Skype Interview

Blog Post 13

Alabama Learning Exchange (ALEX) is a holistic database full of educational materials that can be beneficial to self progress, interacting with students, parents involving themselves with better their childrens education experiences at home. This website strives to be up to date on the latest changes in the education domain of the state of Alabama, and is a work in progress for changes are constantly made to better suit to the researchers needs. Things that are avaiable to website users are things such as lesson plans, professional learning experiences, a search engine to better find things one is looking for pertaining to education, web resources that could aid in a teachers preperations for receiving a degree or simply to help a teacher with good tactics in his or her own classroom. All resources that (ALEX) provides are in accordance with the Alabama State Education Requirements.

How this would be useful to my practices as an educator:
-Lesson Plans, by googleing lesson plans you can get bulk mass of unrelevant and unsuccessful lesson plans that anyone can post. Here you can get lesson plans that are made to work in the classroom and could better your chances for seeing your children make progress.
-Web resources, can always be beneficial to an educator for if there is an incident where I need to find reliable information pertaining to a certain topic and district, here I can do these things. A defined search is always a beneficial practice, and knowing that the information you get is legtimate is a sigh of releif!
-Professional Learning, could be beneficial to one who may be in a state of continuation of education say their masters degree, here you can go through a vast collection of courses to take, online demo's and the list goes on.
-Podcast Treasury, here I saved the best for last, because once looking through the collection of podcasts this site had that was a part of our local history and many other popular school topics, I know I can always refer to this site when looking to incorporate these into my own classroom or just for some good ideas on how to present materials to interest my students.

*** Overall, I was very impressed with this site and will be visting it again. It has everything an educator of alabama could ever need and if it does not have it direct, it will provide better guidance of where to find what you need! Great, great site!!

Blog Post 12 * Personally Created Assignment

*** After watching the video published above, In one to two paragraphs; Please describe how use of technology with your students can better prepare them to be continued learners likes ourselves. Next, Provide 2 examples of traditonal class activities that when created through use of technology are more appealing to the eye.


-All students are attracted to the new age of technology for it is something they were born into. With using technology in our own classrooms, we are teaching are students to use an open mind style of thinking and collaboration of shared knowlegde.In using technology, students are being taught how to find the needed information from many sources, instead of having to just read through a lengthy text or article. This use can also be beneficial to our students for it is a more personalized experience, for example students who are more visual learners can watch youtube videos that demonstrate hands on learning. Once a student is taught to do this for the use of schooling, they then can turn around and build a palace online for things they enjoy viewing outside of school and thus create more of a learning experience for constant learning.
- 2 Examples of activites:
1. Speech- using a webcam or skype can teach the student how to public speek, but can teach the student how to use technology for future use in such situations of business conferences over webcame ect.
2. Science Fair enhanced by technology could open opportunities for the student to really catch ones attention with the beauty and realistic aspects of using digital presentation.

Blog Post 11

In viewing the video created by Ms. Cassidy and her 1st graders and following up with her skype interview used for EDM 310, I found that she is very knowledgeable with using technology in her classroom to widen her students minds through the use of technology. She has been experiencing technology use for the past 10 years, to be successful she keeps things simple and uses the same approach. Blogging is very important to use in her classroom and she recieves much support from her technology aid. She says that the parents of her students are not opposed to this use, for it makes it easier for the parents to stay up to date on things that their students are learning. She uses the students blogs as portfoloio to reflect the progress of her students learning. The kids enjoy this use for they stay attained to the material she says " kids and technology go hand in hand", the world is changing so the education program must too!
What differences does blogging make in life Cassidy replies " the children enjoy using blogs for they recieve an audience for work they complete and can also recieve comments for what they do!" Skype helps build realationships for her students with other students and even students at a college level. Teachers must keep learning, and learning and test running with technology we can be more capable to teach our future students with their needs in mind.
Where do you start with use of technology? -- You can push the use of tech nology through picking out what interests you and work off of your interests.
Cheating is not an issue with use of blogging for the use of blogging becomes a use of technology with a touch of your own personality. You can present the same information of someone else and critique to collaborate!
Technology provides many tools for use in education and Ms. Cassidy really takes the reigns in using this to better prepare her students for a future that is evolved around the modern world of technology use!!

Blog Post 10

In reading Morgan Bayda's blog post, I felt a sense of not being the only one so frustrated with the lack of attention on the needs of education! Followed by a more relieving video by Dan Brown, I saw that these two students just as I have come to a realiziation that we need change. Traditons are a wonderful base to build off, but we must continue to build up to the everchanging trends in the modern world. Students attention is becoming harder to attain for a human is in no way comparable to the vast ways technology can teach. It is independent, so therefore more popular because we indidivuals enjoy teaching and learning ourselves. Sometimes teachers will get bored with the subjects they teach and loose a passion they once may have had!
We have a great opportunity at hand, if we would only reach out and grasp it. Technology and communication networks such as TWITTER, BLOGGING, and DELICIOUS provide ways to share our gained knowlegde and not just store it in our minds to spit back out on a test. The capabilites we can have with use of outside materials could make the classroom as intising as a trip to Disney world!

But to quit yacking, I'll end with this, today I went and voted to reinstate an education tax system that could and possibily will jepordize my getting a job after graduation-- WE NEED A CHANGE!!!




Tom Johnson's "Don't Let them take the pencils home"
Mr. Johnson's peice was great for reading and I enjoyed it highly! The reference to the pencils and authorities was so relevant to the practices that are being avoided and replaced today. I saw in reading this that our children are being given the short stick! There is no education in limiting what tools for learning students may encompass! We must embrace the modern world for what it is worth and use the tools provided at much ease and accomodation!

C4K 7-10

Kid #7: For my seventh assignment in comments for kids, I have very much so enjoyed this project for the class. I love children so being assigned to research what other children around the world are doing in their classrooms is so beneficial to my forming educational practices.
For this go around, I read Christani B who is in Mrs. Phares 4th period class. She wrote and published a blog on the ever changing subject of bullies. She explained how she herself was a bully and lost all of her friends so she had a come to her senses experience and changed her ways. Many people talked bad about Christani and her friends behind their backs and no one respected the, by saying this she opened up her personal life for viewers such as I to read and better understand where she is coming from. She has obviously learned a lot from her experience and I hope to see more posts such as this one, so i can continue to learn about her and her life.

Kid #8 For this assignment, I was lead to a blog from the 6/7th grade class in Adelaide, Australia. There I commented on a girl named Erin's blog. Her most recent post was a persuasive writing assignment where she chose to write about not encouraging animals live in small cages in zoo's. I being a huge animal lover read enthusiastically through her post. She has a very strong voice when it comes to the encasement of the animals and wants to encourage people to be mindful that they were here first. That their natural instincts do matter and that with our behaviors they are loosing what was once their home and being put in observational environments. Erin feels that most zoo's do not provide a home realistic enough to that of their own. This was a very warming post and she did a great job writing it.



Kid #9- For this assignment, Dr. Strange has asked us to view in depth Mrs. Yollis 3rd Grade class blog. I found this blog to be a very neatly organized and managed blog. The students have full interaction with the blog as well as their parents, which I found to be a nice personal touch. I enjoyed how Mrs. Yollis told of herself and her travels, she even posted a picture of her in 3rd grade I thought to be just darling! I also enjoyed getting taught personally by Mrs. Yollis on the standards of posting comments, which brings me to mention the comment clarification quality process she practices on her blog. This ensures to Mrs. Yollis that anyone leaving a comment on her CLASS blog is a good representation of grammar and language use as well as spelling and punctuation--she could not afford to have her students reading comments from college level students that were not up to par on the standards she preaches to them! I enjoyed and will visit back to the html code link, there she posts various codes you can use to add links, change text etc. She obviously learned a lot during her Masters degree in integration of technology in the classroom! I was overall very impressed with this blog, with Mrs. Yollis and how she does use technology in the classroom, which draws me to the conclusion as to why her class blog was voted best EDU blog of 2010! When first being brought to her blog, I read into the post from Nonna, she posted many neat pictures of her home in Italy and all the vast activities there are to do there, it is a small secluded place in a valley of mountains. It looked like a little piece of heaven right there at their back door. I enjoyed this aspect of her blog lastly, because she is tying in to her students minds what is going on around the world--which I have learned and feel is one of the best capabilities of having a class blog *Shared Knowledge is the future* Great assignment enjoyed it very much so!!




Adia's Babble Blog: Persian New Year Celebration: "On Thursday, my brilliant third grade class went to my former teacher's wonderful second grade class to celebrate Persian New Year also know..."

- Today, I viewed Adia's blog about the traditons of her Persian New Year. I was amazed at what I learned and felt inspired to have the rest of the class have a ease of access to this blog. Adia has a great way of explaining things to a person who has no idea prior to reading her posts. This is a remarkable blogger, and I have found her blogs to be very interesting to readers in such a professional way. Mrs. Yollis really has taught these students how to blog efficiently and I am impressed! Adia, is a wonderful example of how student blogs can be a useful tool to teachers with instruction! DO read this blog, it is all worth the time to have such a creative mind share her thoughts and life so openly to the web, I feel honored to have been invited to see this blog post!

Normal Distribution Video

Project #3 C4T #3

For my 3rd teacher I was assigned Mrs. Lisa Thurmann. I read her most recent blog post about the purpose of education and her thoughts became music to my ears. She i would consider to be a warm demander (teaching for the students success and doing everything to see that happen but still demanding they do their best). Which I feel the education dept. is lacking these days so to see that Mrs. Thurmann does this with her students was joy! I enjoyed her view on the aspects of education and actualizing that there is a purpose for us educators and that is to better suit our children for the future to find success! She is a remarkable teacher and has a great way of saying how she feels, and I couldnt help but notice her blog has much attention constantly!!

C4K 4-6

#4 In my fourth comment for kids, I was assigned to Shoal of the PT England school in Auckland, New Zealand. Shoal is the second student I have had from this school, she unlike Lukis, Shoal is in the year 6 and she seems to be just right at her prime. She had very wonderful stories of her family and what hobbies she enjoyed outside of school on her blog. As well Shoal had a very girlie layout and seemed to spent a bit more time on her blog than Lukis does. Her age surprised me for all that she had done through creativity on her blog as a 9 year old. While looking on to the followers of Shoals blog, I bumped into a group of 4 girls who had made a music video. I thought the video was interesting and it had seemed to me that these girls worked hard on getting their dance together and creating the video. The teacher had made this a class assignment and its results seemed positive. The girls seemed like they enjoyed the project. Mrs Garden has by doing this incorporated the fun into education. While the students were learning how to create videos and work together as a group which are good things for students of this age range to be positively accomplishing--the teacher was winning all in the same for she was presenting instruction through this project. This is another positive example of use of technology in the classroom. I enjoyed Mrs Gardens class and will continue to follow her class.

-- To be honest here, which Dr. Strange has encouraged us to do... I usually stay pretty organized with my student comments, but for the life of me I can not remember what student I had for C4K#5 so i will continue to back track and hopefully edit this section soon!


#6- For my sixth assigned child, his name is Brennan and he is currently in grade 8 at the PT school in Auckland

, New Zealand. He is 12 years old, so he about to enter the big high-school level of schooling where the demands will be held at higher stakes. He stated that his favorite food are apples and he enjoys spending time with his friends, who happen to be in the same class as he. The photo pictured with Brennan was his cool new hair cut!! I enjoyed reading about Brennan he seems like a nice boy!!

Blog 9

In reading Mr. Mc Clung's blog post, I felt relief.
Here he stated real aspects of your first year of teaching and really put an emphasis that is will not be sunshine and rainbows when you first enter your classroom. He left experiences to be read by the public in hopes that he could encourage better teaching practices. He spoke of great things that teachers should keep in mind once entering in the classroom such as Listening to your students needs, taking advice, not dumping an idea because it did not work out like you had planned, keep trying and most importantly to not be afraid of failed attempts. He also spoke of use of technology being very beneficial to his classroom and encouraged any readers to learn technology instead of turning away from it. I thought this assignment to his blog was a wonderful learning read-- sadly enough I could not leave my thoughts to his blog but in spirit he will know that I cherished the thoughts he put on the post. I had my assumptions of what it would be like the very first year and these assumptions were that I would regret my chosen career and id be stuck in the mud until I got a good grasp on what works and what doesn't work. By reading Mc clung I feel that I have a better understanding of what to expect and that I will work hard to build relationships with my colleagues to better be equitable

for teaching with success!!

Smartboard Presentation Group 3B

Blog 8

Richard Millers " This is How we Dream"

In watching this movie, I found myself bored at first, thinking no not another long movie of listening to someone else try and push their idea for the new future, but continuing to listen my self proclaimed negativeness begun to change. Richard started to talk about Writing as a soliditary activity, something we do in a place with workmates. What if this writing became more of a personal process and we did all the writing ourselves without searching out resources from say the libary. He spoke of incremental changes such as the desktop becoming our workplace. I feel this is awesome! I have enjoyed my schooling much more since we have been doing independent work without the hassel of going to class! Projects are now made easier and have much more of a creative personal touch when done on a computer system tying in digtal enhancements such as audio and video tagged right on your document there to view without having to download. Through this process we are able to share information internationally. We can also be live on everything, for example he showed in his video a clip of the voting roster from the Obama election, being live every vote that was entered was shown right there, no wait.
Part 2: Richard talks of our digtial enviornment consisting of representations programs such as the ITUNE U.
Something that he said really caught my attention " Ideas belong to our culture-Educators must be invovled and share knowlegde" Well of course we do, it all made sense why everything we complied as research was being placed on the web to be searchable by anyone at any given time. By this i questioned my privacy saying, These are my ideas and my work, why should it be offered up to the public, well its because I am sharing my knowlegde! How cool!
With this digital world students can create their thoughts digitally too.
This is a way for our ideas to spread into our cultures and then our cultures passed internationally to whomever may be interested and possibly can reflect a good imagery to those who are not informed of what differences our cultures have.


Finally, As an Educator, I will push for my students to be fully interactive on the web. I was weary of the safeness of the publicity but now I can see the light. Technology has an answer for every childs questions, they can be themselves and not have a teacher saying you have to do it my way or it is not right at all. Education will once again rise over schooling, children will grow in learning who they are and who the world is around them. As researched many children loose hope in school for their ideas are second to anothers, on the web through the use of technology you dont have to a particular way--you must just creativley be yourself and in seeing this student I feel, will become more attatched to the idea of education and learning for they have no one to compare to. Its them against the world and thats the way it should be. But students can not do this free handed, so once again there is a need for teaching-- We educators must learn to navigate our technology and teach our students how to drive it! Once the task of learning is mastered the road can go on forever, who knows were technology can take you its all at the hands of that indivdual.




In watching these two videos, I found out just how creative some can be. Not only were these videos creative, but they were informing on a good life lesson. We are at a point in school where things are taking a turn and the student no longer relies on the teacher to input information so we can turn around and spit it out on a test, it has come to where school requires your full effort with a hint of your personality. We are graded in many ways such as our promptness, our effort, our knowlegde and of course our dedication to the cause. Many students do start college thinking this will easy and that much dedication is not required and one can pass with the bare minimum. This is a falsification, for as shown in the chipper series if you think you can do this your wrong. The ones who carry this on their shoulder never make it, some rare cases where they make it out of the school enviornment they find once in the professional feild that to be professional you must act professional. I thought of ways that I could be creative in my work and with this I have found that my options are unlimited. I can create a good lecture full of instruction with fun incorportated to result in student participation and success and as well me enjoying what I do. For if you care about something enough you want it to be your best, so when I teach I want everything that my students hear to be at its highest quality.



Learn to change and Change to Learn:
YES YES YES! Of course this is a real arguement for it is occuring all around us, and we learning to be Educators must take this as a fact. If we do not broaden our abilties to reflect useful knowlegde to our students to better prepare them for life, then our job has failed. Incorporating technology into our students practices will better them for what future jobs will be there and what requirements these jobs will have. Technology struck years ago but the curve of its importance is just now visible, we need to take the global tools that technology provides and teach our students what they NEED to know, not how to write on a peice of paper that can be burned and not recorded, we must teach them to use the mechanics of technology so they too can ellaborate their ideas to the rest of the world and take in what others thoughts are around the world. Technology is not the only thing changing, for as they said in the movie our traditons of what is good and acceptable are too.


From watching the last two videos, I feel that our culture is in a huge wave of change. We are no longer living the traditonal American dream, we are living a digitally enhanced dream. Students are no longer motivated on traditonal simple things, these bore students, technology is intising to students and tracks everything that they do. Like I have stated before many of these changes are not limited but unlimited. The possibilities are forever being created and it is our job to follow the wave, for this is the american method. What is good beautiful and true is becoming quite apparent that it must consist of something to do with technology. Our next generation children do not go play outside to entertain themselves for that is boring,these children must entertain from technology and that is when they are not bored, but once technology is boring what is the next step? From all the progression we have made towards excepting technology into our lives, I just can not fathom what could and possibly will exceed these oppertunity. I enjoy the new trends of technology and so do our children but this is just a pure example of continuation of knowledgde and self education. It is what is the future and will be the only thing to motivate our next generation guppies! Our drives for success are for money to survive and the media enhances this beleif that success is only able for one if technology is learned and mastered.

Blog 7

Randy Pausch Acheiveing your Childhood Dreams:
This by far describes an incredible man with a great perspective. I enjoyed how Randy firstly states he is not her to discuss sympathies then falls onto the floor to show just how strong he is! I being around a cousin of mine, while she was young and diagnosed with cancer, I could relate to what turmoil he must have experienced. While such a hard burden to deal with had been placed over his head, he turned the other cheek and let Gods hand guide him. Being future educators I feel this is a video each and every one going into the field should view.

He talks of self perceptions and that nothing could slow him down. Each one of us can relate to a sense of self and we each have goals we attend to achieve and in his case some sooner than later. Some would say that our goals which I refer to are nothing more than dreams..but from my perspective a dream is something that usually stays out of reach. My dream as a child was to be a teacher, and im in the works for it but just haven't reached success. Randy discusses his dreams and talks about his childhood experiences and in this you can't help to not force your full attention to the thoughts this man shares. Never meeting this man, after just hearing of some of his personal attainments to his dreams and achievements I feel as if I do know him.

I heard intelligence when Randy discussed how he used groups of men and women to critique some of the approaches he had. This is very beneficial to Educators for we constantly are referencing to how positive our actions are. And to stand in for personal opinions, one can now use the internet (technology) to opinionize just how successful we are. People will always have different stances on certain things and to organize ourselves for success we must constantly revamp ourselves to suit others needs, especially our students. Thus we will reach a point of intelligence, just as Randy has where our opinions begin to matter to the public eye and can be used as references for future generations to educate on!

I waited for the word technology to come up in his discussion. I had made it this far, I wanted to hear something sweet to the ear! Randy talked of times where he incorporated technology into the classroom for his students and the outcomes were always of students working together in groups to interact and learn from his guidance. From this guidance he provided, his students could now learn how to teach each other for just as a stated above each one of us is different and just like traditional schooling some children will be better at one use of technology than the other and that is why I feel that teaching our children to teach is a positive method of instruction all around! I being a student in grade school used to get annoyed with assigned group work, but now doing the things that I am as a college student, group work can't be any better. For working alone I feel does concrete information that you understand, but what about the partial understandings that our human minds usually overlook and by the end of the week forget? Well being in group work and incorporating learning as a group effort the chances of having a partial understanding are less likely because something you may not interest in or understand, there is a classmate who probably reflects opposite opinion and can reason to you why, thus opening a new window of understanding for yourself.


I highly enjoyed listening to Randy and found that his discussion of life and learning was all too informative! His fate was sealed, but his thoughts and practices can and I feel will carry on to others. What a valuable man he was, and the limitless things he had done in just one lifetime---imagine if he was given three or more? I recommended this video be shared for future classes for each person will grasp it in a different way, but the same intelligence

will be passed on!