Spreadsheets and my Awesome Survey!

I think that spreadsheets can be very beneficial in the classroom. I love that you can create charts, so that students can enter in their data that they have collected and see the results. They can enter in the numbers they have collected form their peers and then see how they are all related to each other as they appear in a graph!

I also love the survey application on google documents. I could create surveys periodically to get feedback from parents or students. I could ask them about how the parents feel their students are progressing or ask the students what they would prefer to learn in our next lessons. There are so many ways I could use these tools!

Here is the survey that I did for this class! Check it out so I can see the results!

Google Documents and Word Processing

All I can say is that technology can be really frustrating sometimes. For many of these applications, although they are awesome, they can be very frustrating to try and get to work. I had a lot of difficulty trying to get my google documents to work. After awhile, and once I figured it out, I can see the many benefits of it.

I think google documenting or using word processing can be a great way to get kids to work together and be creative with their writing. Often I think kids struggle with thinking up ideas to write about. When kids can work off of each others ideas or work as a group, I think they can get a start to their writing.

I want to teach 3rd grade or above. I really enjoy working with older kids and I can see how google documenting can help them. I think that they will understand how to use it better. You would have to be careful what kids are putting on their document. On this site, people can add whatever they want. They may not take it seriously and may just add silly things to other people's stories. To solve part of this problem you could maybe divid the class into groups and have one account that all the students use. This way you can monitor what your students are writing.

Copyrights!

This week in my instructional technology class I learned about copyrights and how important it is for teachers to be careful in how they use materials. I found it scary that if a teacher uses some sort of material wrongly they could be sued and even fired from their job. There acts could be seen as immoral.

There are so many laws and even though there is the idea of Fair Use, it is not very clear cut. Only the court can decide if your motives were consistent with the Fair Use law. In many instances, it may be best to simply buy material or ask permission just to be safe. There is so much information and material out there for teachers to use that it would be a waist not to use it. As teachers, we are able to use materials more easily because we are using it to benefit our students. It is still better to be safe than to be sorry.

YETC!

Today in my educational technology class, we learned about the many resources that are available from the YETC. I had been on a tour of the YETC, but today I think I learned so much more just how important and wonderful the YETC is. I didn't realize that there are so many resources available online for free. I really want to take advantage of as many of these things as I can.

I will definitely use many of the things we talked about today in my classroom. These resources will make learning so much more engaging for the students and a lot less boring. I really loved the ideas of the spellingcity, storylineonline, and stellarium. Spelling can now become fun and more engaging. Story time can be done through large pictures, read by celebrities that children are familiar with, and become more interactive. I am really excited about the stellarium because I am very interested in astronomy. This can be a great project or activity to do with students. I really enjoyed our tour of the YETC!