August 8, 2011

In the home stretch,  I guess that I am winning by a nose. This has been such an informative and helpful class going forward with my education.  I am so glad that I got to be a part of a group of indiviuals who are not only dedicated to their own education but to the learning of the others within the group.  I know that this was a tought class for many of us since it is the summer and so many of us had so many other commitments.  I have to say that this group was not only professional but also welcoming and supportive.  I hope that I have an opportunity to be in class with many of you again. 

July 27th 2011

Another day, another class.  I found this week to be a little frustrating between the closure slide and the orientation slide.  This is one time that I really felt like I needed to have visual design before I can create what I see in my mind.  I would like to be able to create what I think that is possible in my mind.  At least I know that I will be able to do that soon.
I will say that I am very fortunate to have such supportive and good classmates.  Everyone in class has done such a great job and have raised the bar so that makes me want to be better.

I'm Ready.....

This class has been such a great experience in so many ways.  First of all I love the fact that I was in NY last week and was able to participate in class, secondly I really appreciate that everyone strives to create better material every week.  There is something to be said for raising the bar with your peers.  It is the desire to create better material because not only were you challenged to but you were inspired.
It's going to be a long road but it's better with you guys!

I remember being so afraid of staying home and using Wimba in my last class because I really felt that I would miss something because so many people actually went to class.  This class has been a great example of what a virtual classroom should be.  I think the best part is that we don't know each other (well most of us don 't) yet we are open and honest and share about our lives and experiences with each other knowing that it will impact how we view the topics.  I really appreciate the different views.  Great job tonight.

July 17th 2011

Home from vacation and what a vacation it was.  My entire family including aunts and uncles and cousins from my fathers side of the family all converged in Ocean City, Maryland for the week.  It was an exhausting week.  I really feel like I need a vacation from my vacation, but there is no rest for the weary I will be traveling up to Saugerties, NY for a horse show for the remainder of the week.  There were a couple of noteworthy experiences this week

1) My son would make a good gangster (or at least looks the part.)
2) My family should not spend more then five days together. 
I think there are pros and cons to both of those statements.  I will be listening to the archives, hope you missed me :)  

Adult Learning Class Number 1 !

Oka's Picture

I am an adult and I am a learner.  I think that this is really funny because in the horse show land, we call them A-Dolts because they tend to not learn as quickly as kids. I really think that kids are better learners in many cases because they do not have the fear or reservations of failing.  I never really thought of myself as an adult learner I really like to think of myself just as a learner.  I guess if the shoe fits......see if it is on sale so you can buy more!  Anyway, I like the basis of this class as a pychology undergrad I really like to learn theory.  I don't like to write papers (I heart APA), but I do like that this class has a different approach then just learn it write about it, move on.  We will see where the evenings take us. 

Mine look something like this

Shark Bait

June 13th, 2011

I'm not sure if I am happy or sad that class is over on the 14th.  It has been an interesting class.  I feel that I have come away with more information that I can turnkey into my classroom then any other class or inservice I have taken.  I think that teachers can be some of the worst students, I was glad to see that this class had the same mentality as me.  Everyone really wants to learn and apply what it is that we have learned.  I am excited to see what our cohort holds in the future.  I like being able to go to the Hammonton High School instead of having to go all the way to Stockton.  That is not right around the corner for me.  I hope that I was as much an asset to the class I, my classmates were to me.  :)  We will certainly have fun raising a glass and looking forward to the next one..........

June 7th, 2011

Well another day another interesting evening.  I find that I have found so many good ideas from my fellow classmates just from the quick info given in passing.  Thanks to Anne tonight for the great idea of how she used her Wiki.  It is an idea that can be used across the curriculum.  I think that I can even use it in math and you know how much I love that!

Overall I think that Danielle, Brandy and I forged the way for the rest of the groups to present.  It was a learning experience to work with a group and I am glad that we worked so well together.  I look forward to making our Wiki better or even finding another source that would be better to publish our ideas to. 

I will leave you all this evening with the Polygon Song, yet another benefit of youtube (plus its just silly and  it makes me laugh)

May 17th, 2011

Tool Time......what a interesting experience.  I was really thinking that I didn't have enough to talk about Toondoo.com is really self explanatory and can be quite fun.  I like that it is easy to use and turnkey.  It is great to find a tool that you can use immediately in your classroom. I think that Turnkey may have been the term that I think Erika asked me about in class.  I was trying to remember what I had said that someone would not have used before and that is the only term that I can think of.  When we turnkey something at school it is when someone learns a concept and implements it in the classroom easily and immediately while showing colleagues how to use it also.  We usually refer to it when one person goes to an out of district workshop.




I enjoyed Kevin's presentation, I like that someone used Google Calendar as a tool time.  It is really useful tool.  I like that I can access my calendar anywhere and share some of my information but not everything. It is nice that I can have a home calendar, school calendar, and horse show calendar. I like that I can share a schedule, but not my entire life.....

May 10th, 2011

I think overall one of the most interesting parts of our class is our Tool Times.  I really enjoy seeing what everyone else finds useful and interesting.  Not only does it give us new tools to use but it allows us to see tools that maybe we have used before in a different manner.  I know that I would really like to use epals if I was going to teach a technology class again.  (I know Michelle, I could have done it this year but it was too hard to manage with 5 of us teaching tech.)  I would really like to promote that within our staff to see if anyone in the language arts departments would like to try that with our block scheduling hanging over our heads for next year.

Secondly the befunky.com is great! I love how many different choices there are for editing and I think that the shapes will be really useful.  This is the picture that I played with a little bit to try some of the effects.  It was Christmas tree shopping with my husband and the baby last December.  The baby was thrilled to go (as shown above.) I think that sometimes I get stuck looking at some of theses tools through my very narrow math teacher vision and miss the fact that some of them are just cool and have social and other implications as well.  Even if I couldn't use this directly in class doesn't mean that I couldn't use it to edit photos that I put on my new Wiki or parent help site.

Lastly Comic Life has a lot of potential as well, I tend to be a fan of toondoo.com just because it is free and I don't have to have my tech guy put it on my machine (I don't like to be tied down to one machine because we don't have laptops and I don't have my own room)  As a math teacher much of what we do is a process I think that having multiple frames as steps would be very effective for visual learners.  For example this would work well for order of operations.   Another example for visual and auditory learners would be the following song.
"

May 3rd 2011

Baby it's cold outside, or in class.  We made it to our halfway freeze mark tonight.  Amy was quite nice by advancing some of us our points to be sure we get to where we need to be.  I am feeling a little bad because I don't think that I contribute as much to the bulletin board discussions as other people.  However I am a self admitted bulletin board stalker (don't worry not the crazy kind.)  I just get great ideas from people and I have some good feedback to add but I don't think that I have contributed as many useful tools as other people have.  I think part of the problem is that the type of tools that I look for are different from my peers.  NCTM math illuminations for example is a site that I use frequently with a lot of virtual manipulatives.  I did a jing on vertex edge graphing that I had used in my classes.  It is not a tool that really anyone else in the class would use but it is important to me and my curriculum.  I really do enjoy exploring all of the different tools that we find but some I feel would be more useful to me then others.  I think that we all find ones that we gravitate towards more than others.  I really liked proprofs.com but I am again concerned about how it would translate into a math classroom.  Math is very difficult to type in an essay format so it would work if I created all multiple choice tests and then had students show all of the work on an additional paper.  I really like the fact that there are test statistics.  I like to be able to tell if the tests that I am creating are fair and really testing what it is that I taught, that is the point after all.

I was interested in the possibility of being able to continue as a cohort and also being able to take additional classes on my own.  It is a very different way of learning being in a cohort, you really do get to know the people that you are in class with and rely on their opinions and skills.  I think that it would be nice if we could continue on as a group.   

April 26th 2011

So another week has gone by, closer to our mid marking period freeze which has me a little paranoid since I have so much left to do.  The adventures to the Stockton campus were fun but far.  It does make me appreciate having a remote location and a driving buddy (thanks for driving Danielle.)  I know that there are so many options when you pick a school and I think that I made the right choice when it comes to everything I am trying to balance in my life. 


The Library tutorial was helpful and I do like to know that there are people behind all of these online resources.  We try so hard to make life easier and find more ways to be able to do things on our own without interacting with people.  It is nice to know that there are people available to help with our searches and get us pointed in the correct direction if we are not going about things the right way.  As an undergrad our library was huge and the elevator was slow.  I went every Tuesday night with my friends to study,  they are fond memories of a past time.  It is funny to me that our big old library has really been replaced with online media.  What are they going to do with all of those shelves? The Umass library stands in the middle of campus with a fence around it because bricks fall off of the building randomly. Also the weight of the books was not factored in when they built it so there are only books on every other floor, so maybe its a lighter load for the poorly planned building? 


Finally I think that the capstone projects were very interesting and diverse.  They did seem to fill a need and use creative thinking to showcase a solution to a problem.  It is very interesting that everyone had a different take or angle.  I liked that the program seemed to come full circle.  All of the presenters were learners then leaders of the very thing that they learned.  It is what we strive for everyday in our classrooms.