My Beliefs

I believe that it's a good thing to incorporate technology in the classroom.  The students absolutely LOVE technology.  When I was in field we took the students to the computer lab to find research about the Boston Tea Party.  We showed the students exactly what website to go to, but they still enjoyed being on the computer and using the information they found from the computer on their group poster.  Also in field, we made a jeopardy powerpoint game for the students and put it on the Smart Board.  You should've seen how excited they were.  The students paid attention the entire time and rarely got distracted. 

Technology amazes and fascinates students.  They love when they get to see technology in class, but they love it even more when they get to create things using technology.  I cannot honestly say that I will be using Digital Story in my classes, but I will definitely use google sites, powerpoints, jeopardy games, etc to improve my students knowledge about technology.  Technology is great and can be very beneficial to students and teachers. 

Lessons Learned

The first thing I learned in going into field was that the pursuit of happiness cannot be for "material" things.  If we desire "things" we cannot truly be happy.  Also from  The New WWW, it was said that the internet has been used as an escape from real life, which has caused a lot of problems for children.  It has caused many addictions.  From Tools for Change, I learned that there is something in technology for everyone.  An example of this is my husband just got a Kindle and has not been able to put it down.  Before he got the Kindle he only read a few times a month, but now he reads everyday.  He just needed a different form of reading to get himself excited about a book.  

From the article, Teen Disconnect, I learned about writing in schools.  There are five things that teachers can do to motivate their students to write: topics are relevant to their lives; teachers/parents who challenge them; receiving detailed feedback on their work; opportunities to creatively write; and having an audience.  In Shift Happens, I learned just how small the United States is compared to other countries, such as China.  I also learned that technology and new learning information is advancing at a tremendous rate.  3,000 books are published daily in the world.  Half of what a student will learn in their first year of college will be outdated by their third year.   

Strengths & Weaknesses

When taking the UNI surveys and looking over the NET standards, I came to the conclusion that I am not very technologically advance.  However, this is not something I didn't know before taking this course.  I have never felt the need to be technologically advanced and if I have questions about computer/technology things, I usually just ask my husband since he's an Information Systems major.  However, being in field for 3 weeks helped me see just how useful technology can be in a classroom.

The first reason that I think technology is useful in the classroom is because students find technology fascinating and intriguing.  They are more likely to listen if the lesson is using the Smart Board, rather than a plain old whiteboard.  The second reason technology is useful is that it can make grading, making homework, etc much simpler.  It takes a little time to learn how to use programs, but once you have done that, then certain things are much easier.  The last reason technology is useful is because technology is only going to get bigger and better.  If we don't learn technology and don't teach it to our future students, us and our students will be at a lost when the entire world is levels beyond what we are in technology.

To improve my technological knowledge I am going to do 2 things: have my husband give me a tutorial about everything I have questions about and find an online tutorial that will give me a basic understanding of different technological resources found in a classroom.  These 2 things will hopefully give me a broad range of information regarding technology.  

Digital Story Reflection

Tahnee Gregory & Aubrey Habel

December 1, 2010

EDEL 3250 Instructional Media

Digital Story Reflection

1. Provide demographics of school, number of students in class and who your cooperating teacher is.  The school we taught at was Edgemont Elementary in Provo, Utah, in the Provo School District.  A few demographic details are the following: Provo School District has a total of 1,863 special education students, ranging anywhere from being deaf or blind to having a traumatic brain injury; Edgemont Elementary has only 499 students, making it one of the smallest schools in the district; and Edgemont has 123 students receiving “reduced” or “free” school lunches.  Our cooperating teacher was Nancy Bishop, a fifth grade teacher who has been teaching for 16 years.  She has 27 students in her class and it’s divided pretty evenly amongst boys and girls.  
2. How is your relationship with your cooperating teacher? Explain. We had a fabulous relationship with Mrs. Bishop.  She is a very easy-going teacher and allowed us to create our lesson plans without given any specific instructions.  However, Mrs. Bishop is not one who uses technology frequently.  She doesn’t even have a cell phone.  She has a Smart Board but told us she didn’t even know how to work it so we helped the best we could and used the basic settings of the board.
3. How does he/she feel about the technology piece you created? Like I said above, Mrs. Bishop is not somebody who uses technology a lot inside her class or outside of her classroom.  She was impressed by any little thing we did with technology because she didn’t know how to do anything.  She did tell us however, that the students really like technological stuff and that they enjoyed the piece we created.
4. How does he/she feel about the lesson you completed? Mrs. Bishop loved all of our lessons.  We tried really hard to make all of our lessons involve the students a lot.  We wanted the students to lead discussions and share what they already knew about the subject material.  One lesson that we did was a taxing activity, where we taxed the students for certain things in the classroom for a few days.  We did this activity to help explain how the colonists felt when being taxed by the king.  The students loved this activity, and Mrs. Bishop was really impressed with the way we were able to captivate the students.
5. How did the the training session go? Explain. To be honest, the training session went alright.  Our teacher was not very excited about learning about the digital story and did not leave really any time for us to thoroughly explain how to make a digital story.  We taught her the basic steps of digital story and that was about it.  
6. How do you feel about this service-learning experience? We don’t feel like we had enough preparation, ourselves, to fully teach somebody about how to make a digital story.  We would’ve liked more instruction about digital story so we could have  felt more prepared.
7. What did your cooperating teacher gain from the experience? Our cooperating teacher probably gained a better understanding of the computer and what she can do, if she wanted, with a computer.  We think this experience opened her eyes to what’s possible when you implement technology in a classroom.
8. What did you gain from the experience? We gained a better understanding of how to make movies on our computer and how to share them with other people.  We also feel like we were learned a ton about the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party (our topics), which we did not previously know a lot about.
9. Was it worth why or why not? The digital story was not worth teaching to our teacher because she was uninterested in learning about technology.  She also informed us that she would never have time to make a digital story, and we don’t blame her.  Our digital story took many hours, which in our opinion is not worth it when it’s only for one lesson.

Field Experience Week 3

This week in field was great!  The more I'm in the classroom the more I love it, and can't wait to be a teacher and have a class of my own.  We were able to teach several times this week (only for small increments, but it was still a great experience), and really find several ways of teaching the students about the American Revolution.  

To help the students learn more about the different Acts in the American Revolution (Sugar Act, Stamp Act, Townshend Act, Tea Act, Intolerable Acts, etc.), we divided the students into groups of 4 and then assigned each group a different Act.  We then told them 4 things they needed to look for when researching their Act.  We also told each student that we would be going to the computer lab and they would be able to look up information about their Act.  We directed them to a reliable website and showed them where they could find information about their act.  The students really enjoyed being able to work on the computers and find research for themselves.  

Another thing we did to help the students learn about the American Revolution was make a timeline and a study guide about different events and people during this time.  We then proceeded to tell the students that we would be playing Jeopardy and taking a quiz in class.  They absolutely LOVED Jeopardy!  The students really enjoyed the competitive spirit about Jeopardy and got very into the game.  Informing the students that there would a Jeopardy game also got them to study their material.  This activity was technology-integrated as well because we did the Jeopardy game on the computer, which is so much fun.  We had the real Jeopardy background and music, it was great.  

Using technology in class really excited the students and gets them more involved about the material!

Field Experience #2

This past week has been another really great week in field.  My partner (Aubrey) and I have started teaching and have already taught 3 times.  The subject we have been given is the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party, and then everything in between as well.  I've never been a huge Social Studies fan, but teaching 5th graders is really fun.  They don't care to knowevery detail, and the information is explained very basically.  I think if high school students were taught the same way as elementary students (in Social Studies) then our high school graduating classes would know more about our countries history (and other countries histories).  

One of our lessons that we did was we gave each student 15 tootsie rolls. Then we told them that they were the colonists and we were the British Parliament-we would be taxing them on certain things.  We taxed them on what color hair they had, what they were wearing, what gender they were, etc.  The students got really into this lesson and got very upset.  We explained to them that this is what the colonists felt like.  They were being taxed on things that they didn't feel were right.  They were being treated unfairly and poorly.  

I've really enjoyed teaching the 5th graders in my class and have learned so much from them and from teaching them.

Field Experience Week 1

These past 4 days have been great. I feel like I learn SO much more being in field than I do when I'm in class (no offense to any teachers). I just feel that I learn by doing, not by listening to teachers lecture or show power points.
My field teacher is Mrs. Bishop and she teaches 5th grade at Edgemont Elementary in Provo School District. She's a fabulous teacher and really has a passion for teaching and for her students. Her students respect her and like to be in her class.
At Edgemont there is a lot of technology available. Mrs. Bishop has a SmartBoard, access to a mobile computer lab, printing/copying available, etc. However, even though there is a SmartBoard in the classroom, the teacher does not use it. She says she's not very good with technology but it is her goal to learn how to use it because she knows it'll be very convenient for teaching subjects such as math. Mrs. Bishop's class does use computers on a weekly basis, sometimes a couple or a few times a week. There is an actual computer lab, and a mobile lab that teachers can check out. These are great resources and my field partner and myself hope to take advantage of being able to have computers brought to the classroom.
I look forward to implementing technology into the classroom and teaching my teacher more about technology.