ITLS Assignment 2 PDF

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This is the professor's weekly assignment. I always got full points and if you are lost you can come here for more ideas....

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Day 1: Home Page: (Links to an external site.)

(Links to an external site.) Last week, you were asked to choose a technology curation tool that would allow you to save resources, ideas, and notes during this course. Did you use it to save any ideas or resources this week? What are your feelings about it (pros and cons)? Do you have any questions about using the tool you've chosen? I chose to do a combination of Google Docs and Pinterest. I did save a couple of things last week, but it was a little harder to accomplish on google docs than I had originally anticipated. Pinterest was awesome and easy because there is usually a way built into the site that you can just add it to pinterest and pick the cute little picture that goes with it. It’s way nice. But as I mentioned earlier, I ran into roadblocks pretty quickly when trying to use Docs. If anyone has advice, I’ll keep trying but if not, I’ll just stick to Pinterest!

Day 2: Section 2A (Links to an external site.) : You watched two videos featuring Tony Wagner. Share your thoughts and feelings about what you gleaned from his presentations. Which 'expand your horizon' resource did you choose to explore in Section 2A? Share what you learned with your classmates here. Okay, I know this class is about education and stuff but I can’t sit by and let him introduce what he is going to talk about without my two cents so here they are. I think the student loan crisis will not be solved by innovation alone, but it will be greatly helped when we stop handing out student loans like candy. When no one gets a loan, no one will go to those expensive colleges, then those expensive colleges will have to lower tuition and then people will go there again. It kind of makes me mad when people say there is only one answer to a problem like that and here it is. I don’t think my solution is the one and only answer, but I believe it will help greatly. I really loved what he said early on in one of his videos and that was when he was talking about failure. It is something I haven’t thought about before, but it is way more important to fail than to succeed. We don’t inherently learn from our successes, but we can take a

failure and really digest it and try to understand why and how we can make it be successful in the future. To teach kids to be scared of failing is setting them up to not learn as well as they could be. I also loved what he said about play, passion, and purpose. These seem to me to be so key in getting kids to enjoy learning to want to be at school. For example, when I was in elementary school I loved animals and wanted to learn about animals all the time. If a teacher had come up to me and told me I could pick some project and do something with animals, I would have absolutely loved that. I stopped liking school in about 6th grade and that is not how it is supposed to be. The passion to me is what is so important. If a child feels really passionate about something, we should do nothing but encourage that passion. I also have a lot of feelings about college and specifically admission. We focus so much on just getting into whatever college instead of the why’s behind what we are learning. The common core is just about the dumbest thing that we have in our education systems today. Colleges just want to weed out kids so they have these arbitrary tests to trip up kids. And I honestly think we give too much emphasis on college anyway. Not everyone needs to go or have some arbitrary degree that says “my knowledge suffices''. So, I really enjoyed what Mr. Wagner had to say about learning. School should be about learning! Which to me doesn’t sound like a new idea, but it is so sad we are moving away from such a basic principle. The expanded horizon that I watched was about the makerspaces. This is such a cool idea to me! While it will most likely take some time for us to sort out public education and make it better, this is a great temporary solution I think. To make spaces outside of school where kids can continue to learn and in the ways that will really benefit them.

Day 3: Section 2B : This section shared ideas about setting your own learning goals, along with resources that would help you connect and achieve them. Share your thoughts and feelings about what you gleaned from this section. Which 'expand your horizon' resource did you choose to explore in Section 2B? Share what you learned with your classmates here. I loved this section and learning about goals. A friend of mine always says, “if you aren’t growing, you’re dying”. And although he is referring to business, I think you could apply this to many facets of life including this one. As educators, we can’t expect students to be great learners if we are not already great learners. It is so important to continually learn

and grow so we can always be the best teacher we can be. I think the leadership aspect of this is huge too. People are going to do more if they are accountable and with good leaders who offer strong support and guidance, then people will continue to learn and grow. I also think that feedback, like the article mentioned, is very important. You need to be able to receive and utilize constructive criticism when what you are doing simply isn’t working. I also loved when the article mentioned consistency in professional development. If we aren’t consistently doing these new things, there is no way they will ever stick. Additionally, after reading about a teacher’s typical schedule of preparing, teaching, and assessing, the first thing I thought about was how could we make this better? I wondered if it is out-of-date and needs to be updated? After thinking about it and reading more, I don’t think the principles within the schedule need to be changed, but I also believe we can venture outside that mold from time to time and it would be really beneficial to students. For my ‘expand my horizon’, I looked up ReadWriteThink. It first caught my attention because I absolutely love reading and I believe it is super important for kids to always always always be reading. I also think it is super important for kids to practice writing. Writing is a very important part of communication. As kids learn and discover, it is important for them to be able to share what they learn. If they don’t know how to write well, they won’t be able to communicate what they learn. ReadWriteThink is a place where students and teachers can find and utilize new sources for learning. I think it is a great resource for supplementing student and teacher learning alike.

NOTE: Section 2C has its own separate assignment in Canvas. You will share your findings for that section there. However, please answer the following... Which 'expand your horizon' resource did you choose to explore in Section 2C? Share what you learned with your classmates here. I chose to look at Play and Playground encyclopedia. At first I had a difficult time understanding exactly what it was, but it is a resource for parents and teachers alike to help them understand how important play is to their growing children and it has many ideas for ways to get out and play! The blog list caught my eye and I looked at the blogs it listed. There were so many good ones, but the few I looked at talked about how children need to be taught that risk is okay and part of life, there was one about slowing down as parents and allowing time for unstructured creative play for kids. These kinds of things are really important for kids’ development and growth. Especially the risk one, it connected so much to the ideas I’ve been digesting lately. Kids need to know that making mistakes is okay and a part of life, not be taught to fear failure.

Day 4: Section 2D (Links to an external site.) : In this section, you watched videos about integrating technology into teaching and learning. They were about Webb's Depth of Knowledge, TPACK, SAMR, and PICRAT. What did you glean from these presentations? Which one impacted you the most? Why? Which 'expand your horizon' resource did you choose to explore in Section 2D? Share what you learned with your classmates here. I really liked Webb’s Depth of Knowledge and I definitely agree that it is always better to get down to those levels so students can have a strong understanding of what they are learning. I admit, while listening to the SAMR I was immediately put off because I think that every level here is important, but then he explicitly said that in his presentation! There are times when substitution is important and times where redefinition is the best fit and that there is no end all answer! I love love love that he said it depends. Because I really believe that. When he was discussing TPACK, it really made sense to me. To be able to teach really well, we need to have those three areas really balanced. If one of them is lacking, we won’t ever be able to reach that area in the very middle that is best for the students. I also like how he said that if you are really good in one area, it should reflect and transfer over into other areas. I also liked how he talked about how everyone uses this differently. We are all different people who will have different styles and what works for them and that’s okay! As long as we stay in our context and infuse all our technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge together to create the best learning environment we can then we are all doing the right thing. One of the other things he said was “unleash creativity”. And this made me think about the fear of failure I’ve been talking about. And I think it connects well to PICRAT. I think it is important just to try! Try new technologies, test them out, see what works and what doesn’t. Just try and know that not everything will work out and that’s okay. For my ‘expand my horizon’ today I read ‘Use this cutting-edge AI text generator to write stories, poems, news articles, and more’. This was an interesting article on a new AI chat robot that writes coherently and answers questions. It was interesting to read about and made me think about possibly ways to improve and integrate this kind of technology into the world. Maybe as a writing prompt generator, idea generator, or writing helper!

Day 5: Section 2E

: This section asked you to learn about Google Drive in detail. What were some of the new things you learned about this resource? Which URL shortener did you choose? What did you learn about sharing files from Google Drive? Which 'expand your horizon' resource did you choose to explore in Section 2E? Share what you learned with your classmates here. I knew a lot about Google Drive before doing this experience, but I did learn a couple of new things! For example, I did not know you could drag an entire from your desktop into your folder in Drive. (This is only helpful if you are using Chrome, but I think it is pretty common and I use it myself!) I also had no idea you could shorten links so that is pretty cool. I love how easy it is to do. I used Bitly and shortened a few links, it was very easy. I also never knew you could do voice typing and I found that to be a very cool and unique tool. My ‘expanded horizon’ today was ‘Talking in Class”. This caught my attention because I feel like we let kids sometimes abuse the technology we have access to. They become hooked on screens and don’t communicate as well face-to-face. I loved the guidelines that school 21 created. One of the best ones on the list was “come prepared to change your ideas”. That is something that is really important in creating kind and manageable people. They also talked about being respectful of others’ ideas. I agree completely with this one, but would add something to it. I think its important to teach kids to have tough skin too. That not everyone will agree with them all the time or someone might say something that will cause you to be defensive. Then it is important to teach them strategies to not let small things bother them, but also to communicate their feelings in a positive way. I also liked how they mentioned the other side of talking. Teaching kids how to listen. This is something kids and people struggle with all their lives. But teaching them while they are young, those listening skills will really help them out in the long run....