Blog 7

From using twitter these past weeks, I have come to discover just how helpful it is for educators. I followed various educators and education companies so my feed is always full! I am constantly becoming exposed to different tips, tricks, and facts regarding the education world. The benefits I've come across so far involve the simplicity of twitter. Its so easy to get information. Its also not that much of a time commitment. Its easy to just hop on twitter whenever you have some down time and become connected to whats going on online. The one struggle I have come across myself is that if you're always on twitter, theres not as much new stuff going on all the time. Therefore you aren't learning as much if you're obsessively using twitter.

From the webpage assignment, I got to learn all about Weebly! Before this assignment, I had never used this website before. I think its really good that I now know how to make my own Google calendar and display it on my website. Its so cool that whenever I update  the calendar, the calendar shown on my website is updated instantly! Overall I like Weebly for how easy the platform is to figure out. But going along with that simplicity, its hard to personalize the site as much as I would want to just because of the pretty strict layout they allow your websites to follow. Honestly, with my personal website, I'm satisfied and wouldn't change a lot if I were to do this project again. I think every part of this assignment is helpful for my future career because I need to be able to know how to make a website for nearly any teaching position!  Here's a direct link to my website. http://msbriannamaphis.weebly.com

With Diigo, I'm able to use webpages and share information in ways that I honestly didn't even know was possible. I think being able to not only bookmark specific pages but actually highlight and write notes directly on the page is such a helpful feature. This tool is so helpful for my relations with my peers simply because its such a simple way to get to share information. Its also so cool to be able to see bookmarked sites of others as well and get to see the kinds of tools your fellow teachers are using. Diigo is just a representation of collaboration at its finest.

ILP "Design" - Prezi

Throughout my time as a student, I have often heard about the online tool "Prezi" for making visually pleasing and informative presentations. I recall seeing my classmates make these back in high school. But I have never taken it upon myself to actually try out this website for myself. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to try out this tool and also show off my design skills a little bit!

Prezi has a very simple user interface. But although it is so simple, the finished product ends up still looking so professional and well put together. The presentation is split up into the title, topics, and subtopics. This simple set up helps keep things organized and helps the Prezi creator think of the main points they need to go over in their presentation and make sure they stay on topic. The ability to add pictures and videos in the presentation itself is another feature that lets the presentation creator get in every bit of information they could possibly want to put in a presentation. And the best part of Prezi? You can make an account for free! There's also a paid version with various premium features but all the basic tools you need to create and share a presentation are available with the free version.

Here's my own Prezi I made while trying out all the features. It's on how to be green!

https://prezi.com/view/EOuKUXaRsaeZChVzb50K/

Overall, I have simply just discovered a new online service I am going to find to be so helpful when I have my own classroom and students to teach!

Group Activity C.R.A.P.

GROUP ACTIVITY C.R.A.P.

Mrs. Beckham's science class

Contrast- It's pretty easy to read due to the white background and dark words. She put words over pictures but you were still able to read what she's saying. All of the titles are bold making it darker and more visible . 

Repetition- The fonts are repeated. On the homepage there wasn't that much repetition. There was a lot of random placement. Not really organized. 

Alignment- The three subtitles are aligned perfectly. As well as the pictures. The titles and subtitles are centered neatly. 

Proximity- Some of the media are far apart. There's a lot of extra space throughout the webpage. The three subtitles are grouped together. 

Via: http://mrsbeckhamscience.weebly.com/

Teacher Productivity Tools

Today, throughout my individual efforts, I looked up different teacher productivity tools. Even just from Googling, I found different posts that ranked different productivity tools. This made it easy to see what other people think of different tools, without having to try them all for myself! I found out that there are so many different programs our there for educators. Some things I never would have even thought would exist to help teachers, do in fact exist!

From viewing annotations and bookmarks of others, I got to find even more services that I hadn't discovered on my own. That is the beauty of collaboration on websites like Diigo. It was nice to be  able to go onto websites that my classmates posted and go directly to their annotations and highlights to be able to see what was found to be most important. I got to discover sites like Freshgrade.com, a website to help teachers grade and keep track of grades.

Blog 6

From looking around the public pages of school websites, I learned a bit about the kind of information available. Specifically, I searched Lake Whitney Elementary School's website. This K-5 school is located in Winter Garden, Florida. Some upcoming events are listed to keep parents in the know. The different teachers and staff for the different grades are listed. Their emails and such can be found here! You can also find information on becoming a school volunteer here. Links to be able to find the lunch menus can be found too!

https://lakewhitneyes.ocps.net

I can see myself using technology to be more efficient and effective in all my responsibilities as a future teacher. I would want to use a classroom blog or something to help keep my student's parents in the know, without wasting paper! Online grade recording services and programs would help me share my student's grades with their parents and the school easily. As the podcast brought up, Microsoft Office applications are good for making documents, presentations and more that are going to be shared with many different students/parents. Being able to save whatever you make for use different years is super helpful and saves lots of time as well. Another way to save lots of time is using a web application like Diigo to bookmark sites for easy finding later. Diigo also lets you share sites with your fellow teachers as well!

At the technology sandbox, I discovered so many technologies that I didn't know were even in existence for classroom use! My personal favorite technology I discovered was the SmartBoard that could be written on with dry erase markers and whatever the teacher writes would show up in live time on students smart phones. Students were also able to take screenshots whenever of what the teacher was writing! This is useful for students with teachers that write too fast for them to keep up with and also lets to students focus on learning rather than frantically writing down notes. I also think the giant touch screen tv's that can be turned flat would be very useful in a classroom too. Multiple students can use one at a time offering lots of potential for collaboration and friendly competition among students!

Education and Web 2.0

This week, I learned about how useful tools like Diigo can be for both educators and students alike. The amount of collaboration and interactivity of Diigo is so handy. Web 2.0 sites are truly what makes educational technology what they are. Being able to share useful resources and websites with different groups is so helpful! Web 2.0 opens up a whole new world for everyone and the education community specifically!

Just tweeting!

Have you been keeping up to date on my twitter posts? See what I think about my classmates blog posts here! https://twitter.com/briannafsued/status/917454969221079045