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Reflection of the Quarter

End of Quarter Reflection After going back and reading my original post about integrating technology in to the classroom, my philosophy of technology in education hasn’t really changed. I still believe that it would be a great resource for the teachers to use and for their students to use. I still believe that it should not be used for the sake of saying that it’s being used or to just kill time. I feel more strongly that students and teachers both need to be able to have easy access to technology at the same time. If only the teachers have access to the technology, it wouldn’t be meaningful integration. It wouldn’t really be integration at all. Students in this generation, and all the future generations, have a very great exposure and knowledge of technology. A very good way to reach them is to incorporate something that they enjoy a lot, which is technology. I think that the most important thing I’ve learned in this class is how to incorporate technology into my classroom with
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Assessment

Assessment The Office of Educational Technology has a whole page just on assessment. It is very informative to teachers and the general public. It talks about how assessment is important and how technology can make it easier to assess where students are at. It talks about how using technology to assess their students, teachers can give their students real time feedback. Some teaching tools already have that. The website IXL gives the teacher a chance to watch as their students are working on the site how they are doing. It helps them identify problem areas and where they might have to reteach. The Office of Educational Technology page also talks about how assessment can only get better as technology continues to develop. It can provide the students with new ways for self-evaluation, peer feedback, and teacher evaluation. The article goes on to say that as technology and assessment improves, it is the responsibility of the schools to take the data from these assessments and use it i
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Increasing Library Use

Increasing Student Use of the Library A middle school in Ohio went from maybe ten or so students coming through the library in one day to over one hundred students coming in to work on projects from their classroom. The principal of the school had seen the trend of schools turning their libraries into a kind of makerspace for their students in order to increase the use of the library. She liked the idea but she didn’t want it to be open-ended. Most makerspaces for kids have Lego sets, 3-D printers, and coding and computing tools. She wanted to turn it in to a place for the students to use tools they didn’t have in the classroom to enhance their learning. She wanted to extend the classroom learning to the library space. This principal turned the library in to a learning center. They moved all the books on to shelves that went against the wall in order to open up the space more. They got lots of furniture that was conducive to group work for group projects. They put as much furnitu
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Digital Literacy

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Digital Literacy I think that digital literacy involves more than just reading and writing online. Literacy in general has a broad definition. It can mean reading and writing. Someone can be literate in a certain area. Like hospitality or social situations. It can also mean reading a situation and determining the best course of action. I think it is the same with digital literacy. The person online has to read the situation and the vibe of the site they are posting to to decide if they truly want to post there. There are three different parts to digital literacy. Finding and consuming digital content, creating digital content, and communicating or sharing it. An education professor at the University of Connecticut, Donald Leu, has two ways of consuming digital content. He says offline reading is where you are reading a book on a kindle, or reading a PDF of a newspaper article. Online reading would be if you were reading that article on the internet and it had videos and link
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Universal Design for Learning

Universal Design for Learning             When I first started looking into universal design for learning (UDL), I just thought it meant having a teaching approach that could be used across all students. However, as I looked into it in more depth, I discovered that I had it completely backwards. UDL is not about having one way for all students, but having a set of supports that can make learning and the content that is being taught more accessible for every student. It’s about making learning and understanding universal to everyone. It’s like a universal design in building structure. The majority of commercial buildings that are built or remodeled are required to be universally accessible. That means that they have to have ramps for people who are unable to go up the stairs to be able to get in the building.             In order to make learning accessible to all students, many schools use some form of assistive technology. Technology has drastically changed how we live our lives.
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Educational Games

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Educational Games             The website I decided to look into is called ICT Games. It has a bunch of different games for both math and literacy. I found out about this website because of my practicum. My cooperating teacher sometimes will have the students play a game that can be found on ICT Games called Shark Numbers. In the game, the students work with place value. They see a set of blocks on the screen and they have to pick the correct number. If they get it right, a dolphin will jump across the screen. If they get it wrong, a shark will take a bite out of their boat. The kids have so much fun with it, so I decided to look into it a little bit more. As I did, I found ICT Games and saw all the different games that it had for a variety of topics.             I think that these games are best used as a bit of practice, rather than the initial instruction of the concept that the students need to learn. Some of the students in my cooperating teacher’s classroom have troubles wit
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Teacher Blogs

Teacher and Classroom Blogs             I found several blogs that I thought were pretty cool. I will show you some of them here. One I found is called Kinder Craze. It is run by a woman named Maria Gavin. She currently teaches kindergarten but she did teach first and second grade previously. She says that she tries to make her classroom a warm, cozy, and happy place because she spends more time there than she does any other location. I chose this blog because it was interesting to see all the posts about how to set up a classroom. She has one that I found very interesting about how to set up a classroom library.             Another blog I found is called the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis. She is a full-time classroom teacher and an IT Director. She hosts a podcast called the 10-minute teacher. She seems to be very adamant that we should say learning differences instead of learning disabilities. They aren’t disabled, they just learn differently. She has posts about so many
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