Reflection on Maker Project

I very much enjoyed working on this project.

I think we had a lot of good ideas, but as one person pointed out in the peer feedback, they could be condensed or else it would have to be a very complex app. I wish we could have actually made an app, although none of the members of my group knew how to create an app.

I am very glad that we changed the name, although the new name "Label the Lobes" is much less creative. I did not know about the first name when we presented, and I will admit my first thought was that it was a little offensive. I'm extremely glad we changed it, but I wish we had spent more time thinking of a more creative and less offensive name.

All in all, I enjoyed working on this project and I hope someone in our group takes it further and creates a real, working app.

PLN Step 5

I have very much enjoyed this blogging experience. I think it is a great way for teachers to journal about their experiences and life in the classroom and learn from one another.

I have started following some blogs and discussions on teaching-related sites, and although I admit I'm not very good about reading them every week, when I do have a chance to look at them I feel like I learn a lot.

I'm not sure that I am the blogger type. I don't think I could pull from my experiences enough to form actual sentences and strategies about my classroom experiences. Maybe that will change. Maybe I'll just have to force myself into becoming that type of person and see where that gets me.

I have really enjoyed blogging as an assignment. I think blogs are a great way to monitor student progress and work very well as an online journaling type of experience. I hope to use blogs as a sort of ongoing assignment for my future students, because it is a useful skill to have and a fun and different assignment.

PLN Step 10: Making Connections

I will admit that I am a it apprehensive about making connections with other teachers online. I feel like I'm not a "real" teacher, yet, so I shouldn't be sharing strategies and problems at this point. I may just stick with lurking until I get into my student teaching experience, when I think I will feel more like a "real" teacher and be more comfortable sharing with others.

That being said, the Classroom 2.0 experience has forced me to put myself out there and become a online presence as a teacher. I have had one person whose wall I commented on friend me on Facebook already.

PLN Step 7: Diigo

I have very much enjoyed using Diigo. As a resource, I find it very helpful when I want to annotate a webpage, article, or other multimedia source.

 In fact, it helped me as soon as I got it. I had an essay I was doing some research for, for another class, and I like to mark up articles when I want to use them as resources, so I usually print my online sources. However, I was able to use Diigo to write notes, thoughts, comments, and highlight portions of my online sources. This was amazing to me! I'm saving paper and space, because I tend to sprawl all my resources across my desk when writing research papers, and I didn't have chunky articles spread across my desk, just my desktop.

Classroom 2.0 Experience, PLN Step 9

In the short time that I have been involved with Classroom 2.0, I can clearly see the benefits to such a community. I like that every person with a profile on the site can interact with each other and are dedicated to becoming better teachers and learners themselves.

I think that it will be very beneficial for me to be able to interact with educators around the world because I hope to be a history teacher and there's more history out there than just American. I think being able to talk about the topics I cover in class with someone who lives in that country and has seen the effects, or has family who has been affected, will be very insightful. I'm very excited to interact in this community more.

I joined a group about history resources, and I think that in and of itself will be very helpful. It has many links to sites and lesson plans that will help me as a beginning teacher.

Innovation Studio

I loved visiting the Innovation Studio on our Innovation Campus during class on Thursday! I had never been to that campus before and found it to be a great opportunity for me to learn about some of the amazing things our university is doing.

I had no idea that we had access to a space like the one we saw. I was inspired throughout the tour to start generating ideas of cool and fun things I could do with all the advanced technology there. And all at such a low cost!

I was very interested in the laser cutter. Right now, my mind is on Christmas presents and what I am going to give to my friends and family. I think that the laser cutter offers many unique opportunities for gifts: engraving names into Yeti mugs, cutting boards, etc.

Also, I have always wanted to try my hand at sculpting. I'm not much of an artist, but I do believe that anyone can learn, and I would love to attend a class with the sculptor there. I was inspired by the works-in-progress of his that were on the shelf in the last room we saw, as well as the faces that he showed us in the 3D printer room.

There is so much value in having this kind of technology available at a low cost and with guided instruction on how to use it! These kinds of spaces can help inspire a new love for something within a person, and could create a better appreciation for handmade objects and the arts in our society.

Webinar #2: Education Week, PLN Step 8

The second webinar I watched was produced by Education Week and APEX Learning and its topic was Equity of Opportunity: Closing the Achievement Gap.

Many of the points the speaker, Lisa Williams, had were similar to what was discussed in Ali Michael's workshop that I attended here at UNL last month. She was very adamant that diversity matters, especially when most teachers are white women.

Williams also discussed how teachers and school staff who have been a part of the education system for 30+ years are finding it hard to change their viewpoints. The changing groups and learning styles of students are subtle, and older generations of school staff are more susceptible to staying with the system.

The lens of equity is a tricky one to see through, especially when the teachers' races, gender, sexual orientation, etc. are different than their students'. Williams, similar to Michael, says that the first step is to look within yourself and reflect on your problems and your privilege. Then, learning about the cultures of your students is key as well. Cultural competency is a large part of becoming a great teacher who values equity.

This webinar was very enlightening to me. It highlighted a lot of the same things that the workshop speaker did a few weeks ago, and that has made me realize just how important this topic is in schools. As someone who is bouncing around the idea of teaching in an urban school setting, I think this webinar aided me in a lot of ways.

Webinar #1: News Literacy Classroom 2.0, PLN Step 8

The first webinar I watched was on Classroom 2.0. The webinar dealt with News Literacy, which I think is a very interesting topic considering all the talk of "fake news" in our country at the moment. The chat began with recognizing how difficult it is to find real, credible sources in this day and age. I think that acknowledging that fact is often the first step to releasing yourself from the echo chambers many of us have created for ourselves online.

One concept I found interesting during the webinar was the idea of "circular reporting" where news sources cite each other back and forth, without any new information or fact checking. I had no idea this was something that happened in journalism and I can better understand how difficult it really is to find true information.

One of the graphics in the slideshow for the webinar was about how fake news sources surpassed mainstream ones in the amount of shares they received in the last three months of the election cycle last year. The expert speaker, Tiffany Whitehead, noted that this can make it very hard for parents to discern between fake and real news. If parents can't tell the difference, they can then become the ones who are sharing those types of articles and telling their children about them. This creates a cycle where the students begin reading the fake news and believing it as well.

News and media literacy are important concepts for anyone and everyone in our society. It is our job as teachers to help teach students what is credible and how to know if it's a credible source. Students can then take home that knowledge of credibility testing back home to their parents, and it could change our society for the better. As a future social studies teacher, I feel that this skill fits within my niche very well. There are many connections that can be made between the present and history, so teaching news literacy is a skill that I feel I need to be able to share with my future students. This webinar has helped me see the tricks of the trade to discerning credibility and I hope that I will pass that knowledge on to my students.

Module 10 Assignment

Steven Witten's video on Making Things with Maths was interesting. It was hard for me to get into it and be able to become really interested in what he was saying because I haven't had math at this level in a long time. It was hard to get past the mathematical concepts to get to the point of what he was saying. That being said, once I was able to get past the "I don't want to listen to this guy talk about math for an hour" stage, I really liked what he had to say. Using technology to teach math and science in practical ways is a true game changer. Not just memorizing equations or writing out problems, but using programs like the blue circles in a box and being able to apply the laws of motion to them makes the content more realistic and applicable.

QR code to the youtube video: 

For the maker activities in class, I viewed Google Cardboard, Makey Makey, and the Apple Learn to Code activity. Google Cardboard was amazing! I had no idea that for $20 I could have Virtual Reality in my pocket! I love that there are so many experiences you can download for free and utilize in everyday life. My entire group was so enamored with this that we discussed creating a Google Cardboard compatible app for our final project. 

Makey Makey was cool as well, although I'm not sure I can see it being used in a secondary classroom. I enjoyed being able to touch the different objects and they control the mouse, keyboard, and other parts of the computer.

The Learning to Code app was pretty cool as well. My group is thinking that we will be making an app for our final project, so seeing some basic coding elements was very useful and insightful for us. I liked how the app made it seem like a game, rather than a boring how-to list. 

Thoughts on Final Project Ideas

I think we have some really great ideas to combat the overuse of lecture style classes in our field of social studies. We came up with a couple ideas for each of our endorsement areas: anthropology, economics, geography, government and politics, history, psychology, and sociology. All involved creating a tool that would help students understand key concepts that we have found to be difficult in our time learning them.

For anthropology, we thought it would enhance student learning to see the different types of skulls of hominins throughout history when studying evolution. We would use the smithsonian website and the african fossil website to find 3D printer templates for the different skulls. In economics, we would create lines for graphs of supply and demand. We would be able to manipulate those graphs to show how different economic factors change the graphs. In geography, we thought we could create a map puzzle using the laser printer. For government we thought we could create a gerrymandering app where students can gerrymander their own districts to get a deeper understanding of the concept. For history, we could use 3D printing to create busts of historical figures so students feel more connected to them. In psychology, we will make a model of a brain, specifically of the different lobes and sections so students can see, feel, and put them together to get a better understanding of where they are and how they work. In sociology, we would make a pie chart with the 3D printer and use that to help with statistics.

"Human Centered Design" Response

Human centered design is a useful three step process. Inspiration, ideation, and implementation all play a large role in getting new ideas and influences out into the world.

Inspiration is the learning that must take place before ideas can develop. Being open to new things, learning continuously and evolving make up the core of this step.

Ideation is the planning phase. Generating lots of ideas, both good and bad, is what the first step here is. After creating these concepts, you test them and learn from your mistakes to create even better and more advanced ideas. Then you can work on integrating them into your workspace.

Implementation is the step where you take your idea and put it into action in the real world.

This process results in a world where everyone benefits and can work better together through the use of human centered design. Having a theory that can't be easily applied to everyday use is no good; using human centered design you can be sure that your idea will work.

"Learning Technologies and Educational Equity" Response

The article "Learning Technologies and Educational Equity" really struck a chord with me. Often in education, people see these grand fixes for all the problems within the system and many jump behind this one save-all that in the end doesn't really do much. Educational reform usually follows this pattern. We see one big idea and leap on board then realize that just changing one thing doesn't actually help. It's the same with technology in education.

We saw it with SmartBoards, now with one-to-one distributions of iPads, ChromeBooks, and tablets, the spending is just growing, without thought about if the technology is truly helping students. There are "promises that digital wands will mysteriously extricate us from the systemic failings of schooling. Perhaps the most tenacious lore is the conviction that technology will motivate learning in today's digitally savvy youth." This may even be the opposite of the truth. Many young people see technology as a plaything, not a useful learning tool. The technology itself is NOT going to fix the system. Teachers have to up their game, principals have to up their game, the education system as a whole needs to be changed to accommodate the changing platforms of technology that students are using.

Bootcamp Bootleg Response

I found the Bootcamp Bootleg reading to be very insightful. The graphic at the beginning is a very useful tool for educators because it helps remind us what our purpose is in our classrooms.

The modes show different ways we can interact in our classrooms. We must empathize with our students, and understand their point of view; define goes along with this in that we must look over the information we have gathered from empathizing to generate the kind of environment we want in our classrooms. Ideating takes our empathies and definitions and broadens them for use with the entire class. Prototypes come from the learning and interacting that takes place when the other three components are used. Testing has us step back and evaluate what we have done; it takes us back to the beginning to review if what we did was the right choice.

One particular method that struck me was the Why-How Learning method. This would be a useful tool in a social studies classroom. I could use it to help lay out a historical event and discuss why it occurred the way it did; what choices led to it, how it could have been different, etc.

Curation Tools: PLN Step 6

Write a post on your blog about what you learned.  The focus here is to reflect on your learning. For example, ‘What did you learn about using curation for building a PLN that you didn’t know?’, ‘What did you like/not like about the popular curation tools?’, ‘What advice did we give that you don’t agree with or we should have included?’ "

I think curation is a great ability for one to have, especially in the education profession, but for any one else as well. I've never used Evernote or Flipgrid but they are both very useful tools. I personally downloaded Flipgrid because I like the idea of using it to get news in one place. 

Evernote seems very usable, but I'm not sure that it will replace the document tools I already use. While I like that it is concise and keeps all my files in one place, but since I already use 2-3 apps that do similar things and have all my files on there already, I do not see myself switching to using Evernote singularly.

I wish the article had more comparisons between curation apps, though. It gave many examples of curation apps to use, but it didn't really tell what each one does. It would have been nice to see some comparisons before I had to decide which one I wanted to download.

Response to Chris Emdin's Talk at SXSW

Listening to Chris Emdin's talk about race and society in school at theSouth by Southwest leadership conference was a rollercoaster experience. I really enjoyed listening to him speak and he had a lot of interesting viewpoints, that I personally agreed with. His ideas about the people who think they support underprivileged youth, but don't put those beliefs into practice really made me think about my own beliefs and whether or not my actions reflect them. I was very inspired by his talk and I plan on purchasing and reading his book, "For White People Who Teach in the Hood... And the Rest of Y'all Too".

Response to "Women's History Month: 6 Lesson Plan Resources for Teachers"

Recently, I read a post on Matt Davis' edutopia blog about Women's History Month, which is in March. Read it here: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/womens-history-month-lesson-plans-matt-davis

It may seem silly to be planning lessons that I won't use for months, but I think it makes sense to plan that into the schedule of things I want to cover. I don't want to make a last minute change and not have enough time to cover all the topics I need to in my class.

I loved this blog post! It had great resources for teachers, including fully formed lesson plans for a multitude of grades. Utilizing this time to discuss gender stereotypes in class is a great point that the blog post brought up. That's a hard discussion to have with young minds, especially when you feel strongly, as I do, about it. The post supplies resources to bring up that topic and to enhance your class discussion about it.