of them.

iCurio

I had never heard of iCurio but I really liked the things it allowed you to do. It opens the door for children to be able to go and search for factual information that they can learn from. Anthony talked about how it has been a transition for him to start using technology such as drives and folders to store things. iCurio can help you store and organize your things and keep them very accessible for you.

 Discovery Education

This tool gives students a visual component to the text they are studying. It not only helps keep them engaged, but it helps them retain information as well. I feel like this could be a great resource for teachers to use in the classroom. Anthony commented on how he is not an expert on all things and he is constantly learning new things along with his students. Discovery Education can be used to bring experts into the classroom for the students.

The Anthony - Strange list of Tips for Teachers Part 1

Dr. Strange and Anthony Capp teamed up in this video to give us some tips for when we are educators. A few things they talked about really stood out to me. As Dr. Strange is always telling us, it is important that we as educators want to learn ourselves. This is going to be a huge part of our job one day. How can we expect our students to learn new things if we ourselves do not like doing the same thing? Also, it is important that we are flexible and creative. Sometimes things just do not work out the way we planned. We need to be able to overcome this obstacle and still make sure our students are getting what we need them to learn. Finally I really feel that keeping our students engaged during class time is extremely important. There are ways that teachers can make things interesting and more appealing to our students. Our children need to stay together, learning, not leaving anyone behind.

Don't Teach Tech - Use It

Anthony Capp talks about the importance of technology and how we should not teach it, but instead allow the students to use it and learn from it. Students years younger than me are easily picking up on new programs and learning all the ways it works. They are learning by physical use of the technologies instead of someone giving them step by step instructions.

Project 3: Presentation PBL

Project Based Learning

Project 7: My Sentence/My Passion

My Sentence

My Passion

Blog Post 5: Part 1

PLNs, What Are They?
Before using the resources Dr. Strange gave me, and researching it on my own, I would have had no idea what a PLN was. PLN stands for Personal Learning Network and it is the people and tools that you consult about whatever it is you are interested in. I found Karl Fisch’s My Personal Learning Network in Action very helpful. Here Fisch writes about how using his PLN helped him have more understanding on a topic. The way he organized his work showed me that being apart of a PLN could really benefit me. Dr. Strange talked about how PLNs are like a stream in his work Developing A Personal Learning Network. I think that is an interesting way to view this. These resources are collective and so many people are contributing to it, I have a wealth of knowledge at my fingertips. I think we should all take advantage of this, and even contribute also. Since I have dedicated myself to being a life time learner, I will have my own ideas and knowledge to put out there for others use to further their education.

Creating My PLN
When I begin creating my own PLN there will be lots of people I can connect with in the education world. Since I've been working in schools, I will be adding the teachers I've met to my PLN. I share interests with them and I know their ideas and information could really help me when I begin my career. Also I think it would be a great idea to add Dr. Strange to this list. I've only been in EDM310 a little over a month and already I have learned so much. He really knows how to use technology to help teach people. Connecting with these people will lead me to others, and eventually my PLN will grow and I'll have a community of people that share the same ideas and goals as I do.

Project #15: Search Engines

Below are a list of 8 different search engines that I found and also tried out. I also provided the link to them so that you can also try them for your self.

1. WOW.com This search engine has a very simple look to it and is easy to use. When I typed something into the search bar it gave me many pages to go through and the options of web, images, or videos. It also included  related searches list on the right hand side. This was easy to use, but not very complex.

2. Aol.com While this search engine offered more options it was still a pretty simple set up. I typed in the same word I did in the other engines, and it gave me about the same amount of sites to go to. It did give me a small biological search results that some of the other engines did not.

3. Yahoo.com This engine gave me tons of settings, options, along with recent news. It would be a good search engine if you wanted to see how your search was connected in current events.

4. Ask.com  This site not only gave me many options and settings, but it was more set up for Q&A. It would be a place to search when you had a specific question you wanted answered.

5. WolframAlpha.com After using this engine to search different things I came to the conclusion that its results were very scientific. Instead of giving me different websites to visit, it gives me various information and facts for what I searched. This would be a good place to go if you were gathering facts and technical data about something.

6. Webcrawler.com This was very similar to some of the other search engines in the way that it was simple, easy to navigate, and set up with the same options as most search engines. It was lacking some of the short cuts that other more well known websites have.

7. Info.com This engine's results were a collaboration of other search engines results. If you wanted to be get a lot of different websites through different engines this would be the place to look.

8. Bing.com Bing is unique in the way it sets up its cover page. You can drag your mouse over parts of the pictures and get randoms trivia and facts from them. When searching on this engine I found that the results and information I got back was more in depth than other engines. It would be a good place to search for any kind of information you needed.