Project 16 (Final project)

Team Tokyo did a group project on Prezi!!

Reflection video

Here is my reflection video I really enjoyed my experience working with technology!!!

C4T April

The first blog post that I read was from Ms. Brokofsky, she was talking about her not posting a blog in a while and that she was back to blogging. Also how she loves teaching and she got a position as Vice Principal at a school and the differences in being a Vice Principal of a school and a teacher at a school. One of the main things that I agreed and noticed of the 6 things on the list was as a Vice Principal she has to watch and take care of more kids, but a teacher has less kids to be responsible for but don't get me wrong both Vice Principal and a teacher have a lot of tasks to handle. You have to have the talent and patience to be working with children. The second blog I read was from the same teacher Ms. Brokofsky, in this post there were 3 videos. Two people were sorting out candy (skittles) into two even amounts. The main question was "How many bags will it take to get two even amounts of Skittles?" The answer was 41 apiece and only two bags had to be opened.

Blog #13

Instructions: Teach a lesson on your favorite subject. Make a video of you teaching afterwards, post it on your blog. Then write your reflection on how you think your lesson went. Did it go the way you planned or did some parts of the lesson that needed work on?

Reflection: While I was making this video it was more difficult then I thought to teach to people who weren't real. But I thought the Blog Idea was a good Idea and it relates to my field. I really liked making my own blog post to me, it showed how much creativity I have. I do need to work on my speech there were some parts of the video I stuttered some which annoyed me.

The You tube Video:

Blog post #12

In the video Assistive Technologies For Vision And Hearing Impaired Children we are presented with an alternative concept of the majority of our realities. I was reminded of a play I was part of called Children Of A Lesser God by Hessper Anderson and Mark Medoff. It is the story of a teacher and student coming to terms with different worlds. The teacher, able to hear is coming into a deaf school. The Student unable to hear, but able to form approximate words. (For the benefit of the audience I’m sure.) It was an experience that made me question my reality versus the realities of sight or hearing challenged people. Just as this video does. That is where the similarities end. My high school experience wasn’t one that lead me to seek innovations able to bridge the gap between the everyday world so many of us take for granted and the soundless or shapeless world of the minority. This video isn’t an in-depth expose of the various tools and their usage, but it does present several suggestions to alleviate the gap left in the wake of a sight and touched based technological world. For sometime now, 5 years if I had to guess, I have been exploring vastly different concepts of teaching from what I was comfortable with prior to a blind student. I’ll call her Mae for now. Mae was someone who became blind due to an accident. A car wreck left her unable to see anything. No shapes, colors, silhouettes or even light. Her mother helped her do a great many things including a bachelor's in Psychology. Mae lived alone and tried to be as much of a social butterfly as she was able. She had a very positive attitude and carried a smile on her face. She never missed an opportunity to make a joke about her condition and make people laugh allowing them to feel less concerned about hurting her feelings. I met Mae at a practice party. Her mother, an avid dancer, brought her out. Mae had clearly danced previous to our meeting, but a little more dancing with me and she was eager to take some private lessons to improve her ability. I must admit, the task was daunting at first. The way we teach the various ballroom dances are visual based cues. I often stand in front or beside someone and let them mimic my movements. I could no longer say, “here do this” as a method of education. I found that I had to understand the way she experienced the world in order to properly communicate with her. I first discovered the attention that I devote to visual cues, she must devote to known factors of the room. I would walk her around the dance floor so she was aware of how much space we would be using. When discussing degrees of a turn I would have to talk in percentages of a turn or first inform her of what walls to face. She was an excellent follower, as she relied purely on tactile cues to know what to do or where to go. My time teaching Mae taught me more than I was able to relate to her. I am a far better communicator and educator thanks to her. Memory lane trips aside, the driving question for this week’s assignment must be answered. First and foremost, I think our best tool to teaching anyone with sensory impairments is empathy. I don’t mean sympathy or pity in anyway and it shouldn’t be confused at this point. Empathy is the ability to see things from another’s perspective. Taking technology to task using empathy, how can we improve education for those with sensory impairments? My first thoughts goes to articles/videos I have seen recently about implants and the innovations science is creating to end the impairments of a vast number of ailments. Such as Bionic Eyes, Retinal Implants, and Bionic Ears. Those won’t help me in a classroom though. As a PE teacher who hopes to bring ballroom dancing into classrooms, I have to deal with the crux of that issue. The National Center For Learning Disabilities website has a great many suggestions to deal with traditional classroom settings. I happen to be concerned with a non-traditional, not even sitting down setting. As I mentioned in a previous blog, a vibrating metronome app can assist someone that is without the ability to hear beats of a song. As for blind students, there isn’t an app for action. Short of the bionic eye implants I mentioned above, I know of no technology that will help someone learn how to waltz better than doing the waltz. Perhaps, items like Kinect can be used in schools the same way VISIONS in Manhattan is helping senior citizens with vision impairments. Xbox Kinect is a device that is connected to the TV through the Xbox gaming platform. In the current form it responds to voice commands and uses cameras to track the motions of the user. No remote needed. But it isn’t designed for be full audio feedback, the system isn’t something that can be used without sight at this time. I’m not a programer but I’m sure, once it’s set up, it can be used to inform a visually impaired student of their body position and help them correct problem areas such as arm level or posture. Things like Microsoft’s Kinect, Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s Playstation Move are all using a similar approach to motion controlled video games. Hopefully these companies will begin to see the further use in the field of visually impaired learning aides. I would even lend my voice and knowledge to work on a dance game. “Raise your right arm to a height that allows your partner to travel under it in a clockwise motion.” Yeah… I could do that. The search continues.

Aaron Ferguson

I watched the video “Teaching Math to The Blind-Professor Art Karshmer University of San Francisco”. This video mainly talks about how blind students can’t use a lot of mathematics only a rare amount of it. So this professor from the University of San Francisco is trying to experiment a better and more helpful way to let blind students teach and learn math as well.

C4K April

I read a post from a boy named Noah and he was talking how he had a ladybug activity. Where it is a ladybug pattern and Noah and his other classmates had to color the pattern in and the finished picture would end up being a beetle. He did a really good job describing what the activity was about.

The second post I read was from a little girl in the United Kingdom. Her name was Efa-Lata and she made a video on her experience at the zoo and she also drew her favorite animal that she saw it was a Giraffe. Then she said that after the zoo she went to eat a Burger King. I really enjoyed reading and watching her blog post and video.

Smart board project part B

Blog # 11

This is the blog that we had to write as a group and our group name is Team Tokyo. If this is interesting also check out my partner's Jennah's or Aaron's blog page!

Brian Crosby, from the video Back To The Future, showed me how he has innovated the use of education to include experiments, technology and networking to not only meet the standards, but to educate and engage the students in their own education. He reached out to others in the use of blogs. Not only the blogs his students read, but blogs twice removed from his typical blog circle. In this way, he exponentially increased his student’s networking and influence. At the start of the video, he showed how his students were unsure of the city they lived in, throughout the video he showed how he made those same students, not only aware of their city, but globally aware. Perhaps the most touching element was when they brought a typical issue of health concerns that keeps most students at home, into the classroom. Celeste was struggling with cancer and through the use of technology, she wasn’t just a student who fell through the red tape cracks. Crosby set up video sessions that kept her involved in the classroom environment. This type of interaction would have certainly kept up her moral and helped aid her recovery. “Now we are including Celeste in a regular day in school.” This simple statement from one of the students foreshadows Crosby’s follow up statement “not only are we learning but we are learning to change each others lives”. I wish I could do experiments in a class. As it is, P.E. majors have other duties. I have considered sending a balloon into the atmosphere in the past few years on my own. While I haven’t yet spent the time or money to learn and invest in this fun and simple idea, I’m sure, without any doubt, that those kids involved in that experiment won’t soon forget it.

Paul Anderson’s video on Blended learning brought an interesting concept to bare, QU.I.E.V.R.S. (QUestion, Investigate/Inquiry, Video, Elaboration, Review, Summary quiz) In his AP BIology class. He starts a class with a Question and a Hook. In the video he used an Euler’s disc to both bring up the question, and by his method of presentation it creates and sets the hook all on it’s own. He goes through one of his lessons on evolution and shows how he uses this method of QU.I.E.V.R.S. It’s a very student driven learning experience. He gives the students the content and informs them of what they are to know. If they haven’t met those standards by the time the quiz comes around, they are required to figure out what they are missing. He allows them to stumble on their own a few times before he intervenes. This self exploration and requirement to be self critical is essential to be an active learner. Again, if I were teaching a science class, I would steal a page from his play book. Self determination of education, is possibly one of the best things that a teacher can give a student.

Mark Church talked about the students using Critical thinking. His idea was for the students to think of a banner from the video that they watched earlier in the week. In my opinion, I think that this video was talking about how the students should brainstorm from stories things that they have listened too. For example, in the video the whole class reads a book and now they have to think and brainstorm on what the book was about. The teacher gave the student a piece of paper to make a banner about the story something that stands out to them. The question that video asks in the middle is “What’s it all about?”

This video Sam Pane, a 5th grade teacher was talking about how to build your own superhero on the computer. This video talk also talked about Super Digital Citizen, I thought that this video was very good. I especially liked the quote from Spiderman “With great power comes great responsibility.” I also liked how the students built their own superhero and made a comic out of pictures of themselves and the superhero they built. Another thing that I learned in the video was how to use the internet safely.

In the video Project Based Learning, the viewer visited a school in Canada in which they integrated History, Language Art, and Information Processing. Instead of having three separate class times, these three classes met together with all three teachers, and crossed-over subjects. By integrating each of these three subjects within each other, it created much more time for students’ ideas to develop. It also gave the teachers more time to spend time with each student to assist their developing ideas. I learned from the teachers in this video that it is extremely important to get advice from a variety of different people because this enables your ideas to fully develop.

In the video Roosevelt Elementary’s PBL Program, the teachers explained how Project Based Learning presents in-depth, “real world” problems and allows students to research their answers. It also allows students to practice public speaking at a young age, which can help develop their skills and let them practice. I learned from the teachers in this video that through PBL you can bring your community into the classroom and it is a great benefit to the students. It also creates curriculum integration, as the prior video demonstrated. Curriculum integration builds background knowledge and helps students in all areas.

C4T for March

Technology is the main thing that this teacher Daniel Edwards says on his blog. Global inter connectivity through technology has transformed the world of work. But the question is How do we know the learning is relevant and students are actually learning the material? Students have been known if they use technology their more interactive, inquiring self reflection and also connected to social, economical and global contexts in which they live. Teachers are considering to "flip learning" to see how the students react to it (transformational feedback). But the weird thing is that most teachers remembered school as just textbooks and examinations. Basically it is all about the technology, today's future of education; technology restructures the learning process. Also there as been over 10 million tablets worldwide being hosted by schools. The good thing about all education being technology based is when students do there work they receive feedback faster. All in all, teachers need to understand the pedagogy first and then know how to use the technology to facilitate the pedagogy.

I already read the most current posts by Daniel Edwards so I am reading the post titled "How do we prepare our children for Tomorrow". It was talking about the criteria that kids have to go through in order to move from one grade to the next. The criteria is so extreme that there is so much information that the students have to learn and the teachers have to teach. The teachers have to stay busy to teach the students to finish the requirements before the end of the year.Criteria

C4K for March

For the first blog post I read It was a little boy whose name on the blog was Visy Recycling Center. He and a couple of other classmates made a video of a story about Recycling. I commented on the post saying that it was really creative and cute how they had three different people with three different parts telling the story.

The second blog that I read was a class from the United Kingdom, her name is Iron. She and also her partner Josephine had to make a movie of someones job or hobby. Both Iron and Josephine kept looking for someone to film and they found two hairdressers Vivienne and Marita, they both interviewed them and that was there movie project it was a success. They both wandered around again and there was a chocolate booth that was wanting people to take their surveys, which for their reward they got lots of free chocolate. They both kept wandering and found a chief that said that her mom (mum) inspired her to cook. Josephine and Iron both received more free chocolate.

The last blog that I read for this month and from a girl named Emmy in the United Kingdom. She posted a video of how she shows empathy, and she went shopping at the mall and saw a man asking for money. Emmy was nice enough to help out the man by giving him the rest of her change she had.

Interview with Mrs Kayser (Project #10)