Eleventh Post

Excel has always been a very complicated software and I never really liked it. It does however comes in handy when you need to average out grades and other stuff. I guess if I keep practicing it'll get better for me maybe. It really takes time to get the hang of it. It just amazes me how till this day this is my least favorite Microsoft software and I took computer classes in both high school and at TCC. It's also nice to know that I'm not the only person who thinks it can be quite annoying.

One of the topics that just caught my eye was the different uses of technology in a classroom settings. This helped me visualize how my future classroom will be set up. I really liked the idea of how technology plays a role in classrooms mainly because majority of students are exposed to technology outside of school so therefore they can keep up with technology use in school. It's an even better idea because for the kids who aren't exposed to a lot of technology outside of school they can still keep up because they have it available at school.

As a future educator I think that I will always include technology tools such as wikis, blogs, digital content and visualization tools to keep my students engaged and individualized. I also make sure that I connect my students online learning communities that will help them become effective. I want to make my students good digital citizens and how to transfer knowledge of technology from known skills to unknown skills. 

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Tenth Post

As instructional designers we are constantly being bombarded with new technologies and new trends. It's difficult to distinguish which are fads, and which are worthy of our time and resources.There also seems to be be the perception that you can teach any content using any technology which is hardly the case. A blended instructional delivery method that I might use when teaching is flipping the classroom. Flipping the classroom is where the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects,, or discussions. The pros of a flipped classroom is that students have more control over their own learning, it promotes student-centered learning and collaboration, lessons are content and more accessible, easier for parents to see what's going on and it can be more efficient. The disadvantages is that it can create a digital divide, there is significant work on the front end, not really a test-prep form of learning and time in front screens instead of people and places is increased.

Microsoft Excel offers a lot of benefits with its functions, formulas, graphs or charts and tables. Teachers can extract several benefits from Excel worksheets in the classroom. Since I want to be a Reading or Language Arts teacher for middle school students, I can make use of the worksheet columns. The spreadsheets can be used for creating sample sentences and linking with other sheets pertaining to the lesson plans.

I didn't really learn that much from the PowerPoint assignments because PowerPoint has been a very big part of my technology life. However, I was very fascinated with adding buttons and linking them all to the slides was the only thing I learned which was really cool because I always wondered how did my teachers from middle school and high school used to do that when we played Jeopardy in class.

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Ninth Post

When we think about bringing the 4 C's into our classroom we don't need to "add" a thing. The best way to help students master these skills is to change how we teach and learn in our classrooms. It is the process of learning not the content of learning. Technology is a perfect vehicle for facilitating this. We can help students build creativity and critical thinking by the types of questions we ask them to respond to. Students should be building communication skills that reflect the media rich world they are surrounded by. Rather than writing an essay or a report about a subject they are learning, ask students to help solve a problem and let them share their solutions using formats like digital stories, eBooks, virtual museums etc. We often think about collaboration in terms of connecting with experts or emailing experts, technology tools like GoogleDocs are allowing for collaboration on documents. Truly collaborative project work enhances student learning and help students achieve the large scale goals.

Digital Divide is a term that refers to the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern information and communication technology and those that don't or have restricted access. These technologies can include the telephone, television, personal computers and the internet. I'm definitely on the side where technology is used so much because I pretty much grew up around it. I honestly don't think that the digital divide will have a huge affect on my future classroom because I feel like by then majority of my students will have some type of exposure to technology.

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