Educational Technology

Technology and Teacher Professional Development Staying up to date on technology is an important thing in today's day and age. It is even more important for educators because of their unique position of teaching the newer generations. One website that I have found to help educators stay up to date on all technology trends is  Digital Trends . This website has technology news articles, product reviews and rankings, and a bunch of other resources that all have to deal with the current news in technology. Here is a screenshot of the homepage: PowerPoint I have learned a lot through making the two different PowerPoint presentations. This is a screenshot of my linear PowerPoint presentation:  I learned that you can voice over a PowerPoint. This is a valuable tool that I have learned because I can present my PowerPoint presentations without being present. This is a screenshot of my non-linear PowerPoint presentation:  I learned even more while making my non-linea...

Assistive and Adaptive Technologies Assistive and adaptive technologies are extremely important when it comes to supporting learners in education. They are used to help students that can't normally use traditional technologies use them in an educational setting. For example, there is voice recognition software for the students that can't type. When I was in school, one of my friends was dyslexic, so he put all of his work through a spell checker and even asked the teacher to proofread before he turned his work in. One of the challenges that I see with adaptive technologies in my classroom is that if I have a student with a physical disability that has to use a voice recognition program might be distracting to other students. I will combat this by informing students of the importance of the program to that student before we start. I can also offer headphones for the other students so they can listen closer to their own material and block outside noise. Universal Design Un...

Dynamic Instructional Design Model Dynamic Instructional Design (DID) model is a 6-step model that was made to create instructional materials more effectively. For this blog, I am going to look at a lesson plan that I got from CPALMS and evaluate each step one by one using the DID. Here is a link to the lesson plan that I am going to use:  Lesson Plan .  1) Know your learners :  It important to know the learners in your classroom. With this knowledge you can mold your lesson plan to be effective for all the various backgrounds. In this lesson plan, I think that it does a good job of taking into account possible learner backgrounds. The only thing that I would change would be to make sure each students had a basic understanding of World War 2. I would do that by starting the lesson with engaging the class in a discussion about their prior knowledge of World War 2 and adding any additional information they have missed. I understand that World War 2 is a very extensive ...

My Teacher Website I would like to maintain a teacher website. I think that it offers some great opportunities to send reminders, helpful articles and announcements to my students and their parents. It is also important to have because my students and their parents can find out about who their teacher is in my About Me page. Being able to stay in constant communication with students and parents on an accessible medium is worth the effort that it takes to make one and keep it updated. All in all, teacher websites are important and I believe that all teachers should have one that they consistently update and use. Technology for Efficiency Technology does a good job of taking tasks that would take hours and hours before, and making them into a 10-15 minute process (ie. going to the library for resources vs. searching Google Scholar). I see myself using technology to help accomplish my professional responsibilities more effectively and efficiently by utilizing different resources th...

School Websites Most schools have their own websites where people can go to find out information and important dates regarding the school. A lot of schools go even deeper and put links to their teacher's class pages on their website. I looked on Google for some examples of this, and it brought me across the Waterloo Local School District website, where they had class pages for every teacher in every grade for every subject. I clicked around on a few of the 8th grade teacher's pages and I really enjoyed looking at their class pages. Most of the class pages that I saw had a weekly assignments tab and a tab which brought you to the teacher's bio. Each teacher added their own flare with math problems of the week and links to fun resources to help their students. Here is a link to the website as well as what it looks like:  Waterloo Middle School Class Pages The Digital Divide The digital divide is considered to be the increasing divide between people who have easy acce...

ELA Technology Standards Incorporating technology into education is crucial in being able to captivate young learners by speaking their language. However, even though these young learners have grown up in an era full of very innovative technology, they need to be educated on how to use that save innovative technology to benefit them in the world of academia. ELA stands for English Language Arts. ELA is very multifaceted and being proficient in it is key to success in all subjects of school, so to incorporate ELA and technology is important. There is one 8th grade standard that effectively draws the importance of a connection between ELA and technology. The standard is below and can be found at  ELA Technology Standards .   Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and present the relationships between information and ideas efficiently as well as to interact and collaborate with others. In my own words, this means that students can t...