Megschmidtsuffix

Check out this SlideShare Presentation I made! It is a presentation with audio that does a smaller version of a lesson plan on suffixes. This is targeted towards children in elementary school when just learning about parts of speech.

Megschmidtsuffix

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Cellphones in the classroom?.....

http://caise07.idi.ntnu.no/practical_info.php

In my experiences, teachers have always said no to cellphones and ipods in class. ANY other technology that might be at all distracting. We took a poll in class about how many students had cellphones in the past year-ish and 90%ish had cellphones in high school and above half of elementary students had cellphones. This statistic shows that most students have phones. Although the problem is that this statistic does not show the statistics for students in lower income schools. These districts may be lacking in cellphones for all students, which makes cell phones unusable for teaching. The other point that is positive which I want to point out from the poll is that younger students do have cellphones. You can use cellphones, if all students have them, at almost any age where students know how to spell and can understand what you are asking. It depends on the individual class but in general, I would say starting middle school would for sure be an age when you could use cellphones as a classroom tool.
Students would really enjoy it because it is technology they are familiar with. It would also score points for you as a teacher using "cool" technology. Another thing to consider is that not all schools have the money to have the technology to allow cell phones to be used, if the students do have cell phones.
They can be used for anonymous polls or answering in predicting on a story or movie. You could use it in math to enter an answer, or even use it as a prequiz to see what students know and dont know, honestly. That would give you an idea if you have been teaching it well and what to strengthen them on before their quiz. In science, you could use cellphones to have them send picture of things they see for homework and then share the images as a class.
There are so many opportunities to use cellphones and although it may not be the easiest way to do it for you, for your students it may be the most interesting and engaging for them to learn. Leave an open mind and think about it:)

PLN

Personal Learning Networks.
It has been a lot of work and is kind of overwhelming so far but it could have so many benefits if used correctly. It is great that by signing into one account you can find tons of information from multiple sources in seconds but it is overwhelming to me at the same time. I think that its been great to get to know the different networks and belong to them but I think when I start teaching I will probably pick one and become proficient at that before starting a second one. Since I am not quite proficient in all of them I have an account for so far, I am not organized or have not found the best way to organize it which frustrates me because I like to be very organized. I cant wait until I am proficient because it is a really great way to follow educators, companies, and even fellow teachers that you may or may not know for ideas to become a better teacher. More to come with more time haha!

My Zen Presentation

We learned to make our presentations more basic but more effective. Here is a small sample of one about suffixes. It has a single example but is very effective. Check it out!

Busy Week!

I have had so many exams this week and one of my favorite midterms was my technology class midterm. I am learning to develop my own personal website for when I graduate and begin to teach one day. If you wanna check it out feel free!
my website is www.megschmidt.weebly.com

Image Loop

I chose to tell a story about someone getting lost in New York City because although it did not happen, it could happen. I wanted to make an example of the literacy genre Realistic Fiction to introduce the idea to students. It would give them man idea of what it is and we could discuss the video after to talk about why it is Realistic Fiction. If they had access to computers, I could have them make their own stories and present them to the class. I would probably look into another website, but I used Image Loop. Image Loop was very straight foward to use and had a decent amount of choices but I could not find where to add text so I used Picknik to add text and then uploaded the photos. Overall, it was easy and fast to use and I am pleased with how it turned out.

Can cellphones be used in teaching???

The church I attend has been having us use our cellphones to give our opinions recently and it made me wonder about using cell phones in our own classrooms one day. I mean, everybody is going to have on soon if they dont at this point, many young kids have them when I got mine in high school, its crazy! Although I dont think that cell phones have a place in every situation, I think that they could be effective and useful in some situations. Just like in church, they can be very useful in giving and opinion on something and it can be fully anonymous. I was trying to look for other ways to use cellphones in a classroom and when I was researching, I found that people had been using them as resources like calculators, dictionaries, cameras and using the internet as a tool! Even though we could say that is a problem and distraction, it can also be very useful when some schools are not able to have them in their classrooms. You can have a group research something and not have to go to the computer lab, although activities including the cellphones would have to be planned thoroughly, it could be of a great use of a resource to teachers! Think about it! Its a new generation and even more new technology...how can we use it to our advantage??

iClickers

iClickers are relatively new to me. I have used them in two of my classes being here at Michigan State. I really liked using them but it had some major disadvantages as far as using them for learning goes in my classes they were used in. My first class was a lecture for an astronomy class and the questions were very hard and so you were just seeing what the majority of people were saying, and not worried about if you understood it or not, you just wanted to be right. They were not participation points, they were graded so you were more concerned about if you were right for your grade instead of why the answer was what it was. So that made a lot of cheating and guessing which did not enrich my learning of that class. In addition, students did not come to class because they would just give the iClicker to their friends and they were rotate just so that someone could click in their answers for them, you did not have to be present in class which does not enrich or help learning at all.
I understand that its good to grade the responses for iClickers because then that gives them incentive to guess right but at the same time, it can make students more concentrated on the grade then the material.
In my second class I used them in, they were used in groups and we could discuss with our group and then we would click in our responses and they were not graded but were instead participation points. This was a lab so showing up for class meant that you would also have to do the lab which had to be turned into the teacher at the end, so skipping class was not really an option. We did use them but not a ton, but I really liked that they could use the responses and then show us to see how the others compared. The step that this teacher took that my other one did not was that they would ask each group what they picked and their reasons for picking it before they would say the right answer so each group really spent time thinking about it instead of guessing, even though it was only for participation points.
I think that if you plan out the best way to use the iClickers, like my second class professor did, then they can be great tools for teaching effectively. As for the grade, I think that most ages can use these because kids are much better at using technology than we were and they continue to get better every year.
-when I was in fifth grade we did a similar thing in a math lesson and we would click in the right answer with little buzzers using a multiple choice question and so I think that upper elementary and so forth would benefit from using these if they are well thought out and organized.

I love baking

I love baking and was trying to think of ways in which to incorporate baking into teaching. Do you think that is a good idea with kids having different food allergies or do you think it could be a really good idea? I love doing things that are interactive and along with technology, I wanted to do things that are hands on that kids would also love doing because of the outcome. If it is food, they would be really inspired to actually do the project or work because food would be the outcome.
thoughts?

So Cluttered

As I am trying to keep my hold on all of the new technologies and web pages and blogs and search places, I am realizing how cluttered and un-organized all of places are. I would love to get the chance to organize all of it, because I cant stand when things are un-organized and so the fact that all my organization online does not exist is almost stressful for me. I am trying to figure out the best way for me to organize it all...

Trouble with technology

Speaking of technology, I really struggled with figuring out Photoshop...I could not figure out how to embed my slide show into my blog post. I think that I generally think things are much harder than they actually are and after some help from my friend, I realized how easy it actually is. I learned you have to go to share and then publish and its pretty simple from there on out. It is really cool to be able to use this blogger to share much information in many different ways. I cant wait till I am going to get to use all of this technology in my teaching some day to make my teaching the most efficient as possible.

Photoshop.com Album: My photos

Learning how to use Photoshop

I have had previous experience with Picnik but never any other photo editing site, but I recently learned how to use Photoshop in my class. It took me a while to figure it out, but I love a challenge:) This is a slide show which consists of three landmarks in my developing understanding of technology. The first picture is from Macinaw City and I took it and copyrighted it (as shown in an earlier post). The other two pictures are my screen shots I learned to take. The black and white one is me using Picnik to edit it. Hope you enjoy!
(featured above)