Week 3 Communities/Final Project

After the class with Dr. Schwier I felt inspired and wanted to rush into my class to simply talk about communities.  The discussion we had about how people feel connected and a part of something really resonated with me from my own schools perspective.  We need to have that relationship with so many of our families otherwise we are not respected and then that negatively effects how we can run our classroom.  It also made me think of how the sense of community will help me be successful in this class and throughout my entire masters program.  If I can develop an online community with a variety of professionals that can help me become a better educator, learner, writer, etc, why wouldn't I?  I am beginning to view this class as another branch in my network of professional colleagues, that I can work with to create a more positive atmosphere for my system, school, and class.  With all that I am excited to talk about my final project.
After an email with Alec, I have decided to work towards creating a blended classroom.  My reasoning is because I have a group of students this year that need to work in small groups, and mostly at their own pace.  Either it is due to attendance, behavior, or their specific learning styles.  In our school we already break our students up into reading groups, math groups, writing groups, Inquiry groups for our social and science outcomes, and practical and applied arts groupings as well.   With the variety of students that roll through the classroom every day combined with the 60% attendance I get each day, I am finding it very difficult to keep each student engaged.  Either they are finishing the assignments and I need to find filler assignments for those students that attend regularly, or I am attempting to catch up and push those poor attenders through the assignment that they are unable to meet any outcome.  I am hoping that with a blended classroom it will help scaffold the learning in my classroom for the variety of classes I am in charge of teaching. 
All of our students have access to laptops in our school and each one of them have their own specific ID and passwords.  We have the tools within our school that a blended classroom seems like it might help with the success of our students.  With my research so far into blended classrooms I have found some sites that are helping me begin to create meaningful tasks that will help my students learn and meet objectives while staying within their learning parameters.  Some very helpful sites I have found would be:

https://www.edmodo.com/
This is most likely going to be my learning hub.  Within this site I have been able to upload my assignments, and bring in Youtube videos for my math instruction.  I am planning on reconfiguring my math class to include this new learning tool into my Explore +4 model I have started this year with.   This website I believe will help me create a more postive learning atmosphere as the students will have more of an opportunity to work one on one with me during our math times because we will have a strong understanding of what we are supposed to be doing each class, based on where each student is at. 

http://learni.st/category/featured
The Learnist website is another site where I have began to dive into and it is helping me find new ways to demonstrate how to do a variety of rational number problems.  I am starting off with a unit on integers and through the learnist website I have created a board that deals with this skill directly.  I get daily emails that may have useful information, videos, and problems for the students to solve. 

https://www.khanacademy.org/
Khan Acadamy is another website that I have began to play around in and its is useful for the practice of skills.  I say that because I began looking into this after I had already found the videos and "teaching tools" that I needed for the first unit.  Now that I have began to navigate through the website I have found that their teaching videos are the same or very similar to the videos  I have found... I will definately be utilizing this website in the future.  I am not sure how it will link into the Edmodo site and therefore may simply use it as a source of information, but nonetheless I will be on here quite frequently.

So far these are the sites that I have found and had some form of success with.  As you can see I am putting most of my focus on the math curriculum, that is mostly because I have an intern this semester and she is doing most of our Language Arts and I do not want to put the task of making sure the assignments are online ready.    I am not ready to share my progress with the sites yet with the public, I am hoping next week I will have most of my students registered into my classes and I can start with a "soft opening" of the concept with them.  I am both excited and nervous to do this with my students.   Right now I have high expectations for this concept, but I am also slightly jaded and truly very worried that this will flop and will be more of a stress than a help.  That is where my "online community" comes in... I am hoping that I can bounce my ideas off my community members and share my trials and tribulations along with my successes and hopefully I can not only develop a stronger understanding for online resources but my students can improve their understanding of any content area that I teach them throughout the year. 
My request to my community members would be that if you know of or have any sites/videos that are good for demonstrations of skills, techniques, tasks, or development of any of those topics please don't be afraid to tag me, tweet me, share with me, post on my wall, or send to me any other way possible.  Thanks for the help and I look forward to hearing, reading, contacting any and all of you!

Second Week

So the first week went well.  Got my blog up.  Playing around with twitter. Started to develop my about.me page.  I was very excited when talking to friends about this class and how we are connecting and interacting.  I am also very excited to do our major digital project.  A couple of years ago a couple of teachers and I got together and did an anti smoking unit with our students.  We went to the point of writing a skit, creating a song, and then decided to make a youtube video.
Please check it out and let me know what you think.  For our major digital project I think I am going to work with either my class (if I can get the permission for media release) or with my teacher friends again and do an anti bullying video.  I would like the media side of it to be a little more advanced though and hope I can gain the tools or access to the tools through the course. 



Now that is just one idea of what I have done and I think a bullying video with collegues or students would be fun and very engaging as I have done it before and have seen the benifits. 

Another idea would be to create an online presence for my students.  I have a lot of students that miss school on a regular basis.  I am thinking about creating a data base for my students that they can get onto at home, or at school once they are back and it will give them the opportunity to be independently learning.  I am not sure how this would work or what would be the best way of going about it.  I know with Regina Public we are supposed to be going full bore with our Powerschool accounts and having it updated and that is one option.  But I wouldn't mind using something that is a little more user friendly.  I am thinking of something like Igo accounts for my students, or possibly starting a google community like this one.  As for how it would look as a major digital project I am not certain and I will probably have a few questions for you and Alec throughout if this is the route that I choose.  I am one of those people that come up with ideas but has a hard time figuring out how to actually accomplish it on my own.  That is about it for me this week.  If anyone has any suggestions as to how I can create an online community for daily/weekly/major assignments that is user friendly for low readers and EAL students please let me know.  (also please let me know what you think of my video... It was a lot of fun and my students loved it because of the message and they got to see their teachers being goofy)

Thanks for reading see you next week.

First Week.

So ECI 831 is my first masters class.  When I signed up for this class I thought that I was fairly knowledgeable in the realm of technology... apparently not!  In this first class I was surprised about how little I utilize the tools I do have.  I have done some simple blogging with my classes, but never took it very far.  I had a twitter account then simply didn't feel like using it so I ended up forgetting the password.  I have a facebook account that I check on almost everyday, but most of the people I am connected with are typical facebookers where they use the site to complain about their daily lives.  I have began doing a clear cut on that one to make my facebook more appropriate for what I am looking for out of it... (but gossip and the gong show of society is partly intriguing as well... so we will see how many people get cut.)  As for multi media, websites, online professional communities and the plethora of other tech tools that are out there I am essentially illiterate.

With all of that being said I am passionate about technology in my classroom and am very excited to have the opportunity to experience the variety of tools that are available to us as educators.  As it stands I use technology at its basic sense in my classroom.  We use digital cameras, laptops and Ipads, along with our projector and mimio tools to help make the learning more interactive and engaging.  When the technology is used to its full potential I really see large jumps in the comprehension of the given material the students are working with.  Which makes me more excited about taking this class as I am hoping to learn more about how to make our time with these tools more interactive and productive. 

Within my class I like to embrace the tools that my student are able to bring into the class.  I am leery about connecting with the students on a social media level as there seems to be a stigma about lines being blurred.  I would never cross a line but it is the immaturity of the students that I am more concerned with.  I think that connecting with the students would give me a greater insight into their daily lives, but at the same point when is it acceptable for us to become that personal with our students?  Which brings me to the thought process of how a decade ago you had to work at having your personal life be public yet now it is the opposite where you need to work even more diligently to keep your personal life private.  I am hoping through the semester I can develop a stronger stance on the issue and either make a decision as to whether I will begin to connect with my students on a social media level or not.