Blog 7?

It's getting near that time of year again.  Nope, not the time for sleigh bells, eggnogg, and presents.  CRUNCH TIME!  That time of year where exams are coming up and students are shaking from stress or perhaps too much coffee, and professors are at their breaking point from dealing with all the complaining and whining of the over-caffeinated students.  And yes crunch time is taking its toll on me once again as well.  I feel as though I am battling a homework Hydra and every time I cut off one ugly assignment head, three more assignments grow back.  I am neck deep in a sea of projects and presentations and my head won`t stay above much longer.  I hope you enjoyed those sub-par homework metaphors.   In all seriousness though, it is beginning to get stressful with the deadlines and exams quickly approaching.  To be completely honest, the two main assignments I have that are giving me a bit of stress are in ICT.  Building a portfolio is not a very complicated task, but it is very time consuming and requires a lot of gathering and organizing.  Plus I know how I am with computers and I am expecting to have at least one technological ``problem`` while working on it which will slow me down.  The other project is very open.  It is a fifteen minute group presentation and from what I understand it can be on anything ICT related and in any format. Sounds easy right?  In fact, it sounds like it could be downright fun.  The problem I am having with it is just that I have no idea what I want to do.  Once our group gets together and brainstorms it will probably come together quite nicely and a weight will be gone from my shoulders, but in the meantime I am going to chip away at all my other assignments leaving it so I can focus all my energy towards that one.  In the end it will all fall together, it usually does.  

Blog 6

The other day we had a guest speaker come into our ICT class and show us some more neat ideas for incorporating computers into our classrooms.  He gave us a brief overview of Audacity, and we made a recording of everyone in the class saying a quote that someone had said to us that we had held onto for a long time.  I thought this was very neat.  The recording we created was sort of a motivational piece, which is one effective use of the program.  I think this is just one possibility of many that this program could be used for in a classroom.  I think students would love making recordings of different types for pretty much any class.  One idea I thought might be kind of neat is if a class was going to read a novel together, the teacher could record himself or the class reading it and add all kinds of effects making a sort of audiobook that might be more interesting than simply reading the book; especially for something most people find dry like Shakespeare.

We also made a short motivational video using an iPhone.  It was incredibly easy and quick.  I realized that in classroom, a video could be a quick and easy project that students would most likely LOVE to do.  They could make a video in almost any subject and edit it any way they wanted.  Students could produce a documentary or a commercial or pretty much anything really. I think videos are a wonderful piece of media to bring into a classroom to help with the learning process.

Technology While Student Teaching

While I was out student teaching I took note of how "technology" was used.  I only really spent any time in two classrooms and the first thing I noticed was that neither of them had a SmartBoard and one of them did not even have a projector. This struck me as odd because I was under the impression that all schools in this general area had both of those things. On the contrary, both classrooms had televisions and DVD players.  Both had around five desktop computers for student use.  I later found out that most of the other classrooms did in fact have SmartBoards.

I used what "technology" was available to me during my student teaching.  In the one classroom I used the projector screen for slideshows and videos as well as displaying answers for worksheets. In the other classroom I showed youtube videos on the TV (attached to a computer), which we used for class discussions as well as showing helpful videos.  The students used the classroom computers to write essays, poems, and other assignments for English.  This was a self-directed class where all students learned at a different pace, so students also used these computers to individually watch films or do research and so on.  The only problem I had with the classroom technology was when I spent a significant amount of time creating a slideshow and then emailed it to myself so I could open it to teach the lesson.  I didn't realize that the school had all outside emails blocked and so I was unable to open it.  After that I saved my slideshows on a flash drive. 

When I first went out into the field I expected cell phones and other devices to be a large issue,but to my surprise and delight they really weren't.  The only school  rule I noticed was that devices were not allowed in washrooms or changerooms -- which I felt was a logical rule.  Other than that, the teachers seemed to be in control of device rule in the classroom.  For the most part devices weren't much of a problem.  In the one class I was in, students could listen to music as long as it could not be heard by the teacher.  These students also used their phones for research etc.  Sure, sometimes they were probably not using them for educational means, but it did not cause a noticeable problem.  In the other class I worked in, the teacher had a no device policy and it seemed to go without saying.  I rarely saw a device out in that class and again it never caused a problem.

I guess overall I was surprised by the technology at the school I was at.  I thought there would be more of it, both for classroom instruction as well as class disruption.  All in all I thought it was a pretty good system and I never noticed any problems caused by technology. (other than the one)