Online learning in schools

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Online learning in schools

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Online Learning in the 21st Century

Students are changing more than ever today. So to are the ways that we teach our students. Here is a presentation on a new type of learning for our students in the 21st century, online learning. Hope you enjoy the presentation. I have uploaded my presentation in my blog. If you cannot pull up my presentation in my blog, the link to my presentation is http://www.slideshare.net/sheredy11/online-learning-in-schools

Course 6714I3 Reflection

In the past in my building at school, I have heard a lot about differentiated instruction. I had my idea of differentiated instruction, and had my initial thought of how to implement it in my classroom. From this course, I began to get a different and more educated idea of what differentiated instruction really is, and why we must use differentiated instruction if we want to reach all our students. So how will I begin to implement these new strategies in my classroom this year? I plan to look back at the websites and resources that dealt with the Universal Design for Learning, and from these principles, try to make sure I hit different strategies to reach the different types of learning styles for the students in my classes. To me the UDL will be a great guide or checklist to see if I am differentiating my instruction in my lessons to reach the all my students and give them all a fair and equal shot in gaining an education. If I make a checklist myself from the UDL to look at while I am creating new lessons, and while I am looking at lessons that I have already creating that I will be teaching, I will be able to make sure that I have added the elements necessary to get all of my students involved in the lesson. Technology will serve as a big part of this, because much of the new technologies that are available to teachers to use to teach their students in the classroom are differentiated and has a little something for all different types of learners. These activities also grab the attention of our students, and this is a major factor when it comes to our students effort in the lesson. When we get our students attention and motivate them to learn, than we have a chance to get them to learn the things that we need them to. The major way to get their attention and motivate them is to teach them using the learning styles they prefer and by teaching them by relating things to their interests. These are the things that I hope to improve on this year. I hope to avoid the same pitfalls that I have fell into in the past where I do what is easier, instead of what needs to be done, and I must put the work in to improve my lessons so I am not alienating the other students in my class, and I give all my students an equal opportunity at an education.

EDUC-6713I-5 Integrating Technology Across the Content Areas Course Reflection

For this course we were to come up with our own GAME plan. Each week we did different work to work on our GAME plans and evaluate our own progress. In my own personal GAME plan, I wanted to inspire student learning and creativity by designing and developing digital learning experiences to use in the classroom. To this I came up with my set of goals so I could make these improvements and changes in my classroom next year. The more I began to research, the more I had to modify my plan. As I began to do my research, I began to talk to many of my colleagues, especially in my department, and many of them actually began helping me come up with lesson ideas and ideas of digital tools to use in the lessons. Many of the other teachers in my department decided that they also would like to implement these types of lessons in their classes next year as well, and we all began researching and bouncing ideas off each other, and we eventually began to slowly make progress in this area. Now that school is out, I have had more time to take these ideas and build on them, and am moving toward being able to use these types of lessons next year. To me the implementation of these lessons will be a major move for me in my educational instruction. The more I begin to use these types of activities, the more creative I will become myself when it comes to creating lessons that challenge my students knowledge and creativity. I feel that these will be the types of lessons that motivate my students to learn our content knowledge. By doing these types of lessons, my students will be exposed to real life situations that will benefit them when they are out of school. I am hoping that the skills that I teach my student swill be skills that that they will use for the rest of their lives. This will be more beneficial to them than memorizing facts on things they will never use again in their lives. Also, I am hoping that these types of lessons will increase student participation in the classroom, and this should make my classes more productive to my students.

NETS-T and NETS-S

When looking at at the ISTE's site and looking at the National Educational Technology Standards for teachers and students, on could clearly see how both are related. They have the standards that each students should know by time they leave school, and they then have standards of things that teachers need to be implementing in their classrooms to get their students to practice the 21st century skills they will need when they enter the real world. The teacher standards are the guidelines for what each teacher should use to engage their students. What is mapped out for them is plan for them to look at when developing lessons and assessing student learning. The students guidelines go hand in hand with this. Teachers could look at the student guidelines and see if their students can master these standards, and if not, the teacher needs to make accommodations to lessons to help their students improve in these area. Students can also use their guidelines as a assessment tool to grade their performance in these areas, and to see what areas they need improvement in. If I were to use the GAME plan process, I would use it very similar to the way it was used in our course. I would have my students look at the National Educational Technology Standards for students, and I would have them select two indicators that they felt they needed to make improvements in. I would have to tally up the results to see what areas I need to focus more on in my classroom, and then I would have my students follow the GAME plan to come up with their own plan to meet these indicators. We would start out by writing goals, and try to come up with ways to accomplish these goals, and then at the end of the semester, we would re-evaluate our GAME plan, and try to make the adjustments as needed to reach our goals, much like we have been doing in this class. Students could then get an idea of the technology standards that they need to master, and they could get some practice with coming up with a GAME plan. I feel that my students could benefit a lot from coming up with some goals and tracking these goals to see if they accomplished what they set out to.

Week 6 Revising my GAME plan

This week we are to look back at our original GAME plans, and revise them. So I looked back at what I have learned so far. My original goals were to become better at facilitating and inspiring student learning experiences and creativity, and to design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments. The first thing that I did was look at my lessons, and try to develop some new lessons where I could incorporate some digital age learning that would challenge my students creativity. So I began to collaborate with some of my colleagues in my department about what types of problem based learning activities they do in their classes. Some did mock trials, and others explored problems in the community. I then began to look at their lessons, and began to get some ideas of ways to add these lessons into the units that I have already developed. This still was hard since I had never developed these types of activities before. But there are some really creative people in my department, and in a department meeting I asked for help developing the lesson, and I got many ideas from the group that I would not have gotten by myself. This got the ball rolling. I then wanted to design some digital age learning experiences that could go along with either this project, or some of the units that I teach. Some of my colleagues were able to help me with this, but for the most part I had to do the majority of my research on my own. I decided to focus on podcasts and video conferencing/distance learning. Here is where I have to make new goals. I want to begin using podcasts in my class when school starts next year. To have my students use this next year, I will have to teach them the ins and outs of podcasts. I am currently exploring this for myself. After I teach my students how to make and use podcasts, then we can use them with our content. So I must continue to work to be able to teach myself and all my students how to do podcasts. The second thing that I need to do is to continue to try and learn how to use distance learning in my class next year. I have a friend who also teaches history in another high school, and would like to come up with a distance learning activity that we could do with their class. But I am currently not sure how we would do this, let alone have any idea on the lesson or topic of the learning activity. So I will have to talk to my technology department and see what our options are, and try to come up with how we will do the activity. After that is decided, we can begin to work on the lesson itself. Now that I have narrowed down what I have to do, I must continue to work to implement these tools into my classroom this year.

Evaluating My GAME Plan

This week we were supposed to evaluate our GAME plan. I first looked back at what I originally wanted to accomplish in my GAME plan. I wanted to make improvements in the first two standards, Facilitate and Inspire Student learning and Creativity, and Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments. To do this, I new that I needed to come up with lessons that would challenge my students and inspire them to learn by using their creativity, and I needed to do research to be able to develop lessons using digital tools that would give my students digital age learning experiences. First I began to collaborate with other teachers in my department to see what types of 21st century skills were being used by the other teachers that teach in the same area as I do. I found so great projects and mock trials that I would like to incorporate into my classes in the future. I then began to talk about what technology or digital tools they were using in their classes, and I told them the ones that I wanted to learn more about, podcasts, and video conferencing and distance learning. I asked if there were any other teachers who were interested in learning how to implement these into their classes as well. What I found out was that multiple teachers were interested, and a couple of us began to do research on these tools. Since we have limited time because it is the end of the school year, it has helped to have more than one person doing the research to hopefully be able to use these tools in class next year. We have all been discussing how to use some of these tools, and we have been talking about how we could use some of these tools in our lessons. I feel the thing that we still need to do is talk to the technology department at our school. They have been busy changing our schools grading system and email, so as they get more time, we can discuss with them the steps we need to take to use these digital tools in class next year, and how we could use video conferencing and distance learning. I feel I have got the ball rolling and have gotten others involved, but it will be all for nothing if we do not continue to research and and find a way to use these in our classes next year. This will be when my real evaluation will be done.