For my own exploration into presentation, I created a brief overview of the direction I am in the process of taking my AP Psychology classes. My hope is that as I go through this presentation with them, they will start to get excited about taking our class in a more technologically advanced direction.
After examining social networking this week, my next task was to explore Google Docs. Fortunately, I had some experience utilizing these, and Google is a very intuitive system. In the past, I have created a spreadsheet to keep up with all of my AP Psychology students’ email addresses for importing into our Wikispace. I have also taken numerous surveys and filled out forms using a Google Doc managed by our Student Government Association teacher/sponsor. The possibilities for Google Docs are so great. What I am looking forward to doing with them at this point is having students create presentations across classes so that groups in each class are able to add information, analysis, and pictures. In this way, they will be able to collaborate with each other and collectively build more knowledge. For my own exploration into presentation, I created a brief overview of the direction I am in the process of taking my AP Psychology classes. My hope is that as I go through this presentation with them, they will start to get excited about taking our class in a more technologically advanced direction.
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This week’s exploration centered on social networking, specifically looking at Edmodo and Classroom 2.0. Although I utilize various social networking sites and I know teachers who use Edmodo, I am new to these. Setting up an Edmodo account was incredibly easy as Cobb County Schools already has a membership with them. As I explored, I focused mainly on AP Psychology searches and was surprised to find several other teachers looking for the same things I am, i.e. review resources and online collaboration. I went ahead and set up an online classroom for AP Psychology, and I plan to have my students register for the classroom in the next week when we have computer lab time. I also browsed through some of the apps available through Edmodo, and while I have not found any specifically targeted to AP Psychology thus far, I did find several that I am excited about sharing with the U.S. History teachers at my school, such as Founding Documents of the United States of America (https://www.edmodo.com/home#/store/app/?app_id=784) and Guns, Germs, and Steel (https://www.edmodo.com/home#/store/app/?app_id=198).
The second social networking resource I explored this week was Classroom 2.0. What I found here was absolutely amazing! On this site, teachers have an opportunity to connect with other teachers to share resources, ideas, and tools. I spent some time searching through the forum and videos for Psychology – an AP Psychology search netted me nothing in the forum. When I searched for Psychology though, I found several teachers looking for ideas and other teachers to foster a collaborative environment for themselves and their students. I am so excited to reach out to some teachers in a few months for collaboration during my abnormal psychology and treatment unit. On Classroom 2.0, I also found links to online and in-person conferences and got lost for quite some time exploring http://connectededucators.org/. I believe that overall this week what I learned is some definitive ways to connect with other Psychology and AP Psychology teachers in the country. As the only AP Psychology teacher in my school, the feeling of being connected has been lost in past years. This is a wonderful beginning. YouTube has been a great source for finding video on almost any topic at any time for years. TeacherTube is the more school appropriate version of YouTube; however, it typically is slower and more bogged down with advertisements. This week, one of my tasks was to explore YouTube and its school counterpart, TeacherTube for various videos, including videos relating to teaching content, how to videos, and videos just for fun. As I mentioned in my blog post below on podcasting, I have utilized YouTube to access TED Talks for several months now. These are fantastic videos on a wide range of topics, including this one from Sir Ken Robinson that most people have seen by now or heard about. In this video, Sir Robinson discusses the possibility that schools are killing creativity. I love this video because I believe it empowers students to think. Another video that I found and have seen before is a clip from The Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon trains Penny utilizing the operant conditioning principles of B.F. Skinner. The YouTube user, TeachingBizVids, that posted this has almost twenty other videos that I am excited to use in my classroom. Not all of TeachingBizVids’ videos are appropriate for high school use, but the ones on stress management and academic dishonesty are great! The video below is a how to video song from a first grade class on how to tell time on a clock. I love that this makes learning how to tell time fun for the children, and my one year old son really enjoyed dancing around to the song while it played! Although I could give you hundreds of just for fun videos available on YouTube, I will leave you with the always popular funny cat video below. I can truly say that I have enjoyed every minute of this YouTube exploration, and it has given me even more educational and silly videos to explore in my spare time! I must admit to being a complete novice to podcasting. Although I have an iPhone and have used it to listen to music for years, until this week, I had never subscribed to a podcast. However, given the direction of this assignment, I did some exploring using iTunes and eventually downloading the Podcast app offered by Apple. My focus this week was mainly on the Education category, although with four children at home, I also looked at Kids and Family. I explored several podcasts, focusing mostly on Grammar Girl and TED Talks. Grammar Girl was extremely helpful for my ninth grade daughter as she is our resident grammar expert. TED Talks was one that I have accessed through YouTube prior to this week; however, I love that the new ones will automatically download to my phone now. This gives my kids and me something productive to listen to on the way to school. In terms of how I can use this in my classroom, the possibilities are endless! Of course, the potential for my own podcast is there, and I think that I will be working towards that with helpful hints for the AP Psychology exam, questions of the day, and other useful items. Before I get going on that though, I can recommend to my students that they listen to the TED Talks at least once a week to foster a discussion on Fridays. This would allow me to begin to implement more of a “flipped classroom” and put the onus on my students to bring in items for discussion. For information on flipped classrooms, please check out Knewton’s explanation at http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/. For my first attempt at podcasting, please play the audio below. This is a free podcast, hosted by podomatic.com. This week in class, we evaluated many, many web tools for use in the classroom. The one I am the most excited about is socrative.com. Socrative allows you to set up quizzes and allows students to respond with their cell phones, computers, or other web-enabled devices. Teachers set up a free account with Socrative, and it gives them a room number. When students enter the student site, they enter their teachers’ room number and have access to the quiz for the period. Socrative basically eliminates the need for “clickers” in the classroom, and it also allows you to share quizzes with other teachers, which is great for collaborative teams. Additionally, when students are done quizzing, the teacher is given the option of exporting a spreadsheet of student grades.
Along with teaching AP Psychology as I have blogged about before, I also teach Economics in a team taught setting. The Economics lead teacher is an amazing leader and is always open to trying new techniques. We have already set up our mid-unit benchmark for this unit in the computer lab utilizing Socrative. In our school, cellular phone use is very limited, and we are not quite ready to open the door to the potential issues of allowing cell phone use in the classroom. However, we do believe that by securing a computer lab for use of Socrative this week, we have (hopefully) eliminated potential cell phone use issues as well as the potential for inability to participate if students do not have smart phones. I am looking forward to hearing from anyone else who has successfully – or not so successfully – used Socrative in the past. I could use some hints! This week's blog post is devoted to the concept of Creative Commons and the online program Flickr. Prior to this week, I really had no idea what Creative Commons was, but there is a great video available on exactly what Creative Commons does here. I had seen the little cc logo on certain photographs on the Internet, but I was pretty new to the concept. Basically speaking, Creative Commons allows us to share our creative works - our photographs, songs, lectures, videos, the list is endless - with others. All works are fully copyrighted automatically as soon as they are written down somewhere. Creative Commons, however, allows us to share our works with less limiting restrictions. For example, I could post a photograph of my dog and allow others to use it as long as they give me credit for my work and do not use it for commercial purposes. This could revolutionize how students do projects in school. No longer do students have to be as concerned about violating copyrights; as long as they give credit to a cc licensed photograph or work, they are following the law. Additionally, finally understanding what this little cc means will enable me to utilize more of other people's work in my own professional practice.
While I do frequently share pictures on the web of my children, our vacations, our less than intelligent dog, and other adventures, I had never really given any thought to who might be using these. Like many others, I have read the panicked stories of companies like Facebook utilizing our private images to sell their services. Truthfully, that has rarely had much impact on me. Perhaps I was more of a Creative Commons-minded person than I ever knew. In terms of my teaching materials, I have created most of them by working with other teachers, patrolling the web for ideas and insights, and moments of rare inspiration. I do not believe that I own them as I am more than happy to give them away. As far as potential negatives to Creative Commons go, there is always the risk of someone taking your work and changing it such that it does not reflect what you originally intended. But I believe the same can be said for studies that are published, songs that are sung, and poems that are written. Any time another human being interprets our work, much can be changed from what we originally intended. I think it is clear that the positives outweigh the negatives in Creative Commons. The concept of Creative Commons is what led to the idea behind Flickr. Flickr allows people from all over the world to share their photos, comment on others' photos, and add tags so that photos are easily found. As an example, I found the picture below of an owl in honor of Kennesaw State University. See what you can find! Photo courtesy of Jennie Rainsford here. This week was a new exploration for me in ITEC. We explored Twitter, which I had some familiarity with from exploring over the last month. However, social bookmarking was a very new phenomenon to me. Richardson (2010) in his book Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools in the classroom states “Millions of people have begun using public, online bookmarking services where they can save links, annotate them with unique keywords or ‘tags’ to organize them, and then share them with the world (pg. 89).” While I have been bookmarking websites for years, the concept of having a centralized location for all of these bookmarks that would then be available to other colleagues, teachers, students, and others is great. This week, I explored Diigo, a social bookmarking service, and you can view my bookmarks at https://www.diigo.com/user/leahkurtz2012.
What I found overall this week is how incredibly user friendly social bookmarking is. When you find a website you are interested in, you simply click bookmark on the Diigo toolbar, and it opens a box so that you can add tags, which help to later find the site. Another great feature is that once you know which tags you are interested in, you can search for those tags within Diigo, and the service will pull up other Diigo users’ sites. The potential for use in a classroom is limitless! I am already looking forward to adding this to my Wikispace for AP Psychology. I cannot wait to read through other teachers’ blogs to see how they are using Diigo, and I would love some feedback on this post! Up until this week’s reading in Richardson (2010)’s Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for the classroom, I really had no idea what a wiki was other than the knowledge that my AP Psychology students consistently want to utilize Wikipedia as their only resource, and I have never allowed that. However, after reading Richardson’s explanation of what a wiki really is and exploring some other teachers’ wikis, I can honestly say that I am excited about implementing a wiki in my AP Psychology classes. This wiki is already in the process of being set up, and I am meeting with the other Economics teacher to discuss setting up an Economics wiki for all of our classes.
One wiki that I found particularly enlightening was the Discover utopia project (http://discoveryutopias.wikispaces.com/). In this wiki, middle school students are answering the “great questions of society.” By discussing these questions on the wiki and collaborating on answers, they are making progress towards understanding how a great society is made. The collaboration on this wiki is incredible, and I would recommend that any of my readers check it out! Another wiki that was interesting was School in the past (http://schoolsthen.wikispaces.com/), which is a wiki done by first graders in which they interview their parents and other adults to explore what school was like for them. What is amazing about this wiki is that students as young as first grade are actively collaborating to build this understanding of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. So often we accept that young students are not capable of some of these really great technology projects, and School in the past clearly puts that belief to rest. A final wiki that I found interesting was the Westwood wiki (http://westwood.wikispaces.com/). This is a wiki run by Vicki Davis and includes e-portfolios for her students. What I loved about this wiki is that students are showcasing their work to the world in a safe manner. After this week’s readings and exploration, I am truly looking forward to beginning work with my AP Psychology students on our class wiki (kurtzappsychreview.wikispaces.com)… now if I can just figure out a quick way to upload all ninety of their e-mail addresses. Any suggestions? As I think more about how to incorporate students’ blogs into my own classroom, it is imperative that I consider how to evaluate them. As such, I did some research online and came upon several helpful sources. One post by Mark Sample (2010) on ProfHacker was invaluable. This post is available at chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-rubric-for-evaluating-student-blogs/27196. Although Sample was evaluating blog posts at a collegiate level, when incorporating the use of blogs into my AP Psychology courses, this will be a completely appropriate level to examine when creating my own rubric. Sample required his students to contribute to the weekly class blog with various posts and evaluates them primarily regarding their focus and connection to themes and examples. Sample’s criteria primarily drove my first rubric criteria. Another post that helped was Bill Ferriter’s tips for teachers on blogging projects. This is available at http://digitallyspeaking.pbworks.com/f/Handout_TeacherTipsBloggingProjects.pdf. I found this site to be helpful as it gives you a list of how to go about incorporating blogs into your classroom. Although Ferriter’s post is not a rubric per se, it does create a feeling of security when beginning the process of creating your own blogging classroom.
References:
Ferriter, Bill (2013). Teacher tips for blogging projects. Retrieved from http://digitallyspeaking.pbworks.com/f/Handout_TeacherTipsBloggingProjects.pdf. Sample, Mark (2010). A rubric for evaluating student blogs. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-rubric-for-evaluating-student-blogs/27196. ITEC 7430 – Blogging about blogging
In today’s post, I would like to take some time to explore some questions about and issues with blogging. Up until my reading in Richardson’s (2010) Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms, I truly believed that I was successfully utilizing a blog in my classroom. I faithfully post an entry every day for every class at cobblearning.net/kurtzappsychology. Included in each post are lists of things that we did that day as well as links to assignment sheets or sites such as learner.org where a student can view episodes of Discovering Psychology. Instead of actually blogging, I have instead been creating what Richardson (2010) refers to as a “class portal (pg. 21).” While this is useful for students and parents, it is clearly not the true intent of a blog. Blog writing, in general, seems to need a focus on interactive reading and writing. What I am providing my students instead is an opportunity to view assignments and find instructions, but that is about it. Richardson (2010) advocates that blogging could be considered a “new genre that could be called ‘connective writing,’ a form that forces those who do it to read carefully and critically, that demands clarity and cogency in its construction, that is done for a wider audience, and that links to the sources of the ideas expressed (pg. 28).” This is clearly above and beyond what I am currently offering my students. As we educate the students in our classrooms today, it is imperative that we keep in mind how far technology has come in the last few decades. A few days ago, on my Twitter account (@leahkurtz2012), I posted a link to a site that helps to visualize what is going on every second on the Internet (onesecond.designly.com). What fascinated me is just how much information is being traded, accessed, commented on, and explored every second. That being said, it is imperative that I move my blog from a regular feed detailing what we did in class to an interactive classroom. The blogs allowing all comments to freely post is something that we were cautioned against in county trainings for our new blogs last year. However, given that caution, I have never encouraged my students to post comments at all. I am looking forward to exploring how to better do this in the weeks to come in ITEC 7430. I would love to hear how all of you are utilizing blogs in your own classrooms! References: Richardson, Will (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks: Corwin. |
Leah Kurtz
Welcome to my Weebly blog! This is a chronicle of my experiences in the Ed.S. for Instructional Technology program at Kennesaw State University. Come along with me on my grand adventure. Archives
July 2014
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