Tech Integration Plan

I feel that it is incredibly important to give students the opportunity to participate in activities that help them engage in their learning and especially help them build personal connections with their learning. I want students to be able to do work that is meaningful to them, that they remember and find helpful in years to come in school and I want my students to learn technology skills that they can apply to more than just a specific topic and assignment. I believe that technology is a powerful tool for helping students take ownership of their learning, exploring and presenting it in ways that are unique and engaging. The Internet also has great potential for the sharing of knowledge, giving students the opportunity to create projects that can easily be shared with friends and family members, allowing them to gain a sense of pride in their work and feel as if they are contributing to a greater knowledge base in the world. In my teaching in general I plan to always look for ways to help students find excitement and enjoyment in their learning, always keeping in mind principles of motivation. I believe that technology provides many possibilities for achieving these goals.

In my technology integration plan I will illustrate how several different technologies can be used to enhance the reading component of the 5th grade language arts curriculum. I believe that students gain enormous benefits from developing a habit of reading independently for pleasure in their day to day life. I want to promote independent reading in my classroom and give students opportunities to use technology to engage in and share their favorite books, both from independent reading and books read as a class. This will be a set of projects and assignments ongoing throughout the school year and will include technologies such as blogs, wikis, map mashups, digital storytelling, and making internet searches for needed information.

Throughout the school year students will write book reviews on the books they read independently and post them on a specific page on the class wiki. This wiki page is meant to be a place where students can share their favorite books with their classmates in an effort to promote excitement over reading and a sharing of book recommendations with others. Students will be required to write at least three book reviews of either fiction or nonfiction books during the school year and post them on the class wiki. Students will also be instructed on how to create and maintain a blog and many assignments related to reading will take the form of blog posts, including all of their book reviews, and many specific response writings to different books and stories read in class, and also personal narratives, fictional stories, and poems that students write themselves. I want my students to start selecting and placing their quality work online where they can easily access it even after the school year is over. I want them to begin to see technologies such as blogs and wikis as places for them to share their thoughts with others and add to a growing knowledge base.

Other technologies that will be incorporated into independent reading assignments will include Google Maps and digital stories. As a teacher I intend to create my own maps and digital stories to share with my students to help them enhance their understanding of literature read in class. Students will be exposed to these technologies by exploring or viewing creations made by the teacher related to books read in class. Google Maps can be used to highlight and provide more details about locations where different stories take place and digital stories can be used for multiple purposes, including explaining historical contexts of a story, giving information about an author, or creating a response to a certain aspect of the story. Later in the school year students will have the opportunity to learn how to create their own Google Maps and digital stories. For independent reading of historical fiction novels students can create maps that display the setting of the novel, information about the real life location at that period in history, and its significance to the story. Student created digital stories can be used to present information from a biography. Students would search for pictures online of the person they read about and narrate a description of this person’s life and accomplishments based on these pictures in the form of a digital story.

Along with these specific projects students will also learn valuable internet skills in the process of creating them. I want to encourage my students to search the internet for information, reviews, and opinions about their favorite books on websites and blogs. I will teach them how to evaluate a website as a source of quality information and also warn them about the dangers of incorrect information and inappropriate content that they need to be aware of when searching the web. I plan to also search for quality sources myself and provide them to my students to explore. Students will also learn how to search for images online for use in their projects and posts to the class wiki and their blogs. They will also learn how to properly give credit to these images. Some of the GLCEs for 5th grade that this plan meets are:
R.NT.05.01 Analyze how characters and communities reflect life (in positive and negative ways) in classic, multicultural, and contemporary literature recognized for quality and literary merit.
R.NT.05.02 Analyze the structure, elements, style, and purpose of narrative genre including historical fiction, tall tales, science fiction, fantasy, and mystery.
R.IT.05.03 Explain how authors use text features including timelines, graphs, charts, diagrams, tables of contents, indices, introductions, summaries, and conclusions to enhance the understanding of key and supporting ideas.
R.CM.05.01 Connect personal knowledge, experiences, and understanding of the world to themes and perspectives in text through oral and written responses.
R.CM.05.02 Retell through concise summarization grade-level narrative and informational text.
R.AT.05.01 Be enthusiastic about reading and do substantial reading and writing on their own.

This plan provides a large number of ideas in how to incorporate technology into the language arts curriculum, focusing mainly on ideas of how technology can be used to enhance students’ experiences interacting with and responding to the literature they read. The class wiki, student blogs, and book reviews would be introduced at the beginning of the year as activities that would continue throughout the school year. Searching the web for information about literature will also be introduced fairly early on as well so students can quickly begin to use this process to help them select new books to read independently throughout the school year. Teacher created map mashups and digital stories will be used frequently in both language arts and other subjects. These will first be introduced for the students to view on a projector screen, with the technology pulled up on the teacher’s computer. By the middle of the year, students will receive instruction on how to navigate these technologies and have many opportunities to explore them on their own. During the second half of the year the class will begin learning how to create map mashups and digital stories themselves. I hope that this progression from viewing to exploring to creating will build excitement and motivation for the students as they slowly gain more experience and compentency in using these technologies. Students will work in pairs in class to create these technologies before they make their own for the historical fiction and biography book reports. Through these technology activities I hope that my students will gain ideas of ways to respond to literature that they can use in future years of school and develop habits of reading independently, developing their own ideas about literature, and being willing to share those ideas with others. These technologies are tools that can help them achieve these goals.

Creating My Own Podcast

The podcast that I created is a mini lesson in 6th grade Earth science discussing the composition of the Earth, plate tectonics, and forces such as volcanos and earthquakes. In the audio podcast I talk about the layers of the Earth, the material they're made of, and how convection in the mantle causes plate movement in the crust. The video podcast discusses different types of plate movement including divergence, convergence between ocean and continent, convergence between two continents, and shearing, and the volcanos, earthquakes, and mountains that can result from these movements. I illustrated these concepts using images I found online which included diagrams of the types of plate movements and photos that show the results of these movements in real life, including volcanos in Iceland, the Mid-Ocean Ridge, the Andes Mountains, the Himalayan Mountains, and the San Andreas Fault. This lesson addresses three GLCEs from 6th grade science: E.SE.06.51 Explain plate tectonic movement and how the lithospheric plates move centimeters each year, E.SE.06.52 Demonstrate how major geological events (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, mountain building) result from these plate motions, E.SE.06.53 Describe layers of the Earth as a lithosphere (crust and upper mantle), convecting mantle, and dense metallic core.

Using a class blog or wiki, podcasting can be a very useful tool for teachers to create audio tracks or short videos for their students that can serve as study tools leading up to tests or as review of difficult concepts. In some of the blogs I've looked at I've seen teachers film themselves solving math problems on the board and then posting these videos as podcasts. Such videos would be useful to students if they were struggling with a certain concept in math to help them review the lesson multiple times to review and increase their understanding. Teachers could also create podcasts that simulate a spelling test to allow students to prepare for the actual test. And they can obviously be used the way I've shown here to explain information in science that a student might need some review on. This similar concept could easily be used in social studies as well. Parents of students could also subscribe to a teacher's podcast to get updates on what goes on in their child's classroom. I can see lots of uses for podcasts in my future classroom as another method of sharing information, however in this case audio and video are used to present the information instead of written text. For students who like listening better than reading, podcasting may be a good way of reaching out to them and help them understand information better.

Giving Credit to Digital Images

Photo Attribution:
Original image: "Lake Huron Rainbow"
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3244/2606499914_a8d266fd55_m.jpg
By: ChrisMRichards
Released under an Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en

Prior to the things I learned this week about image attribution I probably would have referred the student to Google image search to find pictures, which is where I usually go when I need images to enhance a project. I would have told her to include the image URL in her credits and also the name of the site the image came from. While this method of using and crediting images is commonly used it do quite enough to give credit to the person who created the image and especially does not filter out images that have been licensed for others to use and which have not. After doing this assignment I now have a greater appreciation for the process of licensing creative work and how licensed work can be found and used. Now I would tell a student to search for licensed images on FlickrCC or Creative Commons search and would have her attribute them the way we learned this week. (I found the best way to search for images for this assignment was using the Flickr tab on the Creative Commons search page, which brought up an image search from Flickr of only licensed images. The license itself was also easy to find on the page with the image.) When citing her work in a project I would probably have a student number her images and then have her include her photo attributions, numbered to match the images, on the same page as her bibliography for text sources. It's good to know ways to properly cite images, even if it takes more time and the image selection isn't as large.

Digital Storytelling in Education

I chose to make a digital story that I would create as a teacher to help students understand a new concept. Using a topic I had just written about in my SME 301 (Science for Elementary Schools) class, I made my digital story about how light is needed to see color and how different colors reflect and absorb different wavelengths of light. The information presented in this video was based on a couple of the GLCEs for physical science in 3rd grade, in the categories of energy and properties of matter. Since color and light are visual properties of things we see around us, making a video definitely seems like a good tool for presenting it. VoiceThread worked out very well for me in creating the story. I was able to upload images very easily and I had no trouble figuring out the voice recorded comments. I ran into a little trouble trying to use the doodler and talk at the same time. I tended to forget what I wanted to say next (or lose my place reading off the script I created) while I was concentrating on drawing a line in the correct place on the image. The other problem I had was forgetting to switch back and forth between my two identities between pages. I would be using one identity as the last comment on one page and then I would forget to switch back when I started the first comment on the next page. It wasn't a big deal, I just had to redo a couple comments to get the identities correct with the flow of my story. I tried to be a little lighthearted with my story, creating a conversation of sorts between myself and my dog (the other identity). I'm hoping that 3rd grade students would enjoy that kind of thing.

I can see digital storytelling being a useful tool in pretty much every subject area. My story was an example of how it could be used in science, as a way to connect verbal information with a specific visual idea, which I feel is especially helpful in science. Digital stories could be used to same way to present information in social studies, such as displaying a location on a map followed by a picture of people who live in that location or important monuments. Multiple voices could be used to tell stories from history to enhance understanding of certain events. In language arts, either the teacher or students could create videos to serve as book reviews, biography reports, or to orally present poetry. I can also see uses for digital storytelling in math to present calculations or diagrams to students in ways that they can watch and listen to many times when they don't understand something. The doodler function would be useful for pointing out a specific part of a math problem, or a point of interest on a graph or geometric diagram. Videos like this could also work for presenting students' artwork or writing for themselves or parents to view or listen to. The format of a video of images with voice recordings will probably also capture students' interest much better than more traditional methods of presentation. I can see a lot of potential for digital storytelling when I am a teacher. I'm a little uncomfortable with recording my own voice and I tend to be picky about how my recordings sound, but I could probably get over that eventually. Other than that, I can definitely see digital storytelling being a useful tool.

Map Mashup in Children's Literature

Inspired by the website on Google Lit Trips, I decided to create a Lit Trip of my own based on Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books for a 3rd or 4th grade language arts class. The placemarks on the map include brief summaries about the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, her family, and an overview of the book or books set at each location. I also found web sites created by the historical societies at each of these cities related to Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books, all of which provide historical background, and information about these locations in the present day. This mashup could serve as a resource for either an in class study of one of these books, or for students' independent reading. This is a technology tool that has the ability to connect literature, biography, history, and geography. Pretty cool, in my opinion. I'm always interested in ways to make literature more accessible to students. I also love tools and activities that make connections across the curriculum.

For older students (upper elementary and middle school), if given lessons in class about how to use Google Maps and create their own mashups, this technology could be used by students themselves to create book reports and other projects. When creating a book report about a book that has a variety of locations discussed or just a unique setting, Google Maps could be a useful tool. Students could also create their own maps in science and social studies to map out important historical events, geographical locations including cultural information, landforms, and geological sites around the world. For myself, I know that locating places I'm learning about or reading about on a map can definitely help increase my understanding, allowing me to explore distances from one location to another or even where a place is in relation to where I live. Map mashups are even more useful because of their ability to include links, photos, and other supplementary information right on the map. This makes this technology interactive and also keeps a variety of information all in one place. I would like to think that students could gain the same understanding through map mashups in the classroom, whether they are teacher or student created.

Here is my map based on the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder:


View Larger Map

Social Bookmarking and Lesson Plans

This week's project involves creating a lesson plan and making use of Delicious social bookmarking site and Google Calendars to organize and share plans and resources related to this lesson. My lesson plan is for 5th grade and covers social studies topics related to life in colonial America prior to the American Revolution. This lesson is structured around these GLCEs from 5th grade social studies: U2.2.2 Describe the life of enslaved Africans and free Africans in the American colonies; U2.3.1 Locate the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies on a map; U2.3.2 Describe the daily life of people in the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies; U2.2.3 Describe colonial life in America from the perspectives of at least three different groups of people (e.g., wealthy landowners, farmers, merchants, indentured servants, laborers and the poor, women, enslaved people, free Africans, and American Indians). It also covers these METs: Perform simple queries on existing databases and report results on an assigned topic, collaborate with classmates using a variety of technology tools to plan, organize, and create a group project, and use Web search engines and built-in search functions of other various resources to locate information

I chose this unit for a few reasons. I have a particular interest for this era of American history, I haven't done much work with social studies yet in my teacher education preparation so I thought I would do some exploring now, and I am interested in teaching 5th grade so I thought it would be beneficial to examine their GLCEs. I used the tag "Colonial America Unit" on Delicious to organize the links to resources I collected for this lesson.

I chose to begin my search for web resources about this topic of Colonial life at the website for Colonial Williamsburg. Here, I found a Kids Zone with online games, fun characters, and interactive descriptions of the types of people that lived in Williamsburg and a virtual tour of the town. I would use this site, either on a screen projector or for students to explore themselves in a computer lab on the first day of the lesson to provide an engaging and interactive overview of the topics to be discussed. This site does a good job of introducing different ways of life in colonial America including farming, slavery, the merchant class, and wealthy landowners.

The next site I plan to use is the history site from Colonial Williamsburg, which is not specifically targeted at kids, but it does provide more detailed information on the topics in this lesson and is not too difficult for 5th graders to understand, especially when the teacher is available to assist them. I would use this website on the second day of the lesson, when the focus is on more in depth information about groups of people, trades, and forms of labor. Students would be split into groups, given an overview of the structure of the website, and asked to look up a different topics such as African Americans, women, children, religion, family life, food, specific trades, holiday traditions, and rules of etiquette (these would be different for each group). The class could then come back together to report their findings and put together an understanding of how people lived and worked in this time period and how it compares to modern life.

The GLCEs also emphasized that students should be able to point out economic and social differences between the people living in the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies during this era. I had a more difficult time finding satisfactory websites to explain this idea, however I did come across a page from Encarta encyclopedia online that describes and organizes this topic very well. Students would be assigned to read about one of the three regions on their own, get together with the other students in the class that read about the same region to discuss and answer a list of questions and then report to the entire class their information. This activity could also help students learn to comprehend text from an encyclopedia, a resource they will likely continue to use in their schooling.

A site called The Abolition of the Slave Trade provides timelines, maps, pictures, and information about the slave trade's history in the U.S. up to the Civil War, its impact on Africa, resistance and abolitionism. This site could be used on the fourth day when the lesson includes a discussion of the Slave Trade and the role of slavery in the colonies. Students could explore this site on their own or in groups, or the teacher could present it on a projector to help students understand the horrors and enormous impact of the Slave Trade on history through images, statistics, and stories. This site does not provide complete information about this topic, so interactive activities, information from books and other resources collected by the teacher should also be used on this day. Google Earth would also be used here to show the route taken by slave traders and ships, from within West Africa to the coast, across the Atlantic, and into the U.S.

Here is the schedule for the lesson:

Bringing the Web to Me

For my project this week I chose to seek out content related to a particular subject area in my teaching. Math is one of my minors and I've mentioned in this blog before about wanting to use technology to help seek out ideas for math instruction, particularly ideas I can use to make math more engaging for students. I've had experience in some of my other teaching classes in searching out resources that would be useful for instruction in reading and writing, but not for math as of yet. This assignment seemed like a good opportunity to poke around on the web and find blogs, news, and other sites related to math education.

I found a couple blogs on math education that I think will be useful, Math Education Research Blog, written by a math ed professor in Sweden, and Homeschool Math Blog, written by a homeschool mom who enjoys teaching math and wants to share her ideas. Both of these blogs post news and research articles about math ed, links to sites with teaching resources, book reviews, and other thoughts about ideas in math education. The Math Education Research Blog also shares lots of good information about math education internationally, which I think will be beneficial for me as a teacher to find fresh ideas from countries other than the U.S. Another site I found, Math Shortcut, features printable math worksheets, lesson plan ideas, and links to online math games for students. Click here to see my public page on these resources from Google reader.

RSS definitely has potential to help me keep my thumb on the most up to date information, resources, and ideas in education. Not every good resource site has RSS feeds, as I found while searching for math ed websites, but many blogs and some sites do frequently post links to sites with useful tools and fresh lesson ideas. I definitely see benefits in checking out sites that others in my field recommend. I can use RSS to stay up to date on education news and research articles to further my professional development and knowledge of what is happening in the education field. To share information with parents, once I've created a strong collection of teaching resource feeds I'll be able to easily share information with parents concerned about some aspect of their child's education, or who just want to know more. For example, using my collection of feeds on math education, I can provide resources and ideas to parents of students either struggling in math or needing math enrichment activities to challenge them. For more technologically aware parents, I can encourage them to subscribe to RSS feeds of websites I've found, class blogs, or even my own blogs as well. I can see RSS as a great communication tool.

On another note, I set up an iGoogle this week, which I'm using to keep Google reader, Gmail, and Blogger all in one place. I also set up a calendar and even a moon phases widget, which is useful for some of the things I'm doing in SME 301 right now. I also subscribed to a couple color guard websites to stay up to date on that information. I'm hoping to add a few more of my own personal feeds to my reader soon.

Current Web Presence

When I Googled my name earlier this week I brought up over 6 million hits, which given the apparent commonness of my name is not surprising. However none of them on the first 7 or so pages were associated with me at all. I know that my name exists out on the web in small ways. I have a facebook page, a personal blog on LiveJournal (I don't think I've ever used my last name here though.), I made a wiki last semester in TE 301, and my name appears on the websites for State of Art winterguard and the Spartan Marching Band color guard, which were both created by my roommate. To find all of these quickly through a Google search someone would have to know other facts about me, such as my membership in color guard, my hometown, or the classes I've taken. I've worked hard over the past few years to protect myself online and prevent anyone other than the people I allow from seeing any content I put on the web. For personal things like facebook or LiveJournal that is perfectly appropriate, however through this class I am beginning to see that there is importance in developing a more public web presence where I can put forth a professional image of myself and my work.

As I have looked through the Past Gallery and done my own exploration through building my web portfolio I believe that this will be a very useful tool for me as I work toward entering the workforce as a teacher in the next few years. This site will be a first step toward developing my professional web presence and can also serve as a place to display and share my thoughts and ideas about education. I can use it for future employers to have easy access to my resume, some information about me as a person, and my beliefs about teaching (my teaching philosophy). I also plan to use this site as a place to collect links to work I do on the web from all of my classes. I already have a wiki that I developed in TE 301 for my Literacy Reference Project and I plan to make a web site that serves as a collection of elementary school science resources for my honors option in SME 301. This portfolio will be a convenient place for employers and colleagues to access the work I have done preparing to enter the education field and the work I do from there. For this reason I created a page in my portfolio specifically for coursework. I want to present myself through this portfolio in a way that is honest, professional, and positive. I want others to see my ideas about the career I am enthusiastically about to undertake and hopefully they will give me feedback that I can use in the future.

Notable Education Blogs

This blog, the Class of Ambrose,was created by a 5th grade teacher at a school in Detroit. I took the time to look through this blog mostly because it came from a Michigan school in a grade I am interested in teaching. This teacher has clearly made good use of this blog to provide his students with information and resources to benefit their learning. Some of the early posts provide information for both students and parents with clear instructions on how to use blogs, along with links to other important technology. For example the teacher posted a link and instructions for families to download Firefox for their computers. Other things I liked about this blog were the posts announcing upcoming test dates and project due dates with study information included, descriptions of the GLCEs for 5th grade and the applicable GLCE for each topic they studied, and YouTube videos of lessons he had done in class for students to re-watch should they need a refresher on the material covered. I like how he lets his students know so much about the GLCEs and lets them see exactly which GLCEs they are covering in class and when. The YouTube videos seem to be a particularly useful tool for math, giving students the opportunity to see a math lesson a second time. He also provides his students with other math help resources.

The next blog, Simply Teaching, is written by a New Hampshire 4th grade teacher, posting his experiences in teaching and providing advice and ideas to other teachers. He focuses a lot of his posts around ideas for teaching that meant to be simple, but useful and effective. He provides price and product information from Amazon.com for many of the resources he uses, his goal being to show items that teachers can get for their classrooms that are less expensive. Other posts provide reviews of books he has used in his classroom, both resource books for teachers and fiction and non-fiction books for students. I really liked this aspect of his blog, since I'm always interested in other opinions about good books for children at the grade level I hope to teach. I find that blogs are great places to get the word out about good books, both in education and in general. This is definitely a good blog to check out for ideas on many aspects of teaching.

My New Blog

Welcome to the blog I have created as part of my CEP 416 class, Teaching and Learning with Technology here at Michigan State University. Until about a year ago when blogging was discussed in another one of my education classes I had no idea of the possibilities available through this and other technologies for use in the classroom. I still feel a little bit intimidated by the things I hear about how much technology is changing the face of K-12 education. I have to admit I still feel a little bit tied to more traditional methods of education, like those I grew up with. But if education is changing, then I'm willing to learn whatever I can to change with it.

A few things about me:
I am a junior here at Michigan State in the elementary education program. My integrated teaching minors are English and math. English/Language Arts has always been my favorite subject in school, mostly because I love to read so much. I'm very interested in children's and young adult literature and using literature in the classroom to create cross-curricular connections and open up student's minds to difficult issues. I feel that so many topics can be better understood and become more personal and accessible when placed in the context of a narrative. I'm beginning to see that blogging has huge potential for book discussion, book reviews and recommendations and other uses in the English/Language Arts.

Math is a subject that I don't particularly love for the sake of itself, but through years of hard work at it I became very good at math. I understand the struggles that so many students go through in math and I hope to be the kind of teacher who is competent and confident in my math teaching skills to explain thoroughly and motivate students to work hard in this subject. I'm interested to learn about technologies that I can use to help students engage in math and help them understand it better.

Outside of academics, the activity that consumes a great deal of my life is color guard. I have been a member of the color guard in the Spartan Marching Band here at MSU for the past three years. This winter is also my third season as a member of State of Art, MSU's winterguard team. For those unfamiliar with it, winterguard is a competitive activity that basically takes the color guard from the fall marching band and places them indoors in a gymnasium without the band, performing shows to recorded music that are much more intricate and dance oriented than outdoor marching band shows. I'm very excited because this year State of Art will be attending the world championship for winterguard for the first time. This event will be held in Dayton, OH on April 2-4, 2009. Our first competition is this coming Saturday, January 24 at Northview High School in Grand Rapids. Wish us luck! To find out more about these activities, here are some sites to visit:

State of Art
Spartan Marching Band
Michigan Color Guard Circuit (MCGC)
Winterguard International (WGI)