Blogs as e-portfolios

Teachers can use blogs as e-portfolios for their students and can also provide resources for students on their own teacher blog. In creating a resource blog, teachers can post class assignments and provide background information, research resources, and rubric information. Also, classroom information such as rules of the classroom, scheduled course times, upcoming topics to be discussed can also be listed. If there are areas that won’t be covered in the classroom, but you’d like to make available for students to do further research, you can provide those resources.
If you’d like to use the blog as an e-portfolio, you’ll have to decide how you’d like posts and assignments to be displayed. For instance, do you want everyone to see all assignments, do you want only students in a particular class to see their respective assignments, or do you want students to only see their own works? E-portfolios can be a great asset for students to keep track of their work, and they’ll have works to present if ever they need to show their capabilities.
The following is a helpful resource page for creating e-portfolios: http://blog.helenbarrett.org/p/resources.html

Reference: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0450.pdf

Organized Online Debate

In setting up my personal blog I never had any trouble, although figuring out how to use the features, including editing and deleting posts, or adding to the group blog was a little more confusing. The blog was much more useful for collaboration than even the study group area in Webtycho. For use in my future classroom, I do like the idea of students’ assignments being posted and available for review and also having the ability to comment and communicate back and forth about discussion-worthy or related items. Students from other classes, other schools, or even other countries can join discussions as well. Creating a two-sided debate between schools would be a great way to address some science questions, and help students in developing arguments for or against a topic. Organizing an online debate between two classrooms would be a challenge for students that would allow them to learn about blogging and technology functions, while still accomplishing a class project. It would also encourage coordination between teachers and even school districts. The following resource provides support for student debates and topic ideas for teachers.
http://debate-central.ncpa.org/

Ideas for Inspiring Student Learning for K-12 Classrooms

Connecting students to learning opportunities in a very innovative and stimulating manner is critical towards student learning in this 21st century. You will find inspirational ways to incorporate social media in your classroom with this list.

Ideas for K-12 Classrooms

Implement these great ideas in your K-12 classroom to have students learning stimulated in a dynamic and innovative way.

1. Make literature real. Have students create a Facebook page for a character from a literature they are studying from their classroom curriculum.

2. Pursue famous people. Several famous people are on Twitter. Have students pursue someone related to what they are studying, such as following President Obama when looking at government.

3. Twitter treasure hunt. Use GPS treasure hunting to send students to search for edifying clues.

4. Get knowledge to know more about probability. Elementary teachers can use Twitter to teach the concept of probability.

5. Read and study geography. Use a combination of Twitter and Google Earth to help teach geography-based lessons. Teachers can use network of Twitter followers to create an interactive lesson for the younger students. Use your ideas to spark your creativity for ways to use these two resources.

6. Connect with other classrooms. Collaborate with another classroom, no matter where they are in the world, to expand learning opportunities.

7. Be updated with recent public updates. The recent public updates on Twitter shows the most recent posts from all users and is a great tool to use when studying current events.

8. Virtual field trips in the classroom. Use Skype to bring the field trip into the classroom when it is difficult or impossible for students to go to the source.

9. Introduce parents’ forum. Stay connected with parents through social media to communicate about their child’s progress.


Additional information can be retrieved from the Online Student Learning Universities.

The Social Media has Inspired Student Learning

Social media was emerged from an entertaining way to connect with friends and families, but it has developed into a powerful tool towards inspiring student learning in this 21st century. Additionally, sites such as Facebook and Twitter and tools such as Skype are connecting students to learning opportunities in a very innovative and stimulating manner. Whether you teach an elementary class, a traditional college class, or at an online university, you will find inspirational ways to incorporate social media in your classroom with Student Learning Universities and Science Online 09:Learning Science with Social Media.

Blogging Activity

Blogs are reshaping our classrooms. They are appearing everywhere in the educational field and offer great potential to transform teaching and learning. This experience of working on our group blog has helped me to understand the role blogging can take in the classroom environment. It reflects the way today’s students think and learn better than the older methods of producing written communication could ever do. It is said that today’s students want to share information and work collaboratively more than ever and blogging allows for exactly this type of activity. Teachers can guide students in their writing for classmate readers, and can teach students cite correctly. Commenting allows students to work together on a particular goal. Blogging supports teachers allowing students to use information wisely and with a critical eye. Students need to learn how to digest all of the information available to them and blogging can help teach these skills.

Constructivist learning theories tell us that children need to talk and share in order to learn. Blogging would allow children a way to explain their learning which is necessary for the learning to occur and become part of the student’s foundational knowledge. By participating in this blogging activity I was able to share information and work collaboratively. I had an opportunity to express my opinion and have a voice in the overall conversation. I was able to see a developing connected set of ideas come together in a way that produced a cohesive and yet ever evolving document. The blogging experience allowed me to use the internet to find information to support my thoughts and ideas.

Clearly, all of these things that I did in this activity were done to help me see how the blogging activity functions from the student perspective. One of the things I always get a lot out of by participating in my educational technology classes is an opportunity to be the student. All school year long, I am the teacher. It has always been invaluable to me to also be in the role of the student. It makes me a better teacher. This blogging activity was a very good example of where an activity helped me see the students’ side of the equation.

Overview: Types of Instructional Software

Instructional software can be divided into several different types. These types include applications, drill and practice, tutorials, simulations, instructional games, problem solving, multimedia and teacher utilities. Application software refers to software that is used to automate task such as report cards and grade books, attendance sheets, student databases and word processing. The MS Office Suite® products fall into this category, as do databases. Drill and practice software is very useful for tasks that require rote memorization such as learning multiplication facts or learning how to type. These types of software attempt to help students memorize by repetition usually in the form trying to beat ones best score by achieving a task with better accuracy in less time. Tutorials usually consist of linked pages that introduce a new topic and then allow for some exploration of the topic. These may be linear or they may be branching but either way, the learner is guided through a progression from an introduction to an assessment of the learning. These will occasionally be available as textbook resources and are produced by the publisher of the textbook. Simulations are visual representations of concepts that would be difficult to otherwise describe to students. These are sometimes called animations and are usually artist’s renderings rather than actual video recordings. They are especially useful for describing things that are either too small (atoms) or too far away (cosmic events) to be seen. Instructional games are designed to make learning fun and are often purchased rather than downloaded as a free resource. Examples include Knowledge Adventure® and Reader Rabbit®. Learners play games and lessons are embedded in the game. This type of activity is sometimes called “edutainment”. Problem solving software provides a problem to be solved with a certain data provided and learners must use logic to solve the problem. I do not find this type of program to be in widespread use at this point but I do believe many such applications are under development. Smartboards® are the perfect tool to pair with problem solving software and will make it much easier for teachers to capture the step by step procedures for solving complex problems that involve multiple steps. Multimedia refers to using video and audio production software to make things like documentaries or oral history reports. Slideshows, video clips on Youtube, and other presentations require creativity of students. Mac computer software is often thought of as the ideal resource for media instructional software. The last type of instructional software is teacher utilities. This might includes lesson plans and test banks. It also may include applications such as PCR Educator or HeadMaster. These are school administration software applications and are packages of software for school wide use. These can also include online grade books to improve school to home communication. Sadik, A. (Producer). (2008). Types of instructional software. [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/alaasadik/types-of-instructional-software-presentation#

Atomic Microscope - The World of Atoms

I have been using Atomic Microscope for years now and my students really enjoy it. It is exceptionally useful for explaining the Gas Laws in Chemistry. It is a molecular modeling tool that is simple and inexpensive. http://www.atomicmicroscope.com/

Students enjoy the fascinating world of atoms. The software allows one to see how atoms respond to changes in volume, temperature and pressure. By exploring the affects of changes between variables, students come to understand direct and indirect relationships. Many students consider themselves visual learners, and even if they are not, most students find visuals help to facilitate constructing one's understanding of a phenomena. It is sometimes difficult for some students to understand why matter behaves in a certain way, but given a visualization of the situation, it is easily understandable. Learning is imroved and further building can occur. The more visualization we provide the less likely it is that students will develop misconceptions, a common problem in chemistry.