I just made a video!

 

I am very excited to have created my very first video. This is something that I have always wanted to do. I Think it turned out pretty good for my first try. I plan to show this video to my students to give them a little background information of their teacher. Also, I hope my students will see that I was once in their shoes and I can relate to some of the issues that they face.

Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda

As I am being introduced to more and more great web resources, I wish I had taken more time to play with the Web 2.0 tool Delicious. When introduced to this tool, I underestimated it's greatness. I plan to start using this bookmarking site from now on because my brain is becoming overloaded with useful websites. I am very pleased that I can sign up for an account using my yahoo account. Now I just have to try to remember what sites I have come across that are worth bookmarking. I shoulda started using Delicious a long time ago.

Interactive Spreadsheet- Geometry

This is an example of how an interactive spreadsheet may be used in a high school geometry class. The images are relevant to the questions. Since responses have to be one word, their are some limitations to the level of difficulty that the questions may be. Students receive immediate feedback, which is great. This would be great as a reveiw before a test because students can see what they have not yet grasped. On the other hand, I am not sure how the points come into play. Can the teacher electronically access the number of points each student recieves? I think I would prefer to use google docs than excel in to create interactive worksheets for my classes in the future.

Voicethread

I don't really like this Web 2.0 tool very much. It is not very user friendly. When I was trying to comment, it took forever to get things to show up without fading and looking the way I wanted it to. For perfectionists like myself, using the free hand pencil to draw things is a nightmare. I would not want to work out a math problem on there. Also, when the writing fades, it looks a little creepy. I see there are a lot of math examples that have already been created, but I don't think I will be using this tool.

Inspiration: Regular and Irregular Polygons

This graphic organizer would be great in a high school geometry class. There are notes attached to each type of polygon describing their properties. The graphic organizer includes images, which allows students to connect what they are learning about geometry to the real world!

Scavenger Hunt

Beautiful Butterflies!!!

Picnik

I love using Picnik! Even though I was familiar with this online tool prior to the presentation in class, I never used it until I took this course. I stumbled upon it while trying to edit photos that I uploaded to my google account, the same way I began using picasa. Since then, I have spent far too much time exploring all of the different things you can do to photos. I used picnik to edit all of the screen shots used in the prezi that Whitaker and I created as an artifact for our Web 2.0 project. Using picnik makes me happy; I just love to read the little things it says while the site loads, like "sprinkling dew" and "stealing picnik baskets." It also makes me happy that I do not have to create an account to use it. All the user names and passwords I have created for this class are really annoying! It wasn't so bad at first, but now the list is getting a little too long. Oh well.

Glogging???

Ok, so the glogster website says stop blogging and start glogging. I really don't see how the two are similar. Glogster seems like a great tool to display information, but it is probably not the best online tool to exchange information, as blogs do. 

Glogs are great for creatively displaying classroom rules, but I think it would be really great if they could be printed out as a poster that could be displayed in the classroom. I think it is most useful for students to use to create about me pages, book reports, or other projects that have traditionally been done using poster boards. Its a very green approach to creating posters. On the other hand, I don't like how they try to upsell their products. For example, while I was creating a glog and I tried to use a certain tool from the magnet tool and most of the tools listed are not available with the free account. This is disturbing. If students are using this, they do not need to be distracted by all the things they could do if they were to upgrade to a premium account.

Lesson Planning

It is obviously very important for teachers to plan their lessons and be prepared for class each day. I just find it more difficult to plan for high school math classes. Most people have had pretty much the same experiences with high school math classes. You usually go to class and take notes. It is more difficult for us math people to do really engaging things in our classrooms because we have not seen this first hand. I hope that the internship year will expose me to some really great teachings styles and activities that stray from the norm. I am also looking forward to learning more about the online resources available for high school math teachers. Working on the lesson plan, it was difficult for me to think of accommodations that could be made. I look forward to talking to teachers about the things that they do in their classes to accommodate the needs of students with disabilities. As this is my first semester taking any education classes, and I am taking four this semester, it is difficult for me to have answers to "what would you do in your classroom" questions. It is a little scary because I will be teaching very soon, and I have spent so much of my college career in classes that had nothing to do with education. I still have a strong passion for teaching and I look forward to learning ways to improve my lesson plans so that I can become the awesome, prepared teacher that I have always wanted to be.

Twitter

I enjoyed the informative presentation on twitter, but I doubt I will use twitter in my classroom. I am not a big fan of it. Just they whole concept behind twitter is kind of stupid to me. Why would I want to announce my every move on the internet. Some people might think that's a great idea, but I like my privacy and I am pretty secretive. Plus I'm not very popular obviously; since I joined a week ago, I have two followers. How lame! Depending on the make-up of my class, I may end up using twitter for reminding or announcing things to my students. But there will probably be many more social networking sites by then, and Twitter will be as outdated then as MySpace is now.

Wordle

Wordle is a pretty neat tool. I used it to see what words I use most in my blogs. I think it is a great way for people to create collages of what their interests are with words, sort of like an option for an "all about me" exercise. I created a wordle filled with words that described who I am, what I am, what I like, and what I look like. This was fun.
However, it should be easier for the user to save the images they create with wordle to their computer. You can't just copy and paste them, so I don't really know how they expect people to use them other than by taking screen shots. I also don't like the way the gallery is setup. There are millions of wordles created like every week, and since they are listed in chronological order it is extremely annoying when you are looking for a particular wordle. I hope the creators of wordle.net will make a few adjustments so this tool would be more user-friendly.

WebQuests

I don't remember doing anything like this when I was in school, but it seems pretty neat. Is the main purpose to get students more engaged in the material or to get students to explore technology? I could definitely use WebQuests to relate math to realistic situations. This is a great way to engage students that don't really like math. However, I can see how time consuming developing and utilizing WebQuests may be. And it takes a lot of creativity to develop a WebQuest that is fun, interactive, and follows the standards of the curriculum. This teaching tool could be used as an end of unit project that ties together the main ideas. I saw a lot of WebQuest that didn't seem very effective, so I am not sure if it is worth all of the time and effort that some people put into them. I don't think I would like to make one from scratch.

Awesome Findings

As I was working on my presentation on prezi, I decided I would use screen shots and I uploaded them to google so I could edit them (since I have very little knowledge on how to do this using Mac). So when I clicked edit, it redirected me to picnik. I was so surprised and excited!!!! I think it is cool how I was using something new on accident. Once I started playing around with it, I found they have a lot of neat things you can do to photos. I had to try this at home!!! When I got home, I spent a good hour just checking out the various features of picnik and I used it to create a beautiful profile picture for facebook. I look forward to using this site A LOT in the future because it is just that AWESOME!!!!

Classroom 2.0

So the assignment is to blog about anything, and I'm sure nobody wants to hear about how messed up things are in my life right now, so I will discuss Classroom 2.0! I signed up for an account, because I hope to use technology to assist my high school students in learning math. I had never seen any technology, other than calculators and  projectors, used in a high school math class until I visited Farragut High School two years ago. A teacher was using a SmartBoard to teach Algebra to his students. My initial response was fear that I would not be prepared to use such technology in my classroom. I then felt excited to have such a great teaching tool available to me that teachers didn't have twenty years ago. I thought using a SmartBoard was the only thing that I could do differently than my high school teachers. However, Classroom 2.0 allows me to communicate with teachers in other areas of the country. These teachers not only share things that work for them in their classrooms, they also share online tools and resources that can be used to integrate technology into the learning experience. I would recommend Classroom 2.0 to all teachers and future teachers.

What Have I Learned About Evaluating Websites

I learned that it is not always easy to locate necessary information, such as, the last revision date of a website. It is also sometime difficult to specify who the author of a site is. Evaluating the credibility of a site is important and sometimes it takes a little fishing around to get the facts.

As I plan to teach high school math, it is very hard for me to see how I would use these skills in my classroom. It is beneficial to be able to effectively evaluate a website. However, I can not think of how this will help my students excel in solving math problems. On the other hand, I will most likely also be a "home room teacher" for at least one hour per day each week. During this time I will probably be expected to assist my students in improving their reading levels. It would be possible to integrate the usage of web resources in this sort of class, so it would be beneficial for my students to be able to evaluate websites. Writing a research papers is a requirement for most introductory English courses in colleges, so this would also help my students be better prepared for college work.

Website Evaluation Site

I found a pretty cool website evaluation site. It is from the Teacher Tap website so it automatically caught my eye as a useful resource for us future teachers. It not only gives basic website evaluation guidelines, but it provides examples of hoax websites and links to of useful website evaluation sites!
Check it out
This site also has links to other awesome teacher resources provided by the Teacher Tap website.

What's Up With Wikis

I am excited to learn more about wikis! It is not as complicated as I initially thought. However, I did have trouble deleting a photo that I uploaded (this may be something that only certain users can do). If anyone has information on how to do that I would greatly appreciate it. I am not a big fan of the limited variety in the font styles. Maybe there is more variety when you get one of the more expensive packages. I look forward to learning more about privacy settings. I feel lucky to have so many options available to me with technology and I can wait to experiment with it more in my classroom!

Course Expectations

I look forward to working with technology and becoming more comfortable with using computers. I am not a big fan of relying on computers for anything, but I realize that times are changing and in order to keep up, I must become more comfortable with using computers. I know how to use computers for basic communication such as e-mail and writing papers. I would like to learn more about creating and sharing videos. I also am interested in finding ways that computers can be helpful in teaching a high school math class. It is easy for me to see how technology can be useful in other subjects like science or for younger students. My goal is to be able to use technology to make things that I already do faster or easier.

All About Me

My name is Cassandra Reed. I am originally from Chicago, IL, but I have lived in Tennessee for most of my life. I spent most of my school aged years in Chattanooga and that is the place I call home.  I work at Krystal on the strip and I have been working there for almost four years now. I live in north Knoxville with my black chihuahua, Corona, and my boyfriend of two years. I have always wanted to be a teacher and I look forward to teaching high school math. Being a teacher is something that I am very passionate about because of my background. My goal is to prepare young people to be successful adults by providing information and acting as a positive role model. I first used google as a classroom tool last semester in one of my math classes, and I became very excited to one day use technology in my own classroom. I am not very technologically advanced, but I look forward to being exposed to ways technology can be used to enhance learning.