Blog 10

Creating a survey has proven to be a lot easier than I expected it to be and I hope to use surveys often as a future educator. I think that surveys can have many uses in a classroom. The main thing I believe I would use a survey for would be learning checks. These would be like zero stakes quizzes for my students that would allow me to better understand what topics still need review and what topics have been mastered by my class. These would be very useful as an elementary school teacher because many students are embarrassed to ask for help when they know their classmates understand the material. I think I would also use surveys similar to those used at FSU at the end of the year. I would like to regularly ask my students what they like about class and what they think I could do better. This is extremely important as a teacher because it is easy to think you are doing everything right when no one is correcting you and no one knows your class better than the students in it.

I often read my classmates' blogs and find information I didn't know beforehand. The most interesting thing to me however, is the different ways we have experienced this class. I often go to my classmates' blogs for inspiration and find that we have completely opposite views about parts of this class. Many aspects of this class I find important or interesting are completely ignored or disliked by many classmates and some things they enjoyed I disliked. For example, many classmates really liked using Diigo while I felt it was hard to navigate and unappealing to the eye.

I believe a skill I need to learn or really improve upon is Excel. I do not have much experience in it besides following the video to do the survey assignment. I feel as though it is very important to use as a teacher and I can barely navigate it. I hope to learn more about Excel through my own experience or from future classes. I also would like to improve my skill in making presentations for teaching. While I know how to make them, I feel as though they are lacking in creativity and interesting content.

Blog post 9

 Distance learning has been a very odd experience for me. It has been extremely difficult but also fun in a way. I enjoyed having the flexibility of online classes, for a while it was much easier to stay on top of my assignments. After one semester however, it became very hard to keep up and motivate myself to do assignments. Not being face-to-face with your teachers and peers definitely takes a toll on your learning ability. Not physically seeing my professors every day made classes feel imaginary so I stopped doing assignments. Myself as well as many others became more and more depressed during this period of school. I felt so tired from staring at my computer all day and so upset at myself for not doing schoolwork. I'd say as a future educator, if online classes are used again, I will try to motivate my students and remind them that their school work is still important even if it doesn't feel like it.

Open educational resources are free resources that can be used in teaching and learning. They are extremely useful to students and teachers alike because access to textbooks and databases can become very pricey. A brief article on Edutopia describes these and provides resources to find OERs. They also explain that while they may be convenient, some OERs are not as reliable as others. 

https://www.edutopia.org/open-educational-resources-guide

Doing the two PowerPoint assignments have definitely helped me develop skills I can use as a future educator. Making a game on PowerPoint was very fun and I hope to be able to do that again for actual students. I learned to create hyperlinks to different slides in a presentation which can be useful for many different things besides games. I also worked with different transitions and animations which make the presentation more interesting and easier to follow.

Blog Post 8

 I really appreciate the skills I learned while making this website. This was the first time I have ever made a website so that's the first new thing I learned. I also learned how to use Weebly to create a unique space for myself and my students to view. I was able to create hyperlinks and attach them to any text or image I chose which is something I did not know you could do. Overall, I feel that I may use Weebly in the future to create an actual website for my class.

http://edudelanie.weebly.com/

Diigo is an interesting tool but it is definitely not my favorite. I find Diigo hard to navigate and unappealing. I did learn how to better connect with my peers and share resources with one another which can definitely be useful. I believe this site would be useful if I ever became a high school teacher but I do not see myself using this tool otherwise. 

Technology has become extremely important to teachers and classes in general. Teachers use technology to connect with other teachers and stay up to date on changes and new software. I believe keeping up with technology is extremely important for professional development in education. I believe using sites like Twitter could be very useful in staying aware of changes in the education community. Twitter is used to stay on top of specific topics and news. 

Twitter.com