My Online Experience (required)

During my time of searching for good videos to watch from the conference I discovered some very interesting sessions. While some were harder to follow than other sessions I still was able to learn more about technology and how and why it should be used in education.



The first session I watched was called "Googlios: A 21st – Century Approach to Teaching, Learning, & Assessment" by G. Alex Ambrose. In this video Ambrose explains how google provides more than just a search engine but various types of apps that are great for the classroom. He also mentions how google has created gated networks for schools for teachers and students making a better online place for the classroom to learn through. He also talks about digital natives, immigrants, refugees, and aliens and how there are grabs between some groups that do have and don't have the access while now it's more about willing to and not willing to accept technology. Ambrose speaks about providing not just the "about" but also the "how to" and "to be" apart of the tech savvy world.



The next one I visited was "Little Kids, Big Possibilities" and this one dealt with what you can legally do with children under the age of 13 and the internet. Hines talks about some great sites that you are able to use with the students in the classroom. For example, wallwisher.com, this site allows a teacher to have the students create "post-it" notes on anything they are working on in class. Say that the class was reading Holes, the students could post vocabulary words on there or interesting facts they found while reading the book. This is only one of the numerous ways to use this site and it's free! She also mentions wordle.net, and how to use this internet site. I learned new ways to apply this into the classroom and it got my mind working. Kelly Hines then goes on to explain about how to use this comic creator site to help the students learn through developing their own comic strip based on what they are learning. It can help students learn and understand about plot telling and parts of a story. The one I think is the best is edmodo.com. this site is for both teachers and students and it is a place that assignments by be turned in, you may share files, even do polls with the students to see what they think of something.

Finally, I viewed the "Remixing History: The Cigar Box Project," this was really neat to hear about and made me think of what we have in the States that we could mimic with something in our history of America. These students studied how cigar boxes tell the history of a place (Canada for these students) and how the history is told through the images and design of the box. Then the students started to develop their own boxes and placing the history of Canada in their own designs of cigar boxes. But first they had a graph designer come and show the students how the professionals create images and layouts. From there the students worked as if they were professionals creating their own cigar boxes. I really enjoyed this session because it did not just teach history but also taught the students how what they were doing can be applied to real life careers later in life.

I really enoyed going through this conference and hearing from other educators in the field and to see how they incorporate technology in the learning experience.