How Far We've Come- Literacy and Technology: Semester Reflections

I cannot believe that the semester has come to a close.  As I look back to January to where I am now, I feel I have grown tremendously as an educator.  This was my first online based class so I was definitely a little apprehensive about how it would all work.  How would I be able to meet up with my group?  Would I be able to successfully format and submit assignments?  Would I be able to implement the resources properly?  As with everything new in life you need experience and time to get the hang of things.  I feel that Team TechSavy  came together and worked in a very successful and collaborative way.  We were in frequent contact with each other through gmail, googledocs and with our biweekly WizIq meetings.  We were able to successfully divide up the assignments.  By working as a team, we were able to bounce ideas of each other, use our particular areas of expertise, and practice the important art of compromise.
 Some of my favorite groups projects were the teacher toolkit we created and the 21st Century Classroom  Parent Newsletter.  In these assignments, we  divided up the work into our content areas and found different resources.  It was nice to see how all of our work was able to come together  into a finalized product on googledocs, letterpop, and pbworks.  In the future I will continue to use all of these sites.

My two favorite independent assignments were the digital story telling assignment and the engrade review assignment.  I had never made a digital story before and had no idea how to do so.   I used my iMovie software and was able to narrate, pick out pictures and music to create my own story.  Creating a digital story is a great way for teachers to engage students. The possibilities are endless with digital stories. I enjoyed the engrade assignment alot because I was so impressed with how easy it was to use and how much the site had to offer.  From grading, to creating flashcards and quizzes, to communicating with teachers and parents, it was very impressive.

I found the whole class meeting on WebEx very insightful.  We were able to come together as a whole class and reflect and present our findings. I particularly enjoyed the  class session where we had a guest speaker, Mary Anne,  who is a digital media specialist and educator that lives in Washington.  Listening to her speak about all of the fantastic technology resources that teachers have available to them was very exciting.  She spoke about  such things as twitter, blogging, webquests, ipads, moodle and facebook.  All of these things can be used to enhance learning and connect teachers to other teachers around the world.

Looking back there is no question that I have learned alot that I will carry with me in my career as a educator.  This course has allowed me to see all of the wonderful tools that are available to enhance, create, aid, and simply teaching.  I am a firm believer that education needs to evolve with the times.  We are in living in the 21st century.  Therefore, we need to be teaching 21st century skills.  We need to be 21st century teachers.  We need to engage students, make learning interactive, relevant, personalized, and fun. Technology allows teachers to do all  of these things.  I am looking forward to using all of these tools in the classroom.

Thank you Dr. Smirnova! It truly was a great learning adventure!

Let's Go on a Learning Spree! WOW Projects- reflections on mine and my peers

I have always been a big fan of webquests, so when the opportunities came for me to explore them in greater detail I jumped at it.   A webquest is an inquiry-based student centered learning activity in which all, or most of the information that the students explore and evaluate come from resources on the internet.  Webquest were invented in 1995 by Bernie Dodge a professor of Education at San Diego State University.  A webquest uses higher level thinking and the student must be able to apply and synthesize information.  They are presented with a task that they must research and explore to reseach their own conclusions and create their own product.   All webquests must contain the following components:  Introduction, Task, Process, Evaluation, Conclusion, Credits, Teacher's Page




I designed by webquest in educational professional development format.  I wanted my peers to explore what webquests are, what a good webquest should look like, and why they are so important to use in the classroom.  Here are my welcome, introduction, and task pages:

Welcome Teachers!  

Today we are going on an exciting learning adventure where you will explore the ins and out of webquests.

By the end of this adventure you will be able to answer the following questions:

1) What is a webquest?

2) What features should every webquest contain?

3) What makes a good webquest?

4) What are the benefits of using webquests in your classroom?


Introduction:

Congratulations you have been selected for your outstanding commitment to 21st century teaching to complete a special task. The Teaching Technology Education Company (TTEC) needs your help to spread the word about webquests.  They need a group of innovative, technologically enthusiastic educators to research webquests and create a presentation that details how important of a learning tool they are.

Task: You will work in collaborative groups of 4 to explore and critically analyze 5 different webquests.  You will decide what webquests you thought were the best and which you thought were the weakest, based on your assigned role.  You will then create a powerpoint presentation that explains what a good webquest should look like and why teachers should use them in their classrooms on a regular basis.


I designed my webquest in this format because I wanted teachers who have no experience or very little experience with webquests to work together and explore what a webquest should look like and what a webquest should not look like(discriminate learning).


On the process page they were to each pick a role of either the 


A) The Efficiency expert- This group member will focus in how efficient the webquest is with time.  How much time will the task take to complete?  Is the information organized and presented in way that will allow student to access it easily and quickly?  Does the webquest contain direct, explicitly stated directions?  

B)  The Higher level thinking expert- This group member will look at each webquest and see if there is information that the student has to analyze and synthesize from multiple perspectives.  Does the learner have to formulate a hypothesize?  , Does the webquest allow for some creative expression on the part of the learner? 

C) The Collaboration Expert-  Does the webquest promote teamwork, compromise, collaboration and discussion?  Or could the webquest be completed as a solo activity?  

D) The Technology Expert- This group member will focus on the quality and quantity of the technology in the webquest.  Does it have an attractive and engaging appearance?  Does it contain videos, vokis, interactive games, and many links?  

This four roles capture all the componants of what a webquest should contain.  I used two different rubrics that I created on rubricstar to evaluate the final powerpoints.  

To check out the entire webquest and complete it please go to: misseganswowwebquests.pbworks.com

I was very impressed by all of my classmates WOW projects.  Each student presented and shared their projects in a very creative way.  Many used slideshare, others used a basic powerpoint and others used webquests.  I really enjoyed how they incorporated different technologies into their presentations such as videos, interactive games, and music.  The digital story telling presentation was very insightful because it offered me new ideas on how to use this.  I also liked the mindmapping and voki presentations.  It was very nice to see my peers becoming mini experts on their topics and a perfect way to end the semester.  I know I will be using all of these presentations as a references when I want to use that particular technology in the future.  We truly created a learning community.