FINAL BLOG

This course has really opened my eyes about how today’s technology can be used to make better classrooms having our creativity as the only obstacle. As a teacher from Puerto Rico, I especially know how school budgets really limit the improvement of classrooms and the types of classes that teachers can prepare. I will be incorporating all the great projects that we did into my classes like postcard, video project, podcast, and the webquest. All these great projects are ready to be used in my classes. The resources in the web are infinite facilitating our job and best of all they are free.

I highly recommend this course to all the teachers who want to improve their teaching skills and want to go beyond the traditional curriculum. I would really encourage us teachers to spread the word about all these wonderful resources to all of our colleagues because technology is something that can be incorporated immediately and make a huge difference in the quality of our classes. Thanks Christina for all your help, teaching and support. Thanks class for your support, good luck to all of you, you are all great teachers.

BONUS: LEARNING ABOUT CINEMATOGRAPHY

This is a great website that teaches the basics of cinematography; it is an interactive and educational tool for anyone who wants to learn about cinematography. I have enjoyed and learned very much, but the quizzes were hard to answer because cinematographic terms were difficult to remember. I liked the memory game on the film terms, it was fun. I think this website has been designed for adults and not for kids. I have learned about moving the camera, camera angles, technical film terms, lighting and shot framing. This website could be better if it gave more examples in its explanations.

I have had a great experience navigating this website and I really recommend it. Learning all this information using only textbooks would be boring in today’s classrooms. In fact, it would be impossible to experience this cinematography lecture with out the usage of videos. Also, this information will definitely help us for the video project assignment.

COPYRIGHT

I believe that most people who violate copyright laws do it because of plain ignorance. As teachers, we need to learn more about our copyrights and how to respect them. Copyright & Fair Use Guidelines is a complete teacher web guide about copyrights. It gives us a lot of information about the do’s and don’ts of Copyright and Fair use for teachers. Although I found a little difficult some of the explanations, like the Fair use chart.

On the other hand, I have enjoyed the trip on the “Shakedown Cruise” at the link A Visit to Copyright Bay. This link was created to promote interaction and learning. It helped me understand copyright laws and fair uses. through a lot of examples; like the various cases that covered different copyright issues. It was a fun learning experience. Stanford University Libraries: Copyright & Fair Use also offers more information about copyright and a list of related links that we can visit to learn even more on various copyright topics.

Keeping it Legal, this link presents how important it is to know how to protect your content and “keep it legal”. A helpful detail presented was about publishing student’s work. I didn’t know that we have to get approval from the student and the family to publish any students’ work. As teachers, we always love to publish all the work of our students, but we have to be careful doing it. With all this information in hand, I will certainly be better equipped to defend my work in the future.

PODCAST: REVIEWS

I have listened to Sesame Street Insects with Jenny McCarthy podcast. The puppets interviewed kids and adults and asked them about insects, it was very funny. This audio podcast is excellent for preschool teachers who want to give an introductory class about insects and at the same time reinforce listening skills. When kids are listening they can imagine and guess through the amazing sounds, what is the insect that is being described. Also, ESL teachers can use this podcast as a quick transition to address vocabulary. I would use the audio podcast for listening assignments but I sincerely prefer it in visual content.

The radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd podcast is wonderfully done. This radio show allows your imagination to work and wonder what the character looks like. It has great dialogs and characters. These adventures can be used to introduce history topics of middle school students. I have enjoyed it! Storynory Stories for Kids podcast is appropriate for all ages. I listened to “Bertie and the lion” but there is a wide variety of classic and modern stories to choose from. It was an amazing story with a great narration, I recommend it!

I listened to one episode of Autism podcast and it was very informative. The podcast includes interviews and points of views of professionals and parents. I had an autistic student who was in an inclusion program. It was very hard for me at first to get through him, but I realized that autistic students need to participate in constant integration groups and not be isolated like many teachers do. The podcast showed the big social skill improvements of these students who were in groups. I recommend this podcast to teachers and parents who want to learn more about this disease.

Finally, I listened to (10 news) of 60-Seconds (Scientific American) podcast and I am glad I did. This podcast provides interesting and current science news in a minute. It would help to inspire our students to do more research of the topics that they like because they would see many different topics to choose from. It’s perfect to get high school students thinking and exploring beyond the everyday curriculum. I highly recommend it for science teachers!

PODCASTING

I have learned that podcasting is the easiest way to distribute audio or video files on the internet. As a Language teacher, I agree that podcasting can improve the oral skills of students. This interaction is very important because it enables them to enhance their vocabulary, social skills and to build new knowledge. That’s why I want to integrate podcasting in my classroom. I can create activities like making audio files because this will reinforce and help them to develop their oral presentation skills. It is perfect for foreign language learners! Students can use MP3 players to record interview assignments and then create their own podcasts to interact with other students. We can also create audio books, videos, reports, etc. Definitely, podcasting will create a fun and interactive environment in the classroom that will enhance the overall learning experience of students.

The FAQ: For Podcast Fans link gives us tips and information of what podcasts are and how they work. This information is very useful and easy to understand. Now I know how to find Podcasts, and how to make them! Podcast in Education link presents podcasting as a new simple method to motivate students to learn new things, to be creative and to share their knowledge with classmates and teachers, with anyone”. I absolutely agree with this. It also provides us with excellent samples of podcasts that we can use in our classrooms.

Making An RSS Feed by Danny Sulivan explains in simple terms what RSS is and how to use it. I would like to learn more about this article because there are more things I want to understand . It’s wonderful how RSS gives us the ability to share information and makes it very easy to pull in and format all the information. As a Spanish teacher I would love to create a classroom newsletter to share creative projects and photos of my students and to keep the parents informed about what the class is doing.

SAFETY KIDS

These links give us important advice of how we can protect our kids and students from spam, viruses and inappropriate content. We need to be sure that children are safe when they are online. The obvious solution would be to track the web pages that the kids are visiting, but nowadays children are so good with computers that they can erase their tracks. I think that it is more important and effective to communicate openly with children and establish clear rules about Internet use. This would mean parental supervision. Filtering tools may be helpful with young children, when you use the tools to complement, not replace parental supervision. As teachers, we have to make sure the students go to sites we have chosen and teach them to never share personal information over the Internet.

4Kids.org is a good and safe website for kids; it has funny games that promote learning and it also gives us advice about filtering software. Kids Search Engines by, Danny Sulivan, gives us filtering tips and a list of links that might be inappropriate for children. Kids Search Engines and Connectsafety.org gives us tips and advise on how to safeguard our kids; like detecting web pages that may seem safe, but are not. Safekids.com is another internet site that has tools to protect children, like alerting when children may be having exposure to inappropriate material, physical molestation, harassment, bullying, viruses and hackers.

The article, “A short introduction to the study of Holocaust revisionism,” by Arthur R. is the perfect example of why we need to check what children reading. This shocking and disgusting article seeks to "prove" that the Jewish Holocaust did not happen, calling it a “legend”. I wouldn’t allow my Elementary students review this article because it contains inappropriate material for them.

The article,” Teaching Kids to be Literate,” by Allan November brings to light the fact about the web as he states. Allan expresses how important is that children learn how to research, publish, and work with the Internet and other information tools. We need to teach our students not to trust everything they read on the Web. All of these websites have helped me to learn more about how I can create a safe environment when my students are using the web.

Finally, the Teacher Guide #1: Evaluating Web Pages gives us an excellent guide of how to select good resources for our students. Also this website gives us more links that we can use to learn how to evaluate the resources. For example, checking the age of the information, who is the author and who provide it. All of these websites have helped me to learn more about how I can create a safe environment when my students are using the web. Remember: nothing is more important than the safety and well being of our children!

BONUS: Project Basic Learning

When I teach I give my students different types of assignments like doing research on the Internet in Spanish and English, writing online journals, meeting in groups to plan and create digital media presentations. Also, the students evaluate their peers and themselves for collaboration and presentation skills using checklists. A few years ago, I used to spend a lot of time to create the checklist by myself, but now the work is much easier using the Project Basic learning (PBL). Wow I am using it! But I recognized that I need to learn more about how to do integrate more projects in my curriculum.

I used to assign my students working in groups to solve challenging group problems. During the process, my role was to guide and advise, rather than to direct and manage their work. I love it! The students get really motivated to work hard; they enjoy using computers. PBL is without doubt a different teaching technique that promotes and practices new learning habits. The students have to think in original ways to come up with the solutions to these real world problems. But most importantly is that every student has the opportunity to get involved either individually or as a group. PBL is a great tool that makes it possible for students to think actively about the choices they make and execute. As a teacher, I highly recommend to integrate it in the curriculum and have fun doing it!