Sunday, October 16, 2011

EDT 619 Week 7 Blog Post Integrating Technology Performance Measures in the Classroom

Marla Baldwin
EDT 619
October 16, 2011


Integrating technology performance measures in the Classroom

6-8.CC. Communication and Collaboration—By the end of grade 8 each student will:

6-8.CC.3. Identify effective uses of technology to support communication with peers, family, or school personnel
I chose this measure because I have worked with students in a few ways that support the communication technology standard.
Skills addressed for this standard include a project that I worked with students along with an exceptional Social Studies Teacher. We focused on a project aimed at communicating with loved ones who are stationed overseas. From this idea, we created a secure Twitter account, a Yahoo account, and a Skype account.
Next we created a video exchange lesson where we communicated with middle school students in South Korea using the Microsoft Video software. Students were taught how to produce and edit videos as well as importing videos for communication with students in South Korea. This was a wonderful communication experience for the students and for us.
Another interesting communication system we adopted was called Parent link.  Parent link is a communication system that sends automated calls to parents and guardians informing them of everything that is happening at school. For instance, Parent link is used to notify parents when students are assigned a detention or when there are events going on at school.
I hope this gave you a snippet of how communication and collaboration through technology is being applied at Gerald R. Ford Middle School.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Making the Implicit Explicit Marmar EDT 619 Week 6 Blog Post

I really appreciate this blog. It describes what many of us wonder.  How are people being taught to utilize technology?  When you discussed the dialog and subsequent voice thread activity with the second grade class I thought back to my days as a preschool teacher. When I first started working as a preschool teacher, I had an epiphany,  Verbs that we take for granted (i.e. tying our shoes, going to the bathroom, brushing our teeth, putting things away in its proper place) did not happen automatically. We had to be taught to execute.  My favorite preschool was Montessori because children could practice until proficient in whatever skill they needed to master. Therefore, it is no surprise that technology skills need to be modeled as well. Skill mastery may take a few tries, but when a teacher patiently guides students of all ages to explore technology tools then executing the skills needed to carry out a task on the computer becomes second nature.

The only thing that I would contribute to the blog question is when one places the cursor on the icon Internet icon on newer models; a distribution of websites the user is currently exploring comes up.
http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2009/12/10/making-the-implicit-explicit/comment-page-1/#comment-3943