How am I going to get people to look at my website now?? Well, Vistaprint and other business cards websites offer the option of designing your own business card for FREE. A business card is a perfect way to spread your name around. It looks professional and will make you stand out from other applicants and will help you make a lasting impression. A business card is a quick, easy way to spread your name around, and your website too! (My business cards have my contact information as well as the link to my online professional portfolio - I also splurged for the business card stickers and return address labels with my picture on them (-: ) I definitely recommend this service for anyone looking for a job in this economy!
While not everything in life is free (if it were the job market for educators right now would not be so flooded!!!), there are many nice things that one can get for free...for example love, family and friends. And thanks to technology there are many free services found on the internet that can be used by anybody. Many of those services, like the one that publishes this very blog, weebly editor, can be used in to help get your name out there and be noticed. I started this website as a project for one of my all time favorite classes, a technology class at the University of Akron, and now I am able to turn this record of my reflections on my experiences with technology in my classroom into an online portfolio that showcases my abilities as an educator.
How am I going to get people to look at my website now?? Well, Vistaprint and other business cards websites offer the option of designing your own business card for FREE. A business card is a perfect way to spread your name around. It looks professional and will make you stand out from other applicants and will help you make a lasting impression. A business card is a quick, easy way to spread your name around, and your website too! (My business cards have my contact information as well as the link to my online professional portfolio - I also splurged for the business card stickers and return address labels with my picture on them (-: ) I definitely recommend this service for anyone looking for a job in this economy!
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Check out the weebly website I made for the Current Trends in Education Workshop!!
www.trendsineducation.weebly.com Here is a presentation I created about how social class can affect education. Class Matters View more presentations from jdurinsky. Unfortunately this blog signifies the end of a great class...but it also signifies the beginning of many things. This class has exemplified the very teaching models that it is supposed to teach. This class and its instructor have been very inspiring. This class has helped me broaden my idea of pedagogy, I hope to take what I have learned and shape a unique style of teaching that is both innovative and interesting for my students. The end of this class also signifies the beginning (hopefully ;-) ) of a great teaching career, as it is the last class that I will attend before graduation. I could not have asked for a better ending. Before I started this class I thought that I knew pretty well how to integrate technology into my classroom. I was so wrong. I learned so many things from this class that I had no idea existed or could even be used in the classroom. Simple things like Google Docs and my Delicious account, I had never used. I did not know that Google was so much more than just a search engine. I could write pages and pages on my blog about all that you can do with Google and the possibilities for use in the classroom. I learned to create webpages, blogs, wikis, and podcasts, all on my own, for FREE!!!!! I think that one of the best benefits of this class is all the FREE STUFF you learn about! Another benefit of this class?? The instructor!!!! I think that this may have been the first class that I have taken with an instructor that is ACTUALLY teaching real grade school students and is currenlty USING THE TECHNIQUES THEY ARE TEACHING!!!! Yes I have had some great teachers with tons of experience, but they are not in the field teaching and doing the same stuff that I am doing. THANK YOU GARTH!!! For being there whenever we needed you, via email, skype, whatever, and for showing us that YES! this stuff does actually work in a real classroom and this is what it looks like! You have been a great role model, an example of a teacher who does not see all the bad things wrong with our school system, but rather looks for ways to fix it! Thank you for being a great mentor. I do plan on staying in touch because I want to actually use the stuff I learned, and when it doesn't work I'm calling you. This technology class has by far been one of the most beneficial and relevant classes that the college of education has to offer. The class should really be offered as a beginning course rather than a final course. This course not only taught me a lot about how to integrate technology into my classroom, but more importantly, it gave me a greater sense of purpose and order in planning my instruction. This class is really about teaching kids better, giving them the kind of instruction that will lead them to become motivated to learn and achieve in today's age of technology. Yes we learned lots about technology, but I think the most important lesson that I learned is that I need to open my students eyes to the world around them, I need to bring them opportunities that they wouldnt get otherwise. This class has inspired me to go above and beyond the regular curriculum for my students. I could not have asked for a better ending to my college education, or a better beginning for my education career. This video is really more about college students but I think that it sends a similar message as my reflection. In this class we did not use any textbooks, there were no assigned readings. All of our assignments were our own creations, any research that was done we did on our own, none of it was required. From reading my classmates blogs and from my own experience, I know that a lot of us actually went out and did a lot more than the required work. Another good video, this one relates to the need for todays teachers to modify instruction for todays students. We are not living in the same society as 50 years ago, but we are still teaching the same models. So my goal for myself after this class is to keep myself updated on using technology in the classroom. I would like to keep using this blog because I have found that it is a great way to reflect on myself and what I am doing As part of my philosophy of teaching I believe that teachers never stop learning. The best place to start is to learn from yourself. Teacher reflectiveness is a great skill to have. I have learned so much more from my mistakes than I have from ideas that were never tried out. Hopefully I will gain some more followers, I would like to say someday that I have been able to inspire other aspiring educators to use technology and reflect on their current teaching strategies. So, I guess that this is not really the end after all, but the start to something new and exciting!!!!
I recently created a project for my class centered around creating a class wiki site. To build my wiki I used Wikispaces. Wikispaces is a free online site that allows the user to build a webpage that can be accessed and edited by the public or private members, not just the creator. This is a great tool to use for group collaboration Wikispaces allows the user to build in video, pictures, posters, maps and much more. Extra features and more complex sharing options can be added on for a fee.
For my Wikispace I created a page for each of my classes. The class was learning about the Age of Imperialism and just finished reading selections from Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost. In groups, the students were to use King Leopold's Ghost as a source of information as if they were European journalists in Africa, reporting back to Europe. The students were to use their class's Wikispace page to write an article for a made-up online newspaper or journal. The discussion feature would allow other students to comment on the articles and write "letters to the Editor". Unfortunately Wikispaces requires that the user must become a member to comment in the discussions, but I did find out after the project that my school actually had its own Wikispace that I could have used for the class, in which all the students are already members. So my wikispace project had a few flaws but it was a very good learning experience both for my students and myself. My students were able to practice expressing themselves using facts from history and I learned what to do and not do with a wikispace in the classroom. After the project I added another page on to my wikispace, called Africa After Imperialism. I provide some websites for the students to search for information on Africa today and how it is dealing with the problems that Imperialism left. I also added an interesting video of George Ayittey, a Ghanaian economist, talking about the state of Africa today. I encourage extra research and provide a space for students to add their own sites or videos that they found on Africa. On this page I also posted a discussion forum for students (or the public) with a higher level critical thinking question to respond to. I like this second site that I made becuase I think that it better encompasses the technology standards and gets the students more involved in the project becuase they have to actually go out and do research on their own and formulate an unique opinion to participate in the discussion. Emerging technology is a constant game of catch-up in today's world. There are always new and exciting technologies being created and improved upon. Many of these can be used in the classroom to accelerate and accentuate learning for students. There are so many new and emerging technologies that can be used in the classroom that it would be impossible to write about them all in this blog, but I will touch on just a few that I think are important. Blogs and Wikis -Blogs and Wikis are online webpages that teachers and students an use to stay connected in and out of the classroom. Blogs and Wikis can create and interactive online space for a class to improve their writing and communicating skills while also being able to interact with the content. They are easy to use and easy to create, just look it up in Youtube and there are many instructional videos, some good ones include In Plain English. Laptops - Laptops are a popular choice for older students looking for computers and a way to connect to the world. Laptops can also be a great tool for younger students as well. Laptops make the availabilty of resources multiply exponentially for students. They are a great tool for sutdnets to use to connect the content they are learning with what is going on in the world. Unfortunately, they are expensive and the majority of students do not have this portal to knowledge at their disposal. Programs like the One Laptop Per Child Project are working to fix this problem by providing free, energy efficient and easy to use laptops to children in impoverished areas. Other programs, like Maine's one to one laptop program are giving laptops to students through school. Middle school students in Maine are given their own Macbook to use and discover new things. Writing skills and communication skills are being improved, as well as content knowledge. There are so many ways for teachers to take advantage of the availability of resources on laptops and the internet. Mobile Devices - These days, students are coming to school with their pockets full of emerging technology, literally. Hand held devices like ipods and cellphones nowadays have the capabilities of small personal computers. Students can easily have access to the web and a multitude of different resources in thier hands, on their persons at all times. A lot of schools restrict the use of such devices during instruction, but these devices can be very useful in a classroom. A teacher can have multiple students looking up multiple resources during a single lesson. The technology coming out for these hand-held devices is getting more and more sophisticated so that using one is even more like using an actual full sized computer. New applications like Skyfire 2.0 are examples of how sophisticated the technology for mobile devices has become. Skyfire 2.0 is an app for iphones and Android phones that not only lets the user search multiple sites for similar information on a topic but most importantly allows the user to view Flash video. This helps open up a multitude of new resources for students. All of these emerging technologies can have a great impact on student learning if used correctly. It is not only important for students to be familiar with new technologies, but it is also very important for educators to familiarize themselves with new technologies that could possible transform their classrooms. This past weekend a friend of mine and I spent two and a half hours making a two minute long podcast. This was by far one of our most enjoyable class sessions together yet. For the assignment we used GarageBand on my mac. GarageBand allows the user to create and edit recordings while adding all sorts of sounds and images as well. GarageBand is a very easy tool to use, just about anybody could learn the basics in about five minutes. There are many benefits and uses that a teacher could get out of GarageBand. Podcasts alone can be a tool used in many different ways in a classroom. A teacher can relay notes and important information to students, even on days that the teacher cannot make it into the classroom. A teacher can create interactive projects for the students and use podcasts to give instructions. A teacher can create a podcast of the day's lecture or a review for the students. Students can download these podcasts onto portable music players, even their phones, and take them with them wherever they go. Garage Band not only allows the user to record his/her voice into a podcast, but also includes music, sounds, and images. The creator can also add links in the podcast to allow the listener/viewer to explore related material. Garage Band is very easy to edit, most things the user simply clicks and drags to the desired spot. To make a podcast, one simply converts thier Garage Band session to Itunes and voila!! you have a podcast that you can share with the world. There are many possibilities to use the technology found in Garage Band in the classroom setting. Podcasts are an interesting and stimulating way of getting information out to students. Podcasts are definitely something that I would like to use in my own classroom in the future. Garage Band is so easy that it is a tool that my students could even use to make their own projects. Check out my sweet first podcast!!!
Inquiry learning is a learning theory that puts the student in charge of his or her own learning. Inquiry learning follows the constructivist theory that students will learn better from their own experiences. Student centered learning improves the students self motivation to learn and other problem solving skills. Common types of inquiry learning include problem-based learning, in which students are given a question they must answer on their own, or webquests, in which students learn the content by following certain steps. Both of these facilitate student centered learning with a bit of guidance from the teacher. The teacher acts more of a facilitator of knowledge rather than the sources of all information. The teacher's job in inquiry learning is to guide the students on the right path towards their learning goal, not just give them the answers. In my classroom I have used inquiry learning in several instances. The students have had several inquiry learning based projects to complete. The latest project was on new technology of the industrial revolution. The students were required to choose a few inventions from the industrial revolution to research and present in an advertisement to the rest of the class upon completion. The students were given a set of questions to answer about their inventions and given time in the school's media center to research the answers to those questions. I have also used a webquest with this class. The assignment took the students to different websites having to do with different aspects of Utopian-Socialism. The students were given a set of questions to answer and asked to create and describe their own Utopian-Socialist community. Inquiry learning seems to be a strategy that most of my students enjoy doing. I would like to implement more inquiry learning activities into my lessons in the upcoming unit. I would like to improve my own skills as a facilitator of knowledge to my students as well. I think that by implementing more inquiry lessons with student led activities and group activities I can improve not only my students problem solving and self motivating skills, but also their communication skills. This will ultimately help create a better, more collaborative working environment in which the students will be inclined to cooperate and teach each other. This website allows students to take a virtual tour of tenement houses from the industrial revolution to get a feel of what the living conditions were like during that period. The students were asked in the webquest assignment to explore the ww Skype is a free, internet based communication sensation that is connecting people all over the world. This past weekend a classmate and I were able to use Skype and google docs to collaborate on a joint google doc assignment. As a social studies teacher and a language arts teacher we were able to collaborate on a single assignment for students that incorporated both areas of study. We both did this while sitting in the comfort of our own homes, miles away from each other. We were able to talk and see each other through skype, as well as share our screens. The google doc allowed us both to work on the same document at the same time, just like we were in the same room.
All you need to use Skype is internet access for your computer, a video camera and speakers. With this simple list you can easily connect your classroom to the rest of the world. The possibilities are endless. A teacher can bring in guest speakers from around the world to their class. Classrooms can collaborate between schools and districts on projects and lessons. There are endless possibilities for the uses of Skype in the classroom. As a social studies teacher I can use Skype to take my students all over the world to see the places they are actually learning about. This upcoming week my students will be incorporating using google documents into their experience with technology. . Google Docs allow me to create lesson plans in which my students can easily collaborate with eachother, even from their own computers at home. This week I created a research project for my students using google docs. They will be researching inventors and inventions of the Industrial Revolution. For the Directions I created a google doc similar to a Microsoft Word document, but I was able to insert links to other google docs and make my document viewable to others. I used a chart for my second google doc. A link from the directions page takes the students to the Inventions/Inventors Chart. The students will all be assigned an invention and inventor that they will be responsible for researching. Google docs allows every students information to be shared instantly on every students computer. This way students will be able to use thier fellow students' information as well for the project, and can also make helpful comments or share good sources of information. The pictures above are snapshots of what my google docs look like.
Google docs is an amazing tool that allows students to collaborate over long distances. It makes organizing information very easy as well. Instead of just having access to information on the three inventions that my students researched themselves, they now have access to all 32 inventions that are part of the assignment. I designed this project hoping to inspire my students creativity and curiosity. |
AuthorJessica Durinsky is a recent graduate from the College of Education at the University of Akron. She is currently a substitute teacher in the Brunswick City School District and also worked as a volunteer coach for the Wadsworth High School girls soccer program for their fall 2011 season. The Lady Grizzlies made it all the way to the Division 1 State Regional Finals. Feel Free to Stay in Touch!!!Thank you, your message has been sent
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