Oregon Techonology Education Network Conference Reflections

Here is a video describing the presentations I attended at the Oregon Technology Education Network Conference(OTEN). I want to share this with other educators, students, Computer scientists, students, and parents just to get people thinking of different directions that education can go.





Resources:
Session 1: Social Networking and Digital Citizenship in the Elementary Classroom

• Our Nest- Becky's social networking platform
• International Society of Technological Educators-Betsy is a big collaborator with this organization
• Ning-A controllable social networking platform for students 13 and above
• NetSmartz-Resource with videos addressing digital citizenship
• Kid blogs-blogging platform for students
• Literacy remix by Jesse Gainer and Diane Lapp-talking about technology in the classroom and promoting literacy skills
• Born digital:Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives-It was highly recommended and could be a good read especially for those people who are not digital natives or like me are amazed at how much this generation has become digital natives.

Session 2:World of Warcraft: Social constructivism in a virtual world and applications to the real world classroom.

• Ted Talk: Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world
• Blokus-The game I discussed
• More pictures of the Ginormous Blokus game that I helped build
• Ticket to Ride-Another favorite game that I used in the video as an example
• Mithril- math game developed by Computer science students at standford as a part of their thesis 
• World Without Oil-The example I used in my video, designed by Jane McGonigal and others

Coming soon.....
So I know I talked about my senior thesis a little in the talk. I will go and make a video using screener to quickly go over it so you guys can get an idea about how I used math to analyze the game candy land. I will put it in the resources for the second section since it relates to games in math. So you can look forward to that.

Every student must be Technologically literate

I think one of the major goals of these standards is to prepare students to use technology to solve problems and understand that you must become creative about what they do. As the use of technology increases in society students must learn to adapt and find meaningful ways to use the technology that is readily at their fingertips. They need to be prepared to use technology because they will need those skills later in life since as I said before technology is becoming more prevalent in society. I also believe allowing students to use various programs to create a final project allows them to choose a format that fits their learning style. So I say let them be creative with technology.

The other big part to introducing technology in the classroom is that you have to teach students about privacy and responsible use. I think this has often fallen on parents or been forgotten. We need to help students realize that their are consequences. I also believe that technology is only as smart as the person using it. A student must know what are the best sites to use for information and where to look for information. There is a lot of information out there and there are a lot of programs out there to sift through. We as educators must guide students through the wonders and pitfalls of the technological world.

Another major concept behind these standards is to have students be able to organize information into their Google presentations or yodio podcasts. Students need to learn how to organize and present the information in a way that makes sense.They need to understand how to use the programs tools and features for organizing information. Then they must also learn to really only include what is important to the presentation.

The last big idea that I pulled from the standards was the skills students need to learn about how to use technology to bring people together. Technology and web computing has power to reach a large audience. You need to have students explore different types of media to get the information across. This way students with different learning styles that are listening to the presentation can relate to one of the media types. Students must also learn how to use technology within a group. One simple way we have seen so far in our classes after we discovered the amazingness of google docs. By using google docs students can easily share their thoughts on the subject in one document. I was excited to see that students got their own account to google apps. I am unsure if they have been taught about the other resources, but I think it could go hand in hand. They have just started showing students google apps so it will be interesting to see if the freshmen of this year will graduate knowing how to make information come to them. Each student has access to the schools google calendar and can get text message alerts about important events. They are also encouraged to use their calendar to mark down homework as well.

As we have seen in the program it is most important to model all of these techniques in the classroom. Therefore your curriculum most include various types of media to present the information. You must also use various forms of media to inform parents, administrators, and students about what is going on in your classroom. My student teaching site has a website called moodle where students can get notes, print off assignments, download songs, and even instant message their teacher. If parents and students are taught how to take the most advantage of this site it makes the teachers life much easier and teaches the student personally responsibility. The information is there and you just need to access it.

I think the biggest technology that I want to bring into my math classroom in high school is a program called LaTeX. I used it all through out college to type up my math homework. I believe students need to be exposed to this technology so that their homework can look cleaner and they can see what is used in the professional math communities. Almost all math textbooks are written using this program, so if they are reading textbooks using the program why not incorporate in the classroom. I may ask students to type up certain homeworks or projects using LaTeX. I may also as a beginning assignement let them explore what the program can do. This beginning assignment would address many of the Creativity and Innovation standards in the Oregon Educational Technology Standards (OETS). I know from experience that you may not know exactly how write the code to represent an organize the information, so you have to work at it and research different ways. You may also exactly know the code for the information, but it isn't working correctly. This program forces you to trouble shoot and analyze problems in your code. This covers the Technology and Operations standard in the OETS. I also believe that by teaching students how to use this technology to share their mathematical ideas that they are learning another form of mathematical communication that is used through out the mathematical community. This allows them to share information with peers, teachers, and others across the world. Therefore I plan on having students share or publish these documents so that I include the Communication and Collaboration standard from the OETS within my curriculum.

Another technological component in my classroom that I am currently thinking about including is a problem of the week blog. I would post an interesting question or topic that relates to the math we are studying and have students blog about ideas. They would not have to find a solution, but talk about how it is interesting and ways to find a solution. Each student would have their own blog so that they can get their own ideas out first. Then by using Google reader or by following students on blogger they would comment on two other students blogs. Having students comment and collaborate about solutions will again bring in the Communication and Collaboration standard form the OETS into the classroom. As we have all come to learn there are a few trouble shooting issues to deal with when blogging and when working with technology there will always have to be some trouble shooting. Therefore helping students learn to solve their own problems about their blogs will allow me to address the Technology and Operations from the OETS. This is challenging students to use problem solving skills and analyze a problem. Then by having them read other students blogs they are exposed to multiple perspectives. Therefore having a project like this uses technology to address the Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, Decision making standard in the OETS. If I use this project in my classroom then I would have to teach students about digital citizenship. I can talk to them about what is appropriate personal information to put on the internet and about privacy settings. In this day and age everyone has to learn digital responsibility because there are consequences for what you do online. Having these discussions with students is not only important, but covered in the digital citizenship standard of the OETS.

Those are two specific examples of how I will use technology in my classroom and how that incorporation meets the standards.

Working with Student Scores in a Spread Sheet

By finding the average on each test you can see that the class average continued to improve. When ordering the scores from lowest student average to the highest you can see trends within the student's test score. The student may have a low average, but you can see what test really threw them off. You can also tell which subject area they did the best on. You can see a trend within a student's test scores and compare it to their average easily. Then if the raw data was not good enough you can create a graph. I chose to do a bar graph to compare easily the scores from each test of each student.





Here is the link to the original data.

My Favorite Web2.0 tools

Web2.0 means that technology is changing so that you can put everything on the web. When there is internet access in almost every location and more people have access to the internet on their phones people are using the internet to store their documents. Why not just upload a presentation on the internet so that you don't have to tote around your laptop or remember to store it on a USB stick. Everything is being done on the internet.

4Shared.com: Is a site where you can not only upload photos, but share them with others. You can control who can have access to your photos and who can download them. I know that this may be better than putting them on facebook because sometimes if you download photos from facebook they come out tiny. I think you get quality photos from off the web this way. I plan on personally using this to share photos from the graduation trip I took with my best friend and roommate. However this site can be used in the classroom as well. You can have students upload their photos from a class field trip into a folder, so that everyone has access to them and they are all in one spot. I know often people will throw up photos from a trip on their on facebook page, but then you have to go search for them and find them. You can also have students comment on photos in the album as well. You can have a folder of photos from that class on the web and be able to access it anywhere. That way you can show anyone what students are doing in your class and have photos for presentations right there. You can also upload any images you plan to use in your lesson plans onto the site and be able to access it wherever you end up teaching. This way it allows you more space for photos and no worry of losing them. If you are constantly taking photos of your class then you can store them at 4Shared.com each in its own folder and not take up space on your personal hard drive. 

Screentoaster.com: This site will record your audio of your presentation over your powerpoint presentation. Basically you can go through all of your slides and explain what they mean as you go. You could also show videos and discuss them in your presentation. It is like giving a presentation, but not actually seeing the presenter. It is super cool and super easy. After you are done recording you can download it to your computer, upload it to the site, or even put it on youtube. I think this would be a great tool for teacher's to use so that they can provide students who were absent with the material. It allows them to see and hear your explanation instead of having to rely on student notes or the textbook. Also if students are not strong note takers or are audio-visual learners than this could be a resource for them when doing their homework. If they missed something in class they could refer to the online recording of the lecture. I think students could also use it to record their presentation then listen to it to see if it can be improved on. It also allows students a way to time their presentation and practice it before giving it. I think this also could be a way to publish students final presentation and let them have a copy. It can be saved and be a work sample to share with other teachers. I think if you are ever teaching an online course in your life time it is a great way to make a lecture and then share with the class.

I quickly went through my senior thesis presentation on my computer adding description to the slides. It may be confusing and not accurate because I did it off the cuff and didn't review my notes. However it is still a good example, but some of the complicated math ideas may be incorrect and hard to understand since I didn't go in detail.

Google Reader

This tool allows you to compile all the blogs, people, and sites you follow into one area. You don't have to check each site to see if someone has posted a new blog entry you can just check google reader. Then you can read all the new posts and articles. It allows information to find you, so that you don't have to go chasing information.To find out more you can see the Google document that was the basis of our presentation.

It allows you to follow all of your student's blogs and organize them into folders. Students can also check the google reader to see if you posted a new assignment. You can also have a folder for different blogs or sites that you can look at for ideas and resources in the classroom. I think seeing trends of how much is posted on the internet at what speed could also be interesting to study in a math class and google reader breaks it down for you. Also you can use the google reader tool to help students understand how to read graphs and what the data implies. It is a great tool to keep everything electronically organized for your teaching and classes.

It was a pretty easy tool to learn how to use. I was already following group members blogs on blogger for Steve's Equity class and google reader had it right there when I started using it. It took me some time to understand everything I could do. I didn't make folders to organize my subscriptions until later when I realized I could do that. I being the very organized person I am loved being able to do that, but I didn't think about trying to do it since I wasn't subscribed to very many sites. I am going to start using it to see if some of the blogs and online stories I read have posted something new. It will stop making me a refresh monkey.

I contributed ideas about how this could be incorporated into the math classroom. So I helped give ideas that related to my content area, so I talked about those links to math in the reflections area. I also provided a lot of the initial ideas of how to use the reader in the classroom and Chirs filled in areas that I did not think about like the organizing of folders.

Blogging Ideas in my Math Classroom

After reading different ideas of how to incorporate blogging into the classroom I got some ideas of how to apply that to math. I read a lot of ideas that I think would work better in Humanities classrooms, but being the thinker I was hit with ideas.

The first idea that hit me was having students write about mathematicians. I had to prepare a number of books that related to math for a Young Adult and Children's literature class and one of the books I included was a collection of biographies of mathematicians. So that project got me thinking about having student's do a report on a mathematician of their choice. Now I think I could implement that idea using blogs. I would have students pick some famous mathematician or modern mathematician. I would allow a class period to help the students choose and provide them with resources. I would have them all blog about their chosen mathematician and have them read other students blogs. I would require them to comment on other students blogs. I think I would try to group the students together by their mathematicians that had related fields or lived in a certain time period. This way students could easily see the similarities as well as some differences. Also grouping students would make it easier since the students would not have to read as many blogs. I think this would improve their writing and research skills as well as gain an insight of how exactly these ideas about math came about.

Another big idea behind using blogging in and out of the classroom is having a discussion. I thought really hard about what discussions questions I could pose to my students that related to math. After taking lots of upper level math classes in college I always thought about how some of it is definitely applicable to high school math and how high school students could be really engaged by these topics. I think posing a question each week that has the students extend what they are learning in the classroom and think about some higher based questions. I would find a topic that relates to what we are learning that week and just have students post their thoughts to the question. They could talk through how to solve it and possible answers. They would not have to be right or wrong just work on their problem solving thinking. Students could work together to find the answer. I want to bring in some upper level mathematics thinking into my classroom, however if I don't have time to address it in the classroom I can have students blog about it outside the classroom. I can provide some time in-class to work on it as well, but using blogging as a tool can allow for more time on the subject. I could also meet individually with students to see what their thinking is and help them deal with any frustrations they have while other students are blogging.

Another use for blogging I found was to have students be a scribe for the day and have them post the notes for the day on a blog. I think this would be useful for any classroom and any subject. I think it would be useful to look at for students who were gone that day and need the notes. It would also let each student have a turn of taking responsibility for the class and practice good note taking skills. I had to do something similar to this in my senior seminar class where we took turns recording solutions to problems and then had to type them up. Then when we finished a chapter the class edited the typed up solutions and then they were published in our senior thesis book. This way we all took turns writing the book for our class. This could make my classroom a mini-university and help prepare students for college. It may convince students they are able to go to college or more fully prepare them. They may not want to go to college and take this skill to use in their profession. It is a simple way to have students learn important life skills and technology.

Bio about me

I am 22 and starting my last year as a student at Willamette's MAT program. The program is very linked in and incorporates technology into everything. It really makes the classes interesting. So that is why I am writing this blog.

I received a math degree with a minor in Chinese studies from Willamette just last May. I am now going to use that math degree to teach students the wonders and beauty of math. I would like to teach high school out of anything else. I think the math they get to do at that level is some of the coolest and most exciting. I also like that age group. However I don't mind working with younger students and I am getting licensed to teach middle school as well. They get to do some really cool stuff in math too that I wouldn't mind teaching at all. I get real excited about different subjects of math if you haven't already figured that out.

I have lots of interests and hobbies besides math. I love reading Young Adult books. I just eat them up. I also love playing rugby when I can. I played for five years starting when I was in high school. I collect keychains, so if you go on a trip I don't mind if you bring me back a keychain from somewhere you visited. I love to sing and have been in many choirs through the years. I have often been in several at one time. Singing is medicine for my soul and I love expressing the feelings of the music on my face. I however will not be singing with any choir this year since it will be a busy year and I need to focus on teaching. It will be the first year in thirteen years that I have not been singing with a choir. Anyways let us talk about something happier. I have been to China twice with the Heart of the Valley Choir. These trips inspired me to take courses on Chinese history and eventually become a Chinese studies minor. I have taken several history courses, an art history course, and a sociology course on Chinese studies. I could never get enough. Then when I am in the mood and have time I read books about Chinese history. I can't stop learning about the place, the culture, and the art. I have a lot of postcards, paintings, pictures, and other souvenirs of Chinese art. I had a whole wall in my dorm room covered with just pieces related to my travels to China and the other Chinese art I had bought over the years.

So I guess that is me in a nutshell. There is lots more I could say, but I will leave it at that. I look forward to the many posts that come as I explore technology and its use in education.