Today, I write about the technologies that I will be using in the classroom; tomorrow I will be using these technologies because I will be volunteering to go to Lesher Middle School because I enjoyed working with the students there so much that I wanted an extra day with them (where I am not constantly worrying about the next class and grade that I will be receiving therein. I believe that technology in the classroom is an integral part of becoming a teacher in the 21st century. What we consider to be "technology" today may be considered "necessary" tomorrow, and who knows, our literature within the foreseeable future (before I am gone) may be completely technology-based and no longer require print-form.
I can see myself using the technologies that I learned in my Tech for the Classroom class, however there are a few technologies which I picked up, that I would like to say beat out all the rest. One of them being the use of Pixton, Socrative, and other technologies which allow students to write their own material online and share it with their peers. Socrative allows for students to quiz themselves on material for tests coming up, and has helped me in many classes where memorization was key. Pixton allows for students to create a comic for their own use and share it with their peers based on the lessons/narrative we are writing in class.
Limitations should only include those which are set by the school you work for, not your ingenuity, and should also include unforeseeable circumstances such as the weather or Wi-fi signal.
I plan on conversing with my students to allow myself room to grow using technologies, and if students have feedback about a unit, I would like to hear their take on which technologies are better for what I am doing than the ones which are currently being used. I will also share these with other teachers to see if they are appropriate for others to use in their classroom, because it isn't about being the best teacher in a school, it is about being the best school for a child.
I hope that I will continue to grow alongside my peers, those students who have taken this class with me, and that we will make the future as bright as possible for the students who are leaving our care and going out into the world to find jobs and succeed in school much as we have and our parents did before us.
This will not be the last blog post here, but rather it is a good segue into what I will be writing about in my professional life. Please stick with me as I try to blog about what it is to be a substitute teacher, what it is to be a new teacher, and what it is to be an experienced teacher.
Monday, December 15, 2014
Monday, November 3, 2014
Monday, October 27, 2014
Reasearch Projects done easy
We all would like to see research papers go according to plan, but what where would you start? Who would you turn to when the teacher asks you to research your favorite actor, author, book? Would you just Google it and wing the rest? Who can you trust? Who can't you trust?
Well, let's start with Google, there is actually a lot you can do with Google that is relevant to the research project you have been assigned. So let's look at the front page, found at www.google.com
everyone who is reading this should have a background knowledge of how to use the Google search bar, but if you're a first time Google user, the task ahead is simple, you type your search query into the search bar and hit the "Enter" key.
What we are looking for, however, is a way to make Google relevant to our research project. Let's say we are researching the book Beowulf. Simple enough right? Type Beowulf into the search bar and see what comes up. A mess of movie titles, and places to buy the book, but no scholarly articles about what other people say about Beowulf. There are sources which may help us on Google, but we must remember the rule of thumb when using this site, and that is that Google makes revenue based on the commercial properties of the website being published, and therefore, websites which generate a high amount of money will appear first in the query. The first link you will most likely come across is the Wikipedia website for Beowulf.
Wikis are a great resource for research projects, but we need to remember one crucial bit of information, that everyone can edit a wiki. Since everyone can edit a wiki, I will show you how to properly use a Wiki for your research project. Don't navigate away from this page yet, I am not finished. Even if your teacher says "You can't use Wikipedia for this paper or you will get an F", you will find this part useful. So, to go ahead and use wikipedia, we will need to look at the website first. Type Beowulf into the search bar and hit enter. The first site is Wikipedia, as expected.
If you click on the link, you will be taken to this page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf everything from the top to the bottom you should disregard completely, take your mouse and literally go all the way to the bottom of the website. The reason being is because I could go in, delete everything that there is on the website, put down "I saw Angelina Jolie in this movie" and skip along afterwards without many repercussions. The information that we are looking for is at the bottom of the page called "Reference Bibliography". Here, we can see a plethora of links, books, articles, magazines, and other references that wikipedia and the people that made the Beowulf page, have used to compile their information. Remember to always go to the website in order to check its credibility though.
If you click on the first link that shows up in the "Reference Bibliography" section you will be taken to this page http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3202069?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104415865391 which has a book review on the book Beowulf. As we can see, the page looks similar to that of Amazon.com or other websites selling books with teasers from the information. On this website, you can "Check out" books like a digital library, and even buy electronic copies, however, Jstor.org is not a very reliable website, because the information that they hold is not always scholarly. Scholarly information is information which has been reviewed by one or more collegiate level graduates and deemed worthy and accurate at that time.
You can also see that there are other valuable offline resources which you can take to your local library and check out at any time. These automatically count as scholarly, because they have undergone a process which means that at least one more set of eyes had to see it before it saw print (if not more).
As useful as Wikipedia is at finding resources for researching Beowulf and other topics, we must again return to Google to see if we can make use of this product for our research paper. Regular Google does not work, as we just found out, so let's try Google's scholarly engine, Google Scholar.
The domain name for Google Scholar is Scholar.Google.com . You can click on this hyperlink provided and it will take you to the main page. Enter the search term "Beowulf" again, and you will see a page which is oddly reminiscent of Google, the commercial search engine. If your research project has to be scientifically relevant, you have to make sure your sources are up to date, and to make sure of this you have to click on one of the links to the left which tells you when the article was published or edited last, such as "Since 2014". You may also note that you can search by relevance or by date published and that you can search for articles which have patents or citations.
Citations are a great part of any project, but make sure to always double check your work. Citations, as a reminder, must be in alphabetical order, and must be in the format which is most recent. If you are having troubles with telling what is up to date, visit the https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ website and click on your appropriate style (MLA, Chicago, Chicago Turabian, or APA are the most common).
If you would kindly go back to the search page on scholar.google.com with Beowulf, there are some other tools which you can use to narrow your search down to those which are relevant to your research paper. First, on the right hand side of the page, you will note that each link has a description of what type of link, and where that link came from beside it. Here, you can tell if the link came from an HTML, a book, a magazine, or any other source.
If you are have a google account, Google scholar also has a way for you to save your links so that you can reference them at home, or in your office, or wherever you may go in the future without searching for them time and time again. It is called "my library" If you click on the link to the left of the page you are currently on you will get this page
For you google users, Enabling this will help you save, and eventually help you build your works cited. if you go back to the webpage, you will see a downward facing arrow in the upper right hand corner of Google Scholar. If you click on this, you will be given the option of changing your settings (which is unnecessary) or going to an "advanced search". Click on this, and you should see that it brings up a search bar below your search bar.
Here you should be able to see how you can search for "Beowulf" in articles. We can search using the exact words "Beowulf dies to a dragon" and google scholar will search for any and all articles with that phrase. We might want to exempt from our searches any mentioning of Grendel, so we put into the search box, Without the words "Grendel" and finally, we want to find an article which was published sometime in the last 10 years, so we will go ahead and put in the bottom of the search terms 2004-2014. These tools can help Narrow down 70,700 results to a little over a hundred.
Review questions for section 1.
What is the domain name for Google Scholar?
Where can you find a good reference using Wikipedia?
What is Jstor.org similar to?
How many items can you check out simultaneously with Jstor.org?
We all would like to see research papers go according to plan, but what where would you start? Who would you turn to when the teacher asks you to research your favorite actor, author, book? Would you just Google it and wing the rest? Who can you trust? Who can't you trust?
Well, let's start with Google, there is actually a lot you can do with Google that is relevant to the research project you have been assigned. So let's look at the front page, found at www.google.com
What we are looking for, however, is a way to make Google relevant to our research project. Let's say we are researching the book Beowulf. Simple enough right? Type Beowulf into the search bar and see what comes up. A mess of movie titles, and places to buy the book, but no scholarly articles about what other people say about Beowulf. There are sources which may help us on Google, but we must remember the rule of thumb when using this site, and that is that Google makes revenue based on the commercial properties of the website being published, and therefore, websites which generate a high amount of money will appear first in the query. The first link you will most likely come across is the Wikipedia website for Beowulf.
Wikis are a great resource for research projects, but we need to remember one crucial bit of information, that everyone can edit a wiki. Since everyone can edit a wiki, I will show you how to properly use a Wiki for your research project. Don't navigate away from this page yet, I am not finished. Even if your teacher says "You can't use Wikipedia for this paper or you will get an F", you will find this part useful. So, to go ahead and use wikipedia, we will need to look at the website first. Type Beowulf into the search bar and hit enter. The first site is Wikipedia, as expected.
If you click on the link, you will be taken to this page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf everything from the top to the bottom you should disregard completely, take your mouse and literally go all the way to the bottom of the website. The reason being is because I could go in, delete everything that there is on the website, put down "I saw Angelina Jolie in this movie" and skip along afterwards without many repercussions. The information that we are looking for is at the bottom of the page called "Reference Bibliography". Here, we can see a plethora of links, books, articles, magazines, and other references that wikipedia and the people that made the Beowulf page, have used to compile their information. Remember to always go to the website in order to check its credibility though.
If you click on the first link that shows up in the "Reference Bibliography" section you will be taken to this page http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3202069?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104415865391 which has a book review on the book Beowulf. As we can see, the page looks similar to that of Amazon.com or other websites selling books with teasers from the information. On this website, you can "Check out" books like a digital library, and even buy electronic copies, however, Jstor.org is not a very reliable website, because the information that they hold is not always scholarly. Scholarly information is information which has been reviewed by one or more collegiate level graduates and deemed worthy and accurate at that time.
You can also see that there are other valuable offline resources which you can take to your local library and check out at any time. These automatically count as scholarly, because they have undergone a process which means that at least one more set of eyes had to see it before it saw print (if not more).
As useful as Wikipedia is at finding resources for researching Beowulf and other topics, we must again return to Google to see if we can make use of this product for our research paper. Regular Google does not work, as we just found out, so let's try Google's scholarly engine, Google Scholar.
The domain name for Google Scholar is Scholar.Google.com . You can click on this hyperlink provided and it will take you to the main page. Enter the search term "Beowulf" again, and you will see a page which is oddly reminiscent of Google, the commercial search engine. If your research project has to be scientifically relevant, you have to make sure your sources are up to date, and to make sure of this you have to click on one of the links to the left which tells you when the article was published or edited last, such as "Since 2014". You may also note that you can search by relevance or by date published and that you can search for articles which have patents or citations.
Citations are a great part of any project, but make sure to always double check your work. Citations, as a reminder, must be in alphabetical order, and must be in the format which is most recent. If you are having troubles with telling what is up to date, visit the https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ website and click on your appropriate style (MLA, Chicago, Chicago Turabian, or APA are the most common).
If you would kindly go back to the search page on scholar.google.com with Beowulf, there are some other tools which you can use to narrow your search down to those which are relevant to your research paper. First, on the right hand side of the page, you will note that each link has a description of what type of link, and where that link came from beside it. Here, you can tell if the link came from an HTML, a book, a magazine, or any other source.
If you are have a google account, Google scholar also has a way for you to save your links so that you can reference them at home, or in your office, or wherever you may go in the future without searching for them time and time again. It is called "my library" If you click on the link to the left of the page you are currently on you will get this page
Here you should be able to see how you can search for "Beowulf" in articles. We can search using the exact words "Beowulf dies to a dragon" and google scholar will search for any and all articles with that phrase. We might want to exempt from our searches any mentioning of Grendel, so we put into the search box, Without the words "Grendel" and finally, we want to find an article which was published sometime in the last 10 years, so we will go ahead and put in the bottom of the search terms 2004-2014. These tools can help Narrow down 70,700 results to a little over a hundred.
Review questions for section 1.
What is the domain name for Google Scholar?
Where can you find a good reference using Wikipedia?
What is Jstor.org similar to?
How many items can you check out simultaneously with Jstor.org?
Monday, September 8, 2014
Copywritten in stone
While Copyright can be scary to most of us, and whenever we are talking about copyright I break out in a cold sweat, it is not as scary as all of that.
What we need to remember is the rules of copyright, and know how to better protect ourselves.
Some ground rules are:
1. If you don't know if it is copyrighted, it probably is, so cite it.
This rule is a simple one, ignorance may be bliss when we're talking about war and other subjects that are disturbing to talk about, however, Copyright does not have to be one of these subjects. Ignorance in this case, to be honest, could: land you with a hefty fine, jail time, AND have other consequences such as expulsion from your school, district, or community via a firing at a job. Copyright is a law, and that means that we need to make sure that we are giving it the proper amount of respect that it deserves.
2. If it is copyrighted, give credit where credit is due.
This comes with an addendum, even if you give credit where credit is due you can still have a lawsuit taken against you for using someone's permission to use their creative works.
3. Always get permission when you're unsure whether or not you can use a creative work.
Creative works are always protected, going into a public domain is an easy way to sidestep this. However, someone can claim their work is their own at any time, and have you remove it due to the copyright laws.
4. Creative commons are your friends.
When using media and creative works, try to use creative commons:
Some Creative commons resources include:
Creativecommons.org.nz
Creativecommons.org
Creativecommons.org/licenses
You will find videos about creative commons on these sites.
Why the rules?
The rules help me help you keep yourself safe.
How do I find an image that is not protected under copyright?
If using Google search, this window is your friend you can access it by googling your image, then going to the Gear on the upper right hand corner of your screen which looks like this.
This little gear will be your friend from the day you start browsing the internet for creative commons images. Under this you will go to advanced image search, as you can see, i am trying to get an image of creative commons, however we don't know what i can use yet, Under everything we can see the usage rights. If we click on the blue hyperlink text, it takes us to a page which describes which images you can use, and what you have to attribute them to. to the right of that hyperlink you can scroll through and see what you would like to have for the copyright law.
But Alex, how do I find things when I am NOT using Google?
There are other ways to find images when you're not using Google that are similar to the Google engine, you need to do some digging, and usually it is under some sort of "advanced" settings tab. These "Advanced" settings can seem overwhelming, but you shouldn't be intimidated, let's go to a page that i have never been to before... which is Bing Image search.
Here is the homepage for Bing
Confused? that's alright, I am too.
What i see on the page is at the top i can see what that i can search for videos, images, maps, news, more (and if I put my mouse over it I can see that I can search for travel, and other items.), and even view my search history.
Down below, we can see the "Newsworthy News" section of Bing, a good place to search for news if you're looking for some current events.
What we're going to look for is "Cats" because I love cats, and we're going to search for works which are not protected under copyright to its full extent.
You can search for cat images one of two ways, one, you can type in cats and then click on images, or you can click on images and then type cats.
If we do, we get a page which looks like this.
we can see that there are a lot of suggestions as to what i am looking for in cats, but I am not picky. Therefore, I won't change that. What I AM looking for is this part
See the Circled area? That is the one that we need called "License"
This, if we click on it will give us the magic "Copyright" button that we are looking for. Simple enough to click on it, and then click on "Free to Share and use"
What we need to remember, though is to give credit where credit is due, whether we give them credit within the article, or we attach a hyperlink, we need to make sure that we are protecting the artist who took the pictures of these cute kitties.
What we need to remember is the rules of copyright, and know how to better protect ourselves.
Some ground rules are:
1. If you don't know if it is copyrighted, it probably is, so cite it.
This rule is a simple one, ignorance may be bliss when we're talking about war and other subjects that are disturbing to talk about, however, Copyright does not have to be one of these subjects. Ignorance in this case, to be honest, could: land you with a hefty fine, jail time, AND have other consequences such as expulsion from your school, district, or community via a firing at a job. Copyright is a law, and that means that we need to make sure that we are giving it the proper amount of respect that it deserves.
2. If it is copyrighted, give credit where credit is due.
This comes with an addendum, even if you give credit where credit is due you can still have a lawsuit taken against you for using someone's permission to use their creative works.
3. Always get permission when you're unsure whether or not you can use a creative work.
Creative works are always protected, going into a public domain is an easy way to sidestep this. However, someone can claim their work is their own at any time, and have you remove it due to the copyright laws.
4. Creative commons are your friends.
When using media and creative works, try to use creative commons:
Some Creative commons resources include:
Creativecommons.org.nz
Creativecommons.org
Creativecommons.org/licenses
You will find videos about creative commons on these sites.
Why the rules?
The rules help me help you keep yourself safe.
How do I find an image that is not protected under copyright?
If using Google search, this window is your friend you can access it by googling your image, then going to the Gear on the upper right hand corner of your screen which looks like this.
This little gear will be your friend from the day you start browsing the internet for creative commons images. Under this you will go to advanced image search, as you can see, i am trying to get an image of creative commons, however we don't know what i can use yet, Under everything we can see the usage rights. If we click on the blue hyperlink text, it takes us to a page which describes which images you can use, and what you have to attribute them to. to the right of that hyperlink you can scroll through and see what you would like to have for the copyright law.
But Alex, how do I find things when I am NOT using Google?
There are other ways to find images when you're not using Google that are similar to the Google engine, you need to do some digging, and usually it is under some sort of "advanced" settings tab. These "Advanced" settings can seem overwhelming, but you shouldn't be intimidated, let's go to a page that i have never been to before... which is Bing Image search.
Here is the homepage for Bing
Confused? that's alright, I am too.What i see on the page is at the top i can see what that i can search for videos, images, maps, news, more (and if I put my mouse over it I can see that I can search for travel, and other items.), and even view my search history.
Down below, we can see the "Newsworthy News" section of Bing, a good place to search for news if you're looking for some current events.
What we're going to look for is "Cats" because I love cats, and we're going to search for works which are not protected under copyright to its full extent.
You can search for cat images one of two ways, one, you can type in cats and then click on images, or you can click on images and then type cats.
If we do, we get a page which looks like this.
See the Circled area? That is the one that we need called "License"
This, if we click on it will give us the magic "Copyright" button that we are looking for. Simple enough to click on it, and then click on "Free to Share and use"
What we need to remember, though is to give credit where credit is due, whether we give them credit within the article, or we attach a hyperlink, we need to make sure that we are protecting the artist who took the pictures of these cute kitties.
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