The Two-Step Plan to Becoming One of My Favorite People!

So, Bing is doing a promotion right now where they are giving away $3 giving cards for public school projects. If you go to this website and put in your email they will send you a $3 gift card for a site called Donorschoose.

Then, if you go to the Donorschoose website and find my project , you can give $3 towards helping me get some awesome new books for my students. You just put in the donation code that Bing sent you in the checkout. All of the (free to you) donations will be matched by Wells Fargo. Thanks for your support!

Final Blog Reflection

I think that the ideas from the lesson plan we created for the IIC competition will be most beneficial for engaging my future students in active learning. Although I'm not sure if I would use the exact same approach, I have already been thinking of ways I could use Diigo to help my students keep better track of internet research they will be doing next year. I also think MindMeister or a similar program could really be helpful because of the flexibility it offers students and the visual way it represents the organization of one's thoughts.

Both of these technologies engage students in active learning because they require the students themselves to interact with the texts and technologies and take ownership for their own learning. This class has opened my mind to many new ideas for using the resources available online and other programs to support the learning objectives I want to achieve in the classroom.

Wiki Contributions

Here is the link for my lesson plan and materials about using Diigo and MindMeister to teach persuasive essays. And here is the link to where I posted the most useful blog from this semester; I chose The Book Whisperer because I have been interested in ideas about independent reading for my future students.

Internet Safety Assignment

Blogging:

For this assignment, I read Elder Bednar's talk "Thing as They Really Are," watched the Frontline documentary "Growing Up Online," and looked at a couple of the resources on iKeepSafe.org. I thought both Elder Bednar's talk and the Frontline documentary were particularly interesting. I feel like I am right of the cusp of the generation gap. Social networking sites started to become popular right around the time I graduated from high school. When I was single, I used to spend a lot of time talking to friends through instant messaging, myspace, or facebook. I used to think it was pretty funny when news report would try and explain myspace or facebook to parents. In the "Growing Up Online" documentary, most of the kids interviewed said they know not to meet up with a stranger and other dangerous activities. I think it is true that most kids won't have problems with predators unless they go looking for trouble. However, I think the sense of sharing too much personal information online is a big problem. I know I have been shocked by what some of my friends have posted onto their profiles on social networking sites. Although most of my friends are adults now and can make their own decisions, I think some of their parents would be surprised to find out about what is really going on in their childrens' lives, and it probably wouldn't reflect well to future employers. One thing I hadn't thought much about before was cyberbullying. The story of the boy who killed himself after being bullied online and receiving encouragement from a "friend" was heartbreaking. I think the main idea I took away from this assignment as a future teacher and parents was the need to teach kids that they should follow the same rules they have been taught to follow in the "real world" on the internet. It goes back to having integrity and always treating others with respect.

Doing:

For the teaching part of this assignment I talked to my mom and my three siblings (ages 19, 17, & 15). My siblings have actually been taught a lot about internet safety already at school, which is a good thing. My mom is also a teacher and she has used social networking sites before so she was already pretty informed as well. However, I shared some of the stories from both the documentary I watched and the talk I read, and we discussed how it is important to have face-to-face interactions and not just live through the internet. We also talked about how you should be careful with your information and how you should you always be kind to others even if you don't have to face them in person. It was an interesting conversation.

Copyright Assignment

I found this first video in the Diigo group as an example of a student project about The Giver. It seemed that most of the video was their original footage, except perhaps for the pictures at the end. All of the clips would have been short enough to use anyway, but would have needed a citation if they weren't original. The only problem area seems to be the music, as it played for about a minute and a half, which is over the 30 second limit. They did cite the artist in the description of the video, but maybe they should have also included a citation within the video itself (and used clips from a couple different songs so they wouldn't exceed the length requirement.)




This is another student movie trailer for The Giver. I really like the idea for this project! The students did a great job. Again, it seemed that they filmed most of the images themselves. I wasn't not sure about the music; I couldn't tell if it was clips from different songs or all one track that kept changing tempo. When I looked through the comments, I saw that the student posted the sources in response to a question: "1st part was titanic, 2nd was pirates of the carribean 3 and last was harry potter 5" The music should have been cited and probably the clips were still a little too long. I think this would be the biggest potential problem for student multimedia, so I will need to inform my students about the 30 second guideline if I have them make multimedia projects in my class.

Multimedia Project/IIC Entry

We finally submitted our IIC project this Friday after many hours of frustration. Filming and editing a video is fun, but it also always manages to take much more time than you would expect. We had a lot of complications along the way: incompatible file formats, sound clips that didn't make any sound, and a youtube video that wouldn't show up on any searches. In the end, we were able to resolve all of the problems (the last problem seems to have resolved itself after we gave up) and I think we all learned a lot in the process. Hopefully with more practice there wouldn't be so many problems in the future. I think that participating in the competition was a good opportunity to reflect on how to best use technology to truly support students' learning. I also had fun watching the other teams' videos and seeing what ideas they had.

Here is our video; the rest of our materials our posted on this page of my website.

Personal Technology Project Artifacts

I made some samples of mindmeister maps for our project.

Here is an outline of a persuasive essay format for the students:
Outline

Here is a sample mapping of an essay:
Example

Here is a jing demo:

Weekly Participation - English Companion Ning

I mentioned the English Companion Ning in my gospel insight presentation. This is a social networking site I have already found to be useful in getting ideas for teaching. There are currently 12,438 members from all over the country (and probably the world, too!) There are several groups, which are basically more focused dicsussion forums. Some example are "Teaching Texts," "Adolescent Literature," and "New Teachers." Another neat feature of this site are the monthly book clubs. Each month the ning features a particular professional book and the author hosts discussions. A popular book in English Teaching classes lately is Kelly Gallagher's Readicide. This book was featured in May and members can look back through the archives. I enjoyed reading this book and looking through the discussion was a great way to go deeper into the ideas I had read about.

Competition Proposal

My teammates, Rachel and Becky, did a great job introducing our idea on their blogs. The description of the literacy challenge posted on the competition website says:

You are a 5th grade teacher preparing students to take a state-administered writing test. Your students will be required to plan and write a persuasive essay in response to a prompt provided to them. They will be required to compose their essay on the computer. Prepare a teaching sequence to help your students, focused on the genre of persuasive writing and the use of accurate mechanics.

We have decided to scale the assignment up just a little bit to seventh grade. We have considered using two technologies--Diigo and MindMeister--to help students interactively examine models of persuasive writing and practice drafting their own essays.

Class Website

Here is a link to my class website!

Weekly Participation - EBAY!

So, my husband cracked up this week when I told him, "I just discovered the greatest thing--ebay!" Of course, I already knew about ebay. But, what I didn't know was that you can get amazing deals on books if you buy them in bulk. If you are looking for one specific book it's not so great because you pretty much have to pay at least $3 shipping on everything. However, if you are just trying to accumulate a lot of books in a hurry (like me) you can find some great deals. For example, I got a set of 80 Newbery books for $40 + $16.42 shipping. $56.42 seems like a lot up front, but I think 70 cents for a Newbery book is a pretty sweet deal. I also got another lot of 100 miscellaneous middle grade books for $40.36 total (40 cents each). The only problem now is where I am going to find a place to store all of these lovely books until I get my own classroom! Also, there is the problem of getting a little too carried away in the excitement of bidding for awesome collections. I think it's now time for a little ebay detox... but it was sure fun while it lasted. :)

Weekly Participation - The end of paperbacks?

As usual, Apple's latest gadget (in this case, the "ipad") is getting lots of press coverage and hype. We have discussed it a little bit in this class as well. Personally, I'm not so sure how I feel about books moving digital. Sure, it was love at first sight with my ipod (I have included photographic proof) -- but I have always enjoyed flipping through the concrete, physical pages of a book. At the same time, I can see some intriguing possibilities with this and other similar devices, such as the Kindle. It would definitely save me some back problems to just have one sleek screen to carry in my backpack instead of 60 pounds of textbooks. I think at this point I am still in wait and see mode...

Personal Learning Network - Google Reader

I had never heard of google reader before this class, and I am excited about this new discovery. I definitely waste a lot of time checking my friends' blogs to see if there is anything new, so this could save me a lot of time!

The blogs/resources that I chose for this assignment are:

1. Jim Burke's blog He has written some books for teachers and also started the English Companion Ning, which is a great online community for English teachers. He seems to update his blog frequently and I hope to see some good ideas.

2. The Book Whisperer This is a blog I found on a teacher publication site which might be promising. She seems to post booklists and ideas for reluctant readers.

3. Enhanced English Teacher This is a blog I found about using technology in an English teaching classroom.

4. Families and Literacy This is a blog put together by the BYU library which features websites, tips, and other information to promote literacy.

5. My View From Here My mom is an English teacher, and I knew she had several different blogs. This is the one she uses to write her thoughts about English teaching in general.

An Abundance of Al(l)isons

This is not related to technology, but in looking at the class list I noticed that there are 4 Alison/Allisons in this class! It pretty much blows my mind. I don't think I've ever been outnumbered by my own name before, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it....

Experimenting

This is about the 20th blog background I have tried. I'm not sure if I like it or hate it, but it is what I am sticking with for now. The little spiral reminds me of a notebook, which is kind of schooly, and I also wanted something colorful. Well, we will see if this grows on me or not.

First Post

This is the first post for my personal learning environment. I have a personal blog that use to write about the events of my life, but I have been thinking about making a more professional blog for a while now. I am excited that this class will motivate me to get started!