I can almost see it, the light at the end of the tunnel! We are almost done our term and getting ready to head out on our second teaching placement. I have been waiting and waiting to get out into the classroom and it felt like it was so far away but it is here and I almost can't believe it. I am so excited and nervous to get into my classroom and start teaching my grade 5/6 and 7/8 classes.
This term I have learned so much in my ICT for Education course and I am so excited to use the different apps and websites that I have learned about in my classroom during my placement and my own future classroom. My top three favourite things that I have learned about this term:
Animoto:
A super cool website that allows you yo create picture slideshows with music to add more diversity in your classroom.
Pro: Can bring out creativity in your students.
Con: Can only be 30 seconds long unless you pay a lot of money.
Weebly:
A website that allows you to make websites, for free! Connect with your students and the parents of your students through an online website, or get yourself out there for a job with an online e-portfolio.
Pro: You can have another stream of communication with parents showing pictures and talking about what has been going on in the classroom, provide access to handouts, and a classroom calendar.
Con: Limitations with the free program. Have to pay for a specific domain.
Google Drive:
I had experience with Google Drive before this course but I feel that covering it was so huge because there are many people who had no experience with Google Drive and I feel that it can offer so much to you as an individual but it can offer you so much more as a teacher.
Pro: You can view your students work and have them submit work to you through the Google Drive, because it is on the "cloud" crashing computers, or forgetting it at home are no longer valid excuses.
Con: The Google Docs portion lacks some of the features that Microsoft Word has.
There are so many things that we have taken in this term and I can't wait to use all of them in my classroom...when I get one! Hopefully I can keep up my blog somewhat and share my thoughts while I am pre-service teaching and then eventually through a classroom blog!
Til' Then!!
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Monday, March 3, 2014
#Selfie
They are taking over the internet. Posts from individuals young and old, male and female. The selfie. On a side note, the world selfie isn't recognized by spell check, which I am actually very surprised by. But I digress, this week we were required to take selfies, add a quote from the book or a major idea that stuck out to us and I thought that this assignment was GREAT! It really related the quote or idea to the person who thought that it was important, it just made it very personal and connected. Here is mine! ( I never take selfies, therefore I did not have any on hand- so I had to quickly take one and put my idea on it!)
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I will be using this in my classroom because it is very easy to use and students can do it right from their phone or tablet! Easy and accessible, what more can a teacher ask for?!
Till next time!
I will be using this in my classroom because it is very easy to use and students can do it right from their phone or tablet! Easy and accessible, what more can a teacher ask for?!
Till next time!
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
PLN!
What I took away from this week was how important a PLN is to being a good teacher, as someone who is constantly building his or herself. A PLN allows you to ask questions and build on your resources through web resources, such as social media sites like Twitter. You can follow other teachers or educational resources and join conversations with teachers around the country or even around the world.
For Manitoba educators there is also a very cool site called MAPLE: Manitoba Professional Learning Environment, this site allows you to share resources and join conversations with other teachers around the province. This website to me is great because the information that it has will be formed around the Manitoba curriculum and you can find information specific to grades and courses. One of the other great perks of this site is that there is information and dates to professional development events that may be happening based on specific groups or areas of interest to you. MAPLE also provides Manitoba teachers with video resources, you can view presentations from educators or professional development sessions online.
John Evans who was presenting MAPLE to us made an excellent point that I plan on remembering throughout my teaching career. He said that we as teachers have a mind set to keep on learning but that we end up getting into a groove and teaching the same material the same ways over and over. That is what your PLN is all about, building your resources and your professional development to continue to better yourself as a teacher.
On a side note, always remember to "Publish" your blog. Double check, double check! ~ Sorry for the late post!
For Manitoba educators there is also a very cool site called MAPLE: Manitoba Professional Learning Environment, this site allows you to share resources and join conversations with other teachers around the province. This website to me is great because the information that it has will be formed around the Manitoba curriculum and you can find information specific to grades and courses. One of the other great perks of this site is that there is information and dates to professional development events that may be happening based on specific groups or areas of interest to you. MAPLE also provides Manitoba teachers with video resources, you can view presentations from educators or professional development sessions online.
John Evans who was presenting MAPLE to us made an excellent point that I plan on remembering throughout my teaching career. He said that we as teachers have a mind set to keep on learning but that we end up getting into a groove and teaching the same material the same ways over and over. That is what your PLN is all about, building your resources and your professional development to continue to better yourself as a teacher.
On a side note, always remember to "Publish" your blog. Double check, double check! ~ Sorry for the late post!
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Let's Make a Movie!!!
This week we got to do something extra fun and hilarious in ICT- we got to make movies! Now i'm not going to give it away as to what ours is, but it was a hoot to film and put together! On Monday we looked at videos and discussed what we can do with them, got into our groups and started talking about what we were going to do for short films. Tuesday we got our story board together and had everything planned out from roles, to props, and costumes. Wednesday we were busy all class filming but managed to get it all together and all of our scenes shot, there were MANY laughs to be had! Today (Thursday) we managed to throw all of our scenes together, overlay our music file, and do some editing to get a final product all in three days.
A little snapshot from our movie:
In order to get our project together we decided to film all of our scenes on an iPad and transfer the files over to a PC and use Windows Movie Maker. There would have been an easier way to go about this than we did. What we did was e-mail the individual files from the iPad to the PC, this was a time consuming and tedious process because we could only e-mail one file at a time and we had about twenty two. A faster process we noticed afterward would have been to plug the iPad in via USB and transfer the files that way. Lesson learned. When we had all the files transferred to the PC we put them into Windows Movie Maker and began editing our clips, moving them around, and getting our timing right. A problem that we ran into with the computers at the University was not being able to transfer our music audio file to overlay our video. This was a problem that was very time consuming and put a halt to our editing process, the security constrictions on the schools computers were what was making it difficult to get the audio file. We ended up saving what we had done and e-mailing the file, opening it up on a laptop and finishing the editing that way. This made it easier to add the audio because it was already purchased and on the laptop!
These are great skills for our students to have because it can really bring life to any projects that they may want to do a video for. Students could record themselves and make a video instead of doing a power point presentation, this may be easier for some students because they may be able to express their creative side and may be more comfortable presenting a movie rather than getting up and doing a power point presentation in front of the class. It is also more interactive and provides an opportunity to present more information that may not be able to be expressed in the form of a picture, or brought into the classroom. I will definitely be using this in my classroom with my students in multiple classes such as ELA- presenting a story line of a book that they have read, Science- using stop motion to make their own representations of properties of matter, or mitosis/meiosis. The possibilities are really endless in the movie making in the classroom!
This is a really fun exercise that I can't wait to use in the classroom with my students. Fun, educational, and engaging, what more can a teacher ask for?
A little snapshot from our movie:
In order to get our project together we decided to film all of our scenes on an iPad and transfer the files over to a PC and use Windows Movie Maker. There would have been an easier way to go about this than we did. What we did was e-mail the individual files from the iPad to the PC, this was a time consuming and tedious process because we could only e-mail one file at a time and we had about twenty two. A faster process we noticed afterward would have been to plug the iPad in via USB and transfer the files that way. Lesson learned. When we had all the files transferred to the PC we put them into Windows Movie Maker and began editing our clips, moving them around, and getting our timing right. A problem that we ran into with the computers at the University was not being able to transfer our music audio file to overlay our video. This was a problem that was very time consuming and put a halt to our editing process, the security constrictions on the schools computers were what was making it difficult to get the audio file. We ended up saving what we had done and e-mailing the file, opening it up on a laptop and finishing the editing that way. This made it easier to add the audio because it was already purchased and on the laptop!
These are great skills for our students to have because it can really bring life to any projects that they may want to do a video for. Students could record themselves and make a video instead of doing a power point presentation, this may be easier for some students because they may be able to express their creative side and may be more comfortable presenting a movie rather than getting up and doing a power point presentation in front of the class. It is also more interactive and provides an opportunity to present more information that may not be able to be expressed in the form of a picture, or brought into the classroom. I will definitely be using this in my classroom with my students in multiple classes such as ELA- presenting a story line of a book that they have read, Science- using stop motion to make their own representations of properties of matter, or mitosis/meiosis. The possibilities are really endless in the movie making in the classroom!
This is a really fun exercise that I can't wait to use in the classroom with my students. Fun, educational, and engaging, what more can a teacher ask for?
Friday, February 7, 2014
Look what I can do!!
At the end of this week we were introduced to what, in my opinion, is one of the coolest programs yet, Audacity. This is a program that you can use to take music and voice recordings and overlay them to create cool digital files that you can use in many ways in the classroom
In order to use this program what we did in class was record our voices, transfer the recording over to Evernote from an iPhone, and put it into the Audacity program. Once in this program you can edit how loud the sound is, and even put music into the background of your recording. This really creates a 'mood' and something that is another creative output for students. This program is good for you as a teacher if you create an exit slip where you record messages from students, compile them, and listen to them the next day as an activating strategy. Here is a little something I threw together quick using the program, and threw it on a slide in Windows Movie Maker:
On a side note the music in the background of the clip is a song called 'Love You Don't Go' by JEKK from a FREE website called Jamendo, all of the music on this site is free to download and use in videos! This is also another great way to use Evernote, if you are not familiar with the program I have blogged about it a few weeks ago!
Now Audacity isn't the only cool program that we used this week, we also explored quite a few programs that involve photo editing. Here I have a before and after shot of a picture of my niece that I edited using the programs Citrify and Tuxpi.
How cute is she? These are two programs that are really cool and both offer a variety of different features that students can easily use, these programs are super user friendly. These photo editing programs are another way to offer students a creative outlet using technology that allows them to express themselves in their projects and presentations and truly make them unique to themselves.
I hope you get some use out of these websites, I know I sure will; I am already thinking of ways to incorporate them into my next 5/6 pre-service teaching placement.
In order to use this program what we did in class was record our voices, transfer the recording over to Evernote from an iPhone, and put it into the Audacity program. Once in this program you can edit how loud the sound is, and even put music into the background of your recording. This really creates a 'mood' and something that is another creative output for students. This program is good for you as a teacher if you create an exit slip where you record messages from students, compile them, and listen to them the next day as an activating strategy. Here is a little something I threw together quick using the program, and threw it on a slide in Windows Movie Maker:
On a side note the music in the background of the clip is a song called 'Love You Don't Go' by JEKK from a FREE website called Jamendo, all of the music on this site is free to download and use in videos! This is also another great way to use Evernote, if you are not familiar with the program I have blogged about it a few weeks ago!
Now Audacity isn't the only cool program that we used this week, we also explored quite a few programs that involve photo editing. Here I have a before and after shot of a picture of my niece that I edited using the programs Citrify and Tuxpi.
Before:
After:
How cute is she? These are two programs that are really cool and both offer a variety of different features that students can easily use, these programs are super user friendly. These photo editing programs are another way to offer students a creative outlet using technology that allows them to express themselves in their projects and presentations and truly make them unique to themselves.
I hope you get some use out of these websites, I know I sure will; I am already thinking of ways to incorporate them into my next 5/6 pre-service teaching placement.
Friday, January 31, 2014
Let's get digital!
This week has been crazy busy in ICT we have still been working lots on our websites and mine is coming along well, a few more additions and I will be set! This week we are talking about digital media, what it is, how to use it, and how it can benefit us in the classroom.
We have done work with a few programs such as Animoto which I am having so much fun with!
It is a program that you can make stories with by uploading your own pictures. You can create a movie-style slideshow with super cool graphics and animations. The downfall to this website is that you can only create a 30 second video for free and other than that you have to pay for it. One of the perks of being a teacher (or a teacher in training) are all the resources that you are supplied with and here Animoto does not disappoint. Teachers can sign up, for free, and create videos that are more than three minutes long! The videos that are created on Animoto look so professional; I can definitely see myself using this with students in the classroom for presentations and my sister has already asked me to create a video using it for my Nephew's provincial hockey tournament!
This program provides you and your students with many more opportunities rather than just making power point presentations or poster boards for projects. It allows you to incorporate technology into the classroom in so many more ways and also allows your students to express their creativity and individuality, one thing that I believe to be extra important in the classroom to helping the students develop and to help you get to know your students better.
I leave you now with an example of a video that I made with Animoto composed of some pictures of my horses, enjoy!
Ti'll next time!
We have done work with a few programs such as Animoto which I am having so much fun with!
It is a program that you can make stories with by uploading your own pictures. You can create a movie-style slideshow with super cool graphics and animations. The downfall to this website is that you can only create a 30 second video for free and other than that you have to pay for it. One of the perks of being a teacher (or a teacher in training) are all the resources that you are supplied with and here Animoto does not disappoint. Teachers can sign up, for free, and create videos that are more than three minutes long! The videos that are created on Animoto look so professional; I can definitely see myself using this with students in the classroom for presentations and my sister has already asked me to create a video using it for my Nephew's provincial hockey tournament!
This program provides you and your students with many more opportunities rather than just making power point presentations or poster boards for projects. It allows you to incorporate technology into the classroom in so many more ways and also allows your students to express their creativity and individuality, one thing that I believe to be extra important in the classroom to helping the students develop and to help you get to know your students better.
I leave you now with an example of a video that I made with Animoto composed of some pictures of my horses, enjoy!
Ti'll next time!
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Wonderful World of Technology!
What a week in technology! We are talking about e-portfolios and building websites and I have my own website underway, which is very exciting! Now I have never made my own website before so this is a learning experience. I am still figuring out the ins and outs of how it is all done.
Cheers!
We were given a list of different sites that we could use to make websites with:
-Yola
-Weebly
-Google Websites
As much as I wanted to keep everything under my Google account, you saw how much I like all of it in my last blog, I chose to use Weebly because it seemed user friendly and the templates were sleek and professional looking (not to mention it was also free! Win-Win!!), sorry Google.
Isn't it pretty? I have already seen a few teacher websites so I have a pretty good idea of what I want to include on my classroom website, but first I want to talk about why it is a good thing to have a website for your classroom.
We are in a world of technology, it is around us everywhere, and if we can incorporate it properly into the classroom it can not only make our lives as teachers easier but make things much easier for our students and their parents as well. For students we can include deadlines of assignments, this is great because students can forget to write deadlines down in their agendas or forget them at school. By having these features on the website students will be able to access page numbers, question numbers, and due dates via website.
Students will also be able to access any resources that you may have used in class such as websites or articles. If you provide these links to your students they will have them available to them always. This also avoids nagging questions to the teacher such as "what was that website?" "I can't find that website anymore!", this encourages independence in students.
This is also a great resource for parents because they have access to what their kids are doing in the classroom, they can see deadlines and schedules themselves. Another great resource for parents is to provide them with forms that you may be sending home with students. Sometimes these forms don't make it home, get ripped or ruined, accidentally thrown out, or lost once they get home. This gives parents the opportunity to print out these forms a second time or find out more about where you may be taking the kids or what you are doing with them. If you are going on field trips you can provide links to websites, maps, and other various information that is on the website that maybe wasn't included in a descriptive handout. You can also provide parents with examples of students work by taking pictures and posting them on the website, or pictures of the classroom so parents can see what students have been doing.
Another great feature to have on your website is to create a teacher profile, you can include your e-portfolio or just include a picture and a short description of yourself. This may give parents some ease at knowing who their children are spending their days with. This will build a good relationship between parent and teacher which is important in our students education. The learning process includes a triangular relationship between student, teacher, and parent.
These are only a few of the great opportunities that having a website provides to the classroom and is another great way to incorporate technology! I can't wait until my website is up and running, even if I don't have my own classroom to use it with yet, I see possibilities in using it while student teaching!
I'll leave you now with a super cute video from Kid Snippets!
Cheers!
Friday, January 17, 2014
Google Drive, Google Drive, Google Drive!!!!
I thought it would only be appropriate to start this week's blog off with a little chant (today's blog title) about one of my favorite programs that we just so happened to be talking about this week in ICT!
Google Drive ladies and gentlemen!
This program, in my opinion, is one of the best things that could have happened to me in my university career. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Google Drive let me give you the run down. This program gives you the ability to create documents, slideshows, spreadsheets, drawings, forms, and allows you to add other 'apps', for example the Desmos Graphing Calculator, all while storing it in a 'cloud' out on the web which makes it accessible from any device that has internet access! I know, sounds too good to be true, right? Wrong! It does exist and I find myself using it daily.
Now you may think, "why is that useful when I only use one device which has all of my files on it?" this is where you and I may differ. I walk to school every day and therefore I do not haul my laptop around with me because: a) Living in Manitoba and it being winter I have a fear of slipping and falling on the ice and smashing my laptop in my bag and b) it adds quite a bit of weight to my already full-of-books bag, which can really take a toll on a girls back! But I digress, from a student standpoint this program makes it easy for me to access all of my school assignments no matter what device I may be on. I can be on my laptop in my apartment, my desktop when I am at home for the weekends, the school's computers at the University, my tablet when I am in class, and my smartphone when I am on the road. Did I mention I travel a lot? Oh, and another fun fact, it is fairly compatible with Apple products. I can edit my documents and files from my Ipad and my Iphone, fun I know! There are apps for Google Drive available that I have downloaded on my tablet and phone. Google Drive really takes the pain out of having to e-mail my assignment to myself every time I make a change to it in order to access it later when I am on a different device.
This isn't where the Google Drive's awesome features end. Have you ever been apart of a group project and found it extremely difficult to find days and times where you could all meet because of your busy schedules? If you have ever been a student of any type, weather it be high school or post secondary education, your answer is probably yes and if it isn't you are in the minority that has never had a problem with a group project, ever! Now being in education we know all about the negatives of group projects, but we are also told that they have to happen, it helps us become educators, and so on (do you catch my bias on the group project topic?). But once again, I digress, the great thing about Google Drive is that you can share your files with others and you can all work on, edit, add information at the same time or at separate times. This means that you don't have to be in the same room at the same time in order to complete a group project! There are more fun little features like adding comments to communicate on a certain part of the project, or open up the chat box feature and carry on a conversation while you work. If you are skeptical about this, fear not because I have done it before with complete success! Put five busy education students in a group together and we will overcome and come out in the end successful, with minimal stress I may add.
I know all of this sounds great but I haven't talked about my all time favourite feature about this program, boys and girls get ready for your mind to be blown. Google Docs has an automatic save feature, I know I can hear your gasps of amazement from here! I had the same reaction when I first found out about this feature. How many of us have been working on a project and got a great start or accomplished a huge chunk of a paper only to have your power go out or your computer crash and end up losing everything. I know the heart sinking feeling and I am all too familiar with being near finished an assignment only to loose about half of what you had been working on being completely mortified that you will never get back what you had been working on.
Now that I have touched on a few of the factors that make Google Drive a great program from a student standpoint, let me tell you about a few of the great features that make it awesome for a classroom. Number one, the "I forgot my homework" excuse. One of the great things about the cloud in Google Drive is that if your students forget their homework they can access it from any of the computers in the school, print and hand it in.
Number two, your students can submit files to you by sharing their Google Drive file with you and it will pop up in your gmail and it is now stored in your Google Drive. Not only is this green by saving a lot of paper and ink but if you already have your students email assignments to you, the chance of the email being accidentally deleted or the attachment not working is eliminated. No formatting issues here!
The third great feature from a teacher standpoint is that you can have students share their assignments with you when they first start working on them and have access to their assignment while they are working on it. This means that you can see what students are actually keeping up and working on their assignments and what students are leaving theirs till last minute. This provides you, as a teacher, with the opportunity to approach that student and see if they are having difficulties with the project or get them back on track. This approach was actually used in my pre-service teaching placement and was very efficient!
Another awesome thing that can be done with Google Drive is sharing assignments or notes with students so they can access these from home, providing they have internet access, if they forget a binder or the assignment at school (but that never happens, right?). This means that students can be more independent and still have access to that file themselves.
Before you go off running to create a Google Drive account thinking that it has no faults, I am going to burst your bubble. Like any program there are a few things that Google Drive could improve on. Firstly there are some factors in Google Docs that Microsoft or other word processing programs have that Google Docs does not support. For example, Google Docs does not have the "other first page" option where the second page in the document can be the first numbered page of the entire document. While this is frustrating, I have found it is not the end of the world- I just create a title page for the document in a new file, easy-peasy! There are a few other formatting issues that I have come across, such as the margins being quite small, so small that when you add your page number into a header that it is cut off if you do not press 'Enter' to move it down the page slightly. Once again, a minor issue but I feel as though it is good to let others know about it so you don't per chance print a document to only find out that your page number is only half showing on the paper, get frustrated, crumple up the paper in rage, and figure out how to solve the problem and print again with trial and error, all the while wasting of paper, ink, and money. Three things most university students are short on.
Okay, now you can run off and create your Google Drive and have as much fun with it as I do. I am off to complete my paper due Monday, which I am doing on my Google Drive. Today's pictures brought to you by Evernote, a super cool program for another blog... another time.
Till then Folks!
Keep calm and pretend it's on the lesson plan!!!
Google Drive ladies and gentlemen!
This program, in my opinion, is one of the best things that could have happened to me in my university career. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Google Drive let me give you the run down. This program gives you the ability to create documents, slideshows, spreadsheets, drawings, forms, and allows you to add other 'apps', for example the Desmos Graphing Calculator, all while storing it in a 'cloud' out on the web which makes it accessible from any device that has internet access! I know, sounds too good to be true, right? Wrong! It does exist and I find myself using it daily.
Now you may think, "why is that useful when I only use one device which has all of my files on it?" this is where you and I may differ. I walk to school every day and therefore I do not haul my laptop around with me because: a) Living in Manitoba and it being winter I have a fear of slipping and falling on the ice and smashing my laptop in my bag and b) it adds quite a bit of weight to my already full-of-books bag, which can really take a toll on a girls back! But I digress, from a student standpoint this program makes it easy for me to access all of my school assignments no matter what device I may be on. I can be on my laptop in my apartment, my desktop when I am at home for the weekends, the school's computers at the University, my tablet when I am in class, and my smartphone when I am on the road. Did I mention I travel a lot? Oh, and another fun fact, it is fairly compatible with Apple products. I can edit my documents and files from my Ipad and my Iphone, fun I know! There are apps for Google Drive available that I have downloaded on my tablet and phone. Google Drive really takes the pain out of having to e-mail my assignment to myself every time I make a change to it in order to access it later when I am on a different device.
This isn't where the Google Drive's awesome features end. Have you ever been apart of a group project and found it extremely difficult to find days and times where you could all meet because of your busy schedules? If you have ever been a student of any type, weather it be high school or post secondary education, your answer is probably yes and if it isn't you are in the minority that has never had a problem with a group project, ever! Now being in education we know all about the negatives of group projects, but we are also told that they have to happen, it helps us become educators, and so on (do you catch my bias on the group project topic?). But once again, I digress, the great thing about Google Drive is that you can share your files with others and you can all work on, edit, add information at the same time or at separate times. This means that you don't have to be in the same room at the same time in order to complete a group project! There are more fun little features like adding comments to communicate on a certain part of the project, or open up the chat box feature and carry on a conversation while you work. If you are skeptical about this, fear not because I have done it before with complete success! Put five busy education students in a group together and we will overcome and come out in the end successful, with minimal stress I may add.
I know all of this sounds great but I haven't talked about my all time favourite feature about this program, boys and girls get ready for your mind to be blown. Google Docs has an automatic save feature, I know I can hear your gasps of amazement from here! I had the same reaction when I first found out about this feature. How many of us have been working on a project and got a great start or accomplished a huge chunk of a paper only to have your power go out or your computer crash and end up losing everything. I know the heart sinking feeling and I am all too familiar with being near finished an assignment only to loose about half of what you had been working on being completely mortified that you will never get back what you had been working on.
Now that I have touched on a few of the factors that make Google Drive a great program from a student standpoint, let me tell you about a few of the great features that make it awesome for a classroom. Number one, the "I forgot my homework" excuse. One of the great things about the cloud in Google Drive is that if your students forget their homework they can access it from any of the computers in the school, print and hand it in.
Number two, your students can submit files to you by sharing their Google Drive file with you and it will pop up in your gmail and it is now stored in your Google Drive. Not only is this green by saving a lot of paper and ink but if you already have your students email assignments to you, the chance of the email being accidentally deleted or the attachment not working is eliminated. No formatting issues here!
The third great feature from a teacher standpoint is that you can have students share their assignments with you when they first start working on them and have access to their assignment while they are working on it. This means that you can see what students are actually keeping up and working on their assignments and what students are leaving theirs till last minute. This provides you, as a teacher, with the opportunity to approach that student and see if they are having difficulties with the project or get them back on track. This approach was actually used in my pre-service teaching placement and was very efficient!
Another awesome thing that can be done with Google Drive is sharing assignments or notes with students so they can access these from home, providing they have internet access, if they forget a binder or the assignment at school (but that never happens, right?). This means that students can be more independent and still have access to that file themselves.
Before you go off running to create a Google Drive account thinking that it has no faults, I am going to burst your bubble. Like any program there are a few things that Google Drive could improve on. Firstly there are some factors in Google Docs that Microsoft or other word processing programs have that Google Docs does not support. For example, Google Docs does not have the "other first page" option where the second page in the document can be the first numbered page of the entire document. While this is frustrating, I have found it is not the end of the world- I just create a title page for the document in a new file, easy-peasy! There are a few other formatting issues that I have come across, such as the margins being quite small, so small that when you add your page number into a header that it is cut off if you do not press 'Enter' to move it down the page slightly. Once again, a minor issue but I feel as though it is good to let others know about it so you don't per chance print a document to only find out that your page number is only half showing on the paper, get frustrated, crumple up the paper in rage, and figure out how to solve the problem and print again with trial and error, all the while wasting of paper, ink, and money. Three things most university students are short on.
Okay, now you can run off and create your Google Drive and have as much fun with it as I do. I am off to complete my paper due Monday, which I am doing on my Google Drive. Today's pictures brought to you by Evernote, a super cool program for another blog... another time.
Till then Folks!
Keep calm and pretend it's on the lesson plan!!!
Monday, January 13, 2014
New to The World of Blogging....
Well folks, welcome to my first ever blog post! I have always wanted to have a blog but never felt that I had too much to 'blog' about! I am in my first year of the Education program at Brandon University and for my my ICT in Education course we can create a blog to reflect on what we are learning every week. This blog is where I will share my thoughts and experiences with you as I venture into the world of ICT in education.
I am a firm believer in using technology in the classroom. Society is changing and we need to adapt our classrooms to keep up with this change so that our students learn to use this technology properly.
This week we talked about the importance of curation and discussed some examples and how they are beneficial. Curation is when you work through and sort out the information on the internet so you have easier access to information that you may need more often. I know that myself I use so many different websites that having bookmarks and categories is the only way that I can find them and use them again. I use curation in many programs such as Pinterest, website bookmarks, Google Docs, YouTube channels. All of this is very useful in the classroom to both teacher and students. You can keep a group of all the websites your students may need for research or informational purposes so they are easier to find.
All of these different programs can amaze our lives as teachers easier and more convenient. Because technology is such an important factor in the classroom curation will make it easier because as teachers we are already so busy we don't need to be spending our time searching for videos, pictures, or websites.
Till next time!
I am a firm believer in using technology in the classroom. Society is changing and we need to adapt our classrooms to keep up with this change so that our students learn to use this technology properly.
This week we talked about the importance of curation and discussed some examples and how they are beneficial. Curation is when you work through and sort out the information on the internet so you have easier access to information that you may need more often. I know that myself I use so many different websites that having bookmarks and categories is the only way that I can find them and use them again. I use curation in many programs such as Pinterest, website bookmarks, Google Docs, YouTube channels. All of this is very useful in the classroom to both teacher and students. You can keep a group of all the websites your students may need for research or informational purposes so they are easier to find.
All of these different programs can amaze our lives as teachers easier and more convenient. Because technology is such an important factor in the classroom curation will make it easier because as teachers we are already so busy we don't need to be spending our time searching for videos, pictures, or websites.
Till next time!
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