Class note May 28th, 2009- draft

• A guest speaker from FrontRow company: Introduction for a new product that can help the teacher make their voice clear in the classroom. It's called sound feel portion(?)
  


• FrontRow works in Canada for more than 30 years and the head office is in California
  


• The 1st class: Kevin talks about the project running in Surrey that is going to help student "thinking faster". It's called "Fast Forward".


• Clarify on the schedule of our presentation(Tech lesson). He starts to use the FrontRow product("sound feel portion"). It's great! His voice turns much clear although it seems he doesn't need it in our class. So cool!
  


• About "Understanding by design(UbD)"--explain the first reading:
  


• How to implement the design ; the template; the coverage; the materials<-- "ten years rule"--> "Ten years" run is very important, why?--> that "kind of damage have been done in 10 years, so... change it!
  


• How to access the persuasive? Learning plan is important.


• About "graph"; switch from European perspective to First nation then change back to Canadian perspective.


• How to balance? Past, present and the future.


• Activity should be in front of everything in designing<-- activity based.


• Passion will drive the students learning. Sometime, passion fits it the "10-year rule", sometimes, the curriculum fits in the "10-years rule".


• The reflection part will show you what you did wrong, we want they reflect themselves and get feed back to themselves. "Students will follow you because they feel passion on your lesson".--> you can't manage the classroom if you can't teach.


• "If I don't understand, I don't want to be here", it's a common result.<-- So, you need "thinking of this and thinking of your students" as an educator. <-- backward design;


• Some page is missing ? Piece-picking results?

• The 2nd class: Engaging/Enraging article discussion.

• We can teach the students to use things, such as cell phone, ipod, etc in a proper way.


• Engage them to learn by teaching them, but not over beyond the limit.


• Generation gap: don't use your view to justify the new generation. Put your foot at their position. (?How do we make it easy to do?) "They need their own generational needs". Kevin says.


• "Entertaining kids is the same thing as engaging the kids". Josh says." playing with them with a clear purpose. Engaging is not necessary to be entertainment.


• Reflection discussion: How does the voice impact the class? (Impact the class? Just need to project your voice, but it shouldn't be emotional. Be careful on this because it's easy to "enrage' your students if you cannot handle it properly) How does the voice and video impact the class?


• Some ideas to impress the students and engage them: Smartboard-->You can download software from your district for free if you get a smart board. --> using a dice or a spinner to set up options, play with protractor builded in the smart board and measure angles. --> Smartboard Activities: using magic pen, magnifying, lining up the objects or put them together.


• Activity in the class: changing the world, constant commitment. (30min.) We'll stop by 12:00pm.


• 
  

Math is Fun!

Welcome all teachers, especially math teacher, com on in! Get some fresh air in Math forest.

Do your students feel headache on quadratic equation? Let's enjoy the song of quadratic equation!

How to teach the linear equation with fun? Join them for skiing.

Do your studetns have trouble on inequality? Let's shade together.

Trigonometric function? What does it look like? Enjoy the Yo-yo.

Ohhhhhhhhh~~~ how powerful it is! It turns mathematics into song! Let check Youtube!

Class #3

This class runs way faster than what I can catch up with.

We start from how to build a better blog. In the blog, the "critical thinking" and " deep questions" related with what we learned are more important than fancy tech showing in the blog. We should pay more attention to the content.

The IRP introduction is followed by a discussion on "how to apply one high tech to the class to achieve the teaching goal". It is very helpful for us to practice what we just learned.

The most interesting part in this class is the "10 tools to engage writing" at Kerin's literate blog. From "storyboarding", "mindmaping", ......to "Book Making", everything there attracts me so much. By using "Comic Life", "Inspiration", and etc, a book can be made easily and well.

It turns to a question. Since the high tech can help people express their oppinion in such a simple and well organized way, is the fundamental training for spelling and writing (or we can say, traditional way for literacy) still neccessary?

During the group discussion time, we still keep talking about this. In my personal oppinion, the fundamental training is still very important. I conclude on this because I believe the knowledge pool is built through the talent from all individuals. The fundamental training on spelling, reading, and calculating is essential to develop abilities and skills of an individual. Without the contribution from our individuals, it's not possible to further develop our human society.

From this point of view, I don't encourage younger kids manipulate high techs for learning before they have proper training on traditional skills; I don't like to see such as a 3-4 years kid learns new words through typing in computer but spelling by hand; an elementary kid play calculator rather than using their mind for simple calculation, etc. High technologies can be tools for the teacher to encourage the student who feels no interest in learning; high techs can be good tools for the student who has difficulties to do writing/calculating due to birth defect. However, high techs cannot be everything. Since high techs come from human knowledge pool, if our descedent adhere to high techs only, it's not good for developing their creativity and intelligence. Therefore, we need to think how to avoid the adiction to younger kids for playing in high tech instead of learning basic skills in traditional way(that way has been proved as an effective way to teach our kids well and lead our society forward).

Children is our future. As educators, we are responsible to help them to do right things and learn in right ways. Thus, I think we need to be careful and be aware of the negative effect causing by introducing high techs into the classroom, although I believe the high techs will motivate our students and stimulate them in active learning.

(Welcome comments and discussions)

Videoes for Physics teaching

Look at here:

The Wonder and Beauty of Teaching Physics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJVvtOy-ukE
How do you think? Is it cool? or.......

Second class - website

May 14th, 2009

Ta...Ta....

"Fancy smart board! Impressive!"
I can only say this words.

As I said last time, I'm new to the information technology. And I'm very easy to get lost here. In the first class, I learned a very useful website that can store many information with Tags. It is http://delicious.com/; so, I registered and setup my account. And, I created the blogs from goole. I'm a little happy now, although I still feel that the class is a bit faster than what I can catch up with.

Starting from the brief introduction of smart board, Kevin repeats how to use delicious account and tag your favored websites as bookmarks. After that, a very useful technique - embed a link or a tag under wiki is introduced. I practice it and feel so well when it works. This makes me more confident.

Kevin explains something in the reading - "Setting the Big Pictures" and emphasizes that we need to focus on what we need to teach in activity designed in the class rather than technologies. I totally understand how important it is. No matter how fancy the technology is, it's only a tool to serve in teaching attractively and learning effectively.

The daily discussion in the class is so interesting; it's related the interactive working vs. one-way working in the classroom. The discussions are post spontaneously on docs google at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd3qwvmg_5fctskmf4&invite=858953971, and I name it as a "discussion platform". (DP) On DP, I find sometimes, if there are many people work together, the message I typed in is easily to be inserted in other's words. Interesting. I'm so admire that my colleagues could type in big blocks of message while I could only give a piece.

The most interest part in this class is the introduction of some websites, which are recommended to us. I list all as following:
1) http://allaboutexplorers.com/: introduce explorers
2) http://easywhois.com/: find people
3) http://youtube.com/kevinamboe: Kevin's post inYoutube
4) https://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html: free online photo editing site
5) http://taggalaxy.de/: animated icons as search engine
6) http://zapatopi.net/: a interesting website of Zapato productions for children
7) http://martinlutherking.org/: website for social study teacher, I believe.

All above are very useful websites, I am sure it'll help us in our teaching.

Any suggestions? :-)

First Class of EDUC 482

Reflection #1

The first lesson of Educ_482 on May 7th gave me a little shock, because it seems I knew little in this area. There are a lot of new technologies which I heard of them but not use them very often in my life, such as web Blogs, Internet, Pod casts, Wikis, etc. Mr. Kevin Amboe presented brand new scenery to me and I think I can learn more from this class.

At the beginning of the class, we were explained the textbooks we need to read(it’s a little scary to me), the course outline and something we need to know about this class, such as learning attitude, etc. At least, we need to have a positive attitude to the new technologies. We should positively think how to employ technologies as teaching strategies rather than “but, but, but...”; we should try experiment for innovations. After introducing some of the course outline, assessment and evaluation, we’re asked to write some self-assessment tool kits and edit the blog he created. It’s jittering time to me! I read the required content on dflit, but I didn’t do very much practice before the class since I didn’t know how. It made me confused and lost my way. Fortunately, with help of my colleague, I understand how to do it at last.

With the deeper discussion on the important value of the tools and the influence of the high technologies to the world, Kevin lead us to the world of new technologies. The most interesting discussion is on “How are students different today than 10, 20, 50 years ago? How does it impact in teaching?” These two topics lead us to think of innovations on teaching. How to teach the students in 21 century? With a lot of new technologies developed, the teacher becomes more like facilitator than knowledge carrier, while the student has more ways to learn various kinds of knowledge and possibly know more about new technologies than the teacher. These changes require the teaching approaches and strategies innovated and developed. All above discussions open a window for me. Peers discussion and group work are really helpful and broad my view.

In the class, I realized that I need to become more familiar with these new stuff. Otherwise, I won't be able to catch up with the class. This made me to think about practicing more on Internet. It resulted that I spent almost the whole evening over midnight on Thursday and it also sucked up my Friday. It is really fun. I enjoy the class and I need to learn how to employ these new techs to apply in my future class.

Education starts here

Hi, everyone,
Welcome to Shannon's Education blog.
In this blog, I'd like to invite everyone who has interest in teaching, to share teaching experiences and resources, develop teaching strategies, post some innovations on teaching, discuss some problems existing in classroom, enjoy and channel the emotion on teaching.
With the effort of everybody, I hope this blog will become a platform of teaching that can help me improve on the teaching and inspire me devote myself to teaching.
Thank you, and welcome!
Shannon