CH 12 (Elem)

Liz Exo's Blog Post

This chapter really opened my eyes to the many ways that we can incorporate the internet into classroom learning, even with younger children. Since I plan to be a teacher around the first grade or kindergarten level, I would need some resources that are easy to use with younger children. I think Starfall.com is a great website that can engage pre-reading students and get them on the track to becoming readers. I also like that it has good viusal learning techniques where students can get immediate feedback and can learn the information by seeing it in more concrete forms, rather than hearing it.

I also thought that the email idea was great! It's like a pen pal system, but online. It sounds so much easier and efficient to use email to connect with other students from basically anywhere in the world. I think students would be interested in using this tool, and since the correspondence is a lot quicker, younger students don't have to wait weeks to get another letter back. Not to mention that you can use email correspondence to learn about different cultures from students across the globe!

El Ed Ch 12

I found chapter 12 very interesting and informative. The websites given all seem to be great resources and it really showed me that the Internet holds perhaps even more educational potential than I realized. However, it is true that "[a]s students gain experience with the Internet... teachers need to recognize that even elementary students now need skills in efficient and effective searching, evaluating sources for bias and authority, and ethics" (Hamilton, 12). When I was in elementary school, the computer class teacher taught us everything that we needed to know about the computers, which really just included typing, and the librarian taught us about researching and finding sources. Today's elementary students need to combine those two lessons, and in many cases, it needs to be taught by their classroom teaches, as Hamilton suggests. At first, that thought was a little overwhelming for me, since I haven't been formally trained in information literacy or teaching information literacy. But I looked at the website that the book offered in that section and found it extremely useful. I loved the graphic organizer that they used to categorize the lesson plans. It would make it very easy to find a lesson that teaches the exact skill your students need. Also, I was pleasantly surprised by the number and variety of lesson plans available.
The other part of chapter 12 that stood out to me was the idea of using mapquest.com to teach a lesson, thus making the internet more relevant to the lives of the students, making maps more accessible, and teaching the use of a website that the students will no doubt use in the future. This idea could be used for lessons in many different subjects. For math, students could calculate distances and travel time between various locations; for social studies, students could learn general map skills and geography; for language arts, students could write a story based on their maps; for art, students could draw or paint maps of their own. I think it would be really valuable to use mapquest.com in several different subjects in order to show students how the subjects can be connected.


(I liked the title to the information literacy lesson page because it moved a little bit from the link the book provided.)

El Ed Chapter 12

I took a look at quite a few of the websites mentioned in the reading, and I'd have to say I was pretty impressed. All of them offered different forms of learning the lessons, and all of them were very interactive and fun. This book is a little old, so some of the sites have even more to offer now then when the book was published, which is great. I really like that these can be used as extra practice at home, or an assignment to supplement coursework in school. The student gets the instant feedback they crave and they're great study tools.

As far as teaching internet safety, I much preferred the cybersmart website (www.cybersmartcurriculum.org) to the netsmartz workshop. I found it more resourceful and easier to navigate. It also had lesson plans with activity sheets and information on which goals and standards are being addressed based on the national standards.

I work with websites a lot for my art major and often have the problem of not being able to access my bookmarks in class etc. The websites that allow you to keep track and save them are a really great resource for teachers and students alike.

I’m also a big fan of the use of e-mailing and web chatting with other students. When I was in 7^th grade, we did a whole project in which we communicated with students from Azerbaijan via e-mail in order to learn about their culture, and vice versa. It was really cool and one of the things that stuck with me the most from that class. The only real issue in this is finding a contact for this to work as you don’t want your students communicating with completely random people. I’m fully behind the utilization of these resources, but it is something that will have to be monitored very closely.

Blog Post: Ch 11 (elem)

Liz Exo's

This chapter was really informative to me, and I really liked how the chapter gave a lot of specific examples as to what to use databases and spreadsheets for. It's also really helpful and convenient that under each example they give the grade levels that could appropriately use these ideas. I especially like the idea of creating an acrostic on a spreadsheet. It may take me some time to figure it out, but I think it would be a great way to incorporate technology into the Language Arts/Writing portion on the school day.

I also really enjoyed the idea of using spreadsheets to graph weather changes for younger students to show the changes in weather. This is a pretty abstract concept for younger students, and by graphing the temperatures, students can physically see how it changes with the seasons. I just think this was a really neat example of how we, as future educators, can incorporate technology into everyday lessons.

Ch. 8 - Reinforcing Effort

The reinforcing effort chapter is all about teaching students that effort is a key ingredient in success. The act of reinforcing effort helps students to comprehend that there is a relationship between the two.

There are a few easy methods to help students see this correlation. Teachers can make a rubric showing what they believe to be "good" to "unacceptable" effort in any category that they believe to be important in classroom success. They can then give the students blank spreadsheets so they can rate themselves. After they have graded themselves, the students can highlight the Total Effort and Grade cells and create a new graph in which they can see the coorelation between the effort they expel and the grades they receive. Another example the authors gave was a math teacher who used his unit on graphing to help his students see that in the relationship of effort and grades, when one works harder, his grade is generally higher than when one doesn't work as hard.

It is also imperative to show students success stories of older or past students. When students see that their peers have overcome the same problems they have now, it is easier for them to believe they can succeed, too. Rather than just telling your students of success stories, there could be a section on the school website where teachers submit stories of their students. Teachers can also send out surveys to older students asking about how they overcame difficulties by hard work; teachers can then show their younger students the results of the survey.

Until reading this chapter, I never thought about needing to teach students that effort is necessary; it was always so obvious to me. But just because something was obvious to me, that does not mean that every student grows up with parents teaching them that hard work is the only way to achievement. I was lucky in that my parents instilled a great work ethic in me; but I now see that as teachers, we may have to do the same for our students. Using other students' success can be useful; instead of students just assuming, "Well, I'm a girl so I can't be good at math" or paying attention to other stereotypes, if a younger girl hears the story of a girl going to State for math, the younger girl may begin trying a little harder in math class. I also love the idea of using graphs and charts to show students the coorelation between working hard and achieving what they are striving for. As students grow older, this will probably be the most effective method for teaching students what hard work can do. When students see their grades raising as they put in more effort, that is probably a much more profound realization that simply hearing about a success story of another student.

Using Spreadsheets- El Ed Chapter 11

When I was younger, I definitely got frustrated when trying to play with word art or the shapes on Word when trying to create some sort of web or timeline or just creative text because it was impossible to get things lined up just so. I never thought to try and do it on a spreadsheet, it makes so much sense. Everything gets perfectly aligned and there's no struggle getting everything to print from one page because it will pretty much do it for you because multiple pages are accessed at one time, which is awesome.

We definitely took advantage of using spreadsheets for math related topics like graphing and money management, but this really broadens what can be done over all the subjects.

El Ed Chapter 11

I really liked some of the ideas in this chapter. I think teachers often assume that data bases and spreadsheets are too complex for elementary school students, but this chapter offers some really great uses for them in the classroom. I think my favorite idea is the webbing and timeline. As a middle school and even high school student I struggled to create neat and professional looking timelines in Microsoft Word, which I found nearly impossible. It never even occurred to me to try using Excel or another spreadsheet program. If I had the background knowledge of those programs from elementary school, it would have been very helpful. I also loved the ideas for graphing, especially the example about graphing genres of books read. What I like about that is that it combines the technology of the spreadsheet, the mathematical concept of graphing, and reading, which is associated with language arts. I think it is really important to show students that all of those areas are connected.