My Beliefs

I think technology is essential now a days.  It is something that we need in everyday life and our students should be using it in our classrooms.  Technology can accomplish so much in the learning process.  I believe that we should use technology in our instruction and that our students should use technology in their assignments. I think technology use in the classroom is beneficial for the parents of my students.  It allows them to be a part of our classroom through a classroom website, podcast, and blogs.  I will incorporate technology in many areas of my curriculum and believe it will help me engage my students and be a better teacher.

Lessons Learned

I learned a lot about why technology is so important in the classroom.  I had only thought that it was important because students enjoy it.  It never occurred to me that they NEED to learn and use it to survive in the world.  They need the skills to better our world.  Technology is constantly changing and improving what we know.  We need to encourage our student to use and explore technology.  We never know what contribution it may have on our future.

Strengths and Weaknesses

After completing the UNI survey, I felt like I was facing a new reality.  Some areas that I previously would have considered myself to be an "expert" I discovered I was in fact a practitioner.  There are a few areas that I would still feel confident in calling myself an expert.  I feel accomplished in the areas of operating a multimedia computer system and using the internet to find reliable information.  I also became aware of some areas where I was very weak.  I am very weak in using spreadsheets.  I would say my skill level is Novice.  I understand why we use spreadsheets and can create simple spreadsheets but I know that my skills do not take full advantage of what programs like Excel have to offer.  My husband is what I would consider to be an expert with spreadsheets.  In the past, I have just had him create what I need but I know that he cannot always do this for me.  I can have him give me a crash course in excel and I can also use the free tutorial at www.LearnMicrosoftExcel.com  this will help me in reaching higher levels of knowledge with the program.  I would like to be able to use excel for formula and inputting information relevant to my students for health calculations such as BMIs or other things relating to health.

PowerPoint Activity

This week, we were introduced to the PowerPoint Activity.  We are creating an activity for our students to do.  Our ideas will also be included in Doc. Waters' PowerPoint Activity Project.
At first, it was difficult thinking of a PowerPoint assignment that hadn't already been done.  Once I started looking through other people's ideas and ideas online, I was able to come up with an idea that I think my students will get excited about.  We are doing this activity so that we can see and utilize all that PowerPoint has to offer.  Our students' will enjoy this because it will allow them to get involved with what they learning, while using technology.
As a teacher, it is nice that I will have access to share and use others' ideas to implement and improve my classroom.  I can also share the site with my colleagues so that they can use the ideas for their classroom.  PowerPoint, with a little creativity has so much to offer.  We can make our lectures more exciting than just slide after slide.

Picassa

This week we went around UVU and took pictures that we were able to manipulate using picassa.  We then used the pictures to create a collage and story using PowerPoint.

We are learning this because it is another tool that we can incorporate into our classroom.  It is not only a useful tool but a fun tool.  Picassa has always intimidated me.  I never really understood it.  I appreciated this opportunity.  I learned a lot about the cool things I can use the program for.  It will be a great tool that I can show my students.  I really enjoyed the collage.  It was my favorite part about Picassa.

I think it would be a great idea to have the students use picassa to create a collage about themselves for their first assignment as a way for not only me, but their classmates to learn who they are.  I would also like to use the collage assignment for the students to do a collage of their favorite lessons from Health during the semester.  I also think that the students would enjoy using technology to create a fun assignment.

Week 11

This past week we learned about internet safety.  We watched some videos that were about the different aspects of internet safety.  We also had a class discussion about what we read and watched.

Internet safety is a big issue this day.  You never know who you are speaking to and what information people are able to obtain about you to find you.  The internet has provided us with great technology but there are a lot of people out there who use the internet for inappropriate reasons.  It is important for us to teach our students about internet safety and the risks that are associated with being online.

Internet Safety is actually part of the Health core curriculum.  I plan on educating my students about the risks of being online.  I will also inform them about what is appropriate to share online and what is not.  It is also important for them to know what is internet etiquette.  They need to know that cyber bullying is not acceptable.  I will allow my students to ask questions anonymously if they are concerned with cyber bullying.  I want my students to know that I care and hopefully they will be comfortable enough to speak to me in person if they feel threatened online.  

Service Learning Project

    Lincoln Academy is a Charter school in Pleasant Grove, Utah.  We have been working with Mrs. Larsen in her health class.  The class is fairly small compared to other classes.  The number of students is 24, making it convenient for teaching purposes.  The class is not too big, nor too small.

    Mrs. Larsen has been an excellent teacher to work with.  She has been helpful at providing ideas of what she would like for the classroom.  We all get along well and have never felt uncomfortable to ask her questions and get feedback on the digital story that we are working on. 

    Our digital story was an introduction to her unit on drug use and abuse.  Mrs. Larsen loves our video.  She likes that we were able to show pictures of what a particular drug looks like and then what it does to a person.  She was glad that we created the video for her classroom use.   Mrs. Larsen was impressed with our work and thought it was very well done.  She expressed that it was a great piece of material for her classroom.
    The lesson that we completed fit perfectly with what she was looking for.  It was a great introduction to her unit.  I think that she enjoyed that she was involved in the process of creating the video.  It enabled her to tailor the video to her needs and what she wanted.  Mrs. Larsen was able to gain new ideas for making learning exciting and received new materials that will capture her students’ attention.

The training session did not go so well.  She was not very interested in learning how to create such media herself.  She was able to see how media can be incorporated to enhance learning but felt like it was too much time and effort.  She appreciated the media and was interested in having media in the future but felt that it was not worth the extra time and effort.  We showed her some very simple ideas such as Photo Story, for quickly creating digital media for the classroom.  She was impressed with how simple it was but I don’t know that she will use it in the future.  Not because she doesn’t see the value, but because she feels the short amount of time is not worth it.

We felt that this experience was a little time consuming and it was hard to be able to get together with each other to collaborate and put the digital story together.  We liked the having Mrs. Larsen give us feedback on ideas that we have had on the project.  We enjoyed working with her and how observing how she may incorporate these technology-based lessons into her health class.

From this experience we were able to see other ways of teaching a lesson through technology.  Although we are both unsure if we are going to use this information that we are learning in each class in our future lessons, working with Mrs. Larsen has helped us with trying to see how technology can be used to introduce a lesson.  By being creative in lesson planning and bringing different teaching styles into the classroom even though she wasn’t really interested in it herself is a great learning tool for students.

We both had mixed feelings about this project.  Me as a PE teacher, I don’t find this information useful for my future lessons because we will be participating in physical activity pretty much every day.  Taylor thought that this project would be beneficial to her for her future lessons.  We did like working with another teacher to see how it could be used in an actual classroom setting, but we both are still a little unsure as to how often we will use technology lessons, like these digital stories in our classrooms.