Maggie's Blog EME2040 :)

I think that surveys are an extremely useful tool for teachers! I know that as a teacher, one of my number one priorities will be to form constructive relationships with my students and take their feedback into consideration. Having my students take a survey about their thoughts on my teaching methods would help me to refine my lesson plans to be the best for the students that I have. As an English teacher, I would also conduct surveys to see what books students would want to read, what questions they have about essay writing, and other topics pertinent to their english learning. Using surveys can create a method of conversation between students and teachers, and getting students' honest opinions using an anonymous format is a great way to target what to improve. One of my favorite parts of looking through my peers' blogs was seeing the differing opinions on the subjects we had to write about! I loved getting the chance to see pictures of their PowerPoint Assignment layouts a...

"The Flipped Classroom" is a newer instructional technique that incorporates technology on a daily basis. Rather than the traditional teaching format of lecture in class and homework at home, the flipped classroom has students watch video lectures at home and complete what might typically be homework during class. I personally have had a Calculus class under the flipped method, and I personally didn't think it was very effective. I think part of the most constructive aspect of in-class lectures is the ability to ask your teacher questions during class right when you first learn the material. Watching lectures at home was not engaging enough for me and I wasn't able to get any of my questions directly addressed. That year I performed the worst I ever had in a math class, and I think it was due in part to the flipped format. Open Educational Resources, or OERs, are resources that anyone can use; they typically are found online. These resources are called "open...

I have developed a lot of new skills through Diigo! I had never annotated an article on the computer before using this site, and it's been good to learn how to use the different applications included to emphasize important material. It has also helped me improve my interactions with my peers over a site like this. I have been able to read and respond to my peer's thoughts easier than on the Canvas discussion boards. Overall, it has helped me better prepare for other interactions online that I may have in an educational career. PowerPoint can be used to address every part of Bloom's Taxonomy. For remembering and understanding, simply presenting the information in a PowerPoint could do the trick! Associating certain images or fonts with certain facts could help improve the students' retention and memory of the topics they go over. Understanding tends to come with remembering, but providing additional information and context in the PowerPoint can help promote it as well....

For this ILP, I used a website called Powtoon to make a presentation for English students at the middle school level. The site was easy to use, and with it I was able to create a presentation that I think is both informative and engaging! Here is the link to my Powtoon on the Hamburger Method of essay writing! https://www.powtoon.com/c/ddZvlRdgmdY/1/m Here is the link to my VoiceThread! https://voicethread.com/share/13213199/

I'm observing a class at FSUS, so I thought it would be a good idea to look at their website. I looked at the teacher page of the teacher I observe, Ms. Savage Campbell, as well as those of a few other teachers in the high school English department there. Ms. Campbell's page has a welcome section, a section with information about her, and a section with information about the course. The course info section was similar to a syllabus, and it provided a lot of the necessary information for student conduct in the class. At the bottom of the section, there is a link to a "Google Folder" that is regularly updated by Ms. Campbell with the assignments done in class so that students who are absent can catch up. Looking at another teacher's site (she teaches AP Lit and English 2 Honors), I saw that she put passwords and information for students to access Remind groups and Google Classrooms. Overall these sites showed the important information that students needed at the beg...

I've liked using Diigo so far! I had a little difficulty getting the extension on chrome, but once I did it was super user friendly. I like being able to highlight the important parts of a website, and it's really nice to be able to take notes on the page that are accessible to the rest of the class. It's a good way to share interesting resources with my current peers. I imagine it would also come in handy in the teaching environment as teachers could mark up and communicate what they see as most important in educational documents. I really enjoy blogging! It's a fun way to collect all my thoughts on the general lessons of the week, and I get to do so in a way that makes me feel rather professional. I liked picking the theme of my blog, and I enjoy adding new widgets as it makes me feel tech savvy (and I'm not on a regular basis). The amount of writing is really manageable, and I feel accomplished looking at the finished product. I'm excited to continue making...

So far, using Twitter has been very interesting! I'm only following accounts related to education technology or FSU, but because of that I get a lot of interesting information relevant to the stuff we're learning in class. I've interacted with other EME2040 students and talked about how we did certain assignments or what we like best about the class. This has been beneficial because I get to see other perspectives of peers in the same position as me and know whether or not I'm on the right track. In the future, I'll be able to use Twitter to connect with other teachers and gain different ideas for how to conduct my classroom. The digital divide is the divide created between those who have access to computers and the internet and those who don't. In schools, students without computer access at the home are left at a disadvantage when projects that require typing or online presentations are involved. In the classroom, smart phones have started being integrated i...

For this ILP, I decided to look at a common presentation tool in a fun new way! Although most students are familiar with PowerPoint, it is very rarely used interactively in the classroom, and I wanted to learn how to make it more interactive for my future students. I found this video on how to make an animated PowerPoint slide that would be useful for quizzes and I knew I wanted to watch it and learn more about how to do this. Here is my VoiceThread: https://voicethread.com/share/13068160/ Here is the link to the original video in case you want to learn this skill too! Original Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmXnVMA1E6k NOTE: my VoiceThread is also linked at the bottom of my blog page :)

I feel very prepared to teach the ELA standards of defining words using internet resources and analyzing or using texts from multiple forms of media in a project because these are the skills I feel I was equipped with in middle school and high school. As a young girl, I thoroughly enjoyed using thesaurus.com to diversify my vocabulary and impress my peers. My dad rarely told me the definitions of words I didn't know because he wanted to encourage me to look them up myself in the dictionary, and later on sites like dictionary.com. Since 7th or 8th grade, any time I did a research project I was required to use a print source as well as a reliable online resource. This forced me to pay attention to the credibility of different online sources from a young age. I would be nervous to teach students to incorporate graphs or digital models of information in their work because I rarely did that myself in school. I had one project my sophomore year in which I had to make a pie chart, and doi...

As a student, the extent of my experience using Microsoft Word was limited to writing papers. I would use Word for projects that required a typed essay, but other than that I wasn't required to use it very much at all in my middle school and high school. My teachers would rarely use Word; they often utilized MS PowerPoint in the classroom to teach their lessons, but we didn't use Word in the same way. I personally used Google Docs much more often because I could be writing something on a school computer and I'd still be able to access it on my computer at home without having to save a Word document to a flash drive every time I wanted to work at home. I have countless experiences with copyright and fair use in the classroom that I didn't even think about until writing this blog. My teachers have played copyrighted movies and other media in the classroom, but the teachers would always credit the creator and use it solely for educational purposes. There are also many pu...

What Influences Teachers and Students to Use Technology in the Classroom? As technology grows around us in everyday life, classroom life keeps the pace. Devices that students may be using at home start to become a part of their education, and this can be effective in motivating positive work improvement or increasing engagement. Teachers are influenced to use technology in the classroom as that technology is provided to them by their schools. Students, who are accustomed to already using technology in the home, are influenced to use it in the classroom because it is familiar to them. Classrooms change and advance technologically, and they do so to match the growth in everyday society. The ISTE standards that have been established are, in my opinion, extremely important in the effort to integrate technology fully into the classroom. They will help students use the technology available to them as a tool rather than a hinderance. I think that the most meaningful standard to me would b...

Welcome to my Blog!! 😊 Hey gang! My name is Maggie, and I'm going to share some fun facts about me with y'all. I'm technically a sophomore at FSU, but this is my first year of college. My major is English Education, and I hope to one day teach English at a high school level and possibly move into an administrative role in a school system. I come here from Tampa, but I was born in Franklin Tennessee and I've been moving around my whole life. I have 3 siblings and a dog (her name is Thea and I'm pretty sure she's Satan's spawn but she's still a cutie though). I'm super excited to get to know you all better and learn the course material together! I have a lot of experiences with different types of technology in the school since I moved states and school systems so often. I've been to both private and public school, and as a result I've used smart boards and macs as well as 10 year old computers in my computer labs. A lot of my teachers, esp...