Technology Tools to Keep You Going

MOODLE

Moodle is a free, online Learning Management System that allows educators to create their own private website to teach courses anytime and anywhere. This product facilitates both teaching and learning. At the University of Guam, online classes, as well as hybrid classes, are taught on Moodle.

My view on Moodle: Moodle is fairly simple and straight to the point to use. It’s a bit confusing at first, but once you play around with the different features, it grows on you. What I like most about Moodle is that there is a Grades section which allows students to see their grade so far. Another great feature of Moodle is that it reminds the students that we have “assignments that need attention”, meaning that we have something due. Students can be very forgetful with what we need to turn in, so this reminder is very handy.

CHROME

Google Chrome is a freeware web browser developed by Google. It is fast, simple, and built for the modern web. Google Chrome offers many features like translation in the browser, new tab page, omnibox, incognito mode, and many more. This web browser can also be synced with all your devices such as your laptop, personal computer, and your mobile device.

My view on Chrome: Although I have mentioned that Google Chrome features the Omnibox, I find it very irritating at times. Omnibox is a feature where when you type something in the address bar, it automatically searches in Google. Sometimes I just want to enter the website directly in the address bar, but with this feature, it searches in Google and the Google page pops up. Google Chrome is great though because it’s fast and it has great security.

GOOGLE APPS

Google Apps is a set of web applications provided by Google. These web applications include Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Blogger, and many more.

My view on Google Apps: As a student, I love using Google Apps. It is very helpful, especially with Google Docs because you can have more than one person edit a document in real, live time. Safety is always an important aspect when sending and receiving mail online, and I definitely trust Gmail. The only downside with Google Apps are the small things like with Blogger, there is no table layout when posting. There are a few ways to get around that though, but it’s always good to have that already built into the app itself.

LIVEBINDERS

LiveBinders is a digital 3-ring binder that you can put virtually anything into: webpage, document, PDF, images, and/or videos. Everything is organized by tabs and you can even have subtabs within those tabs.

My view on LiveBinders: LiveBinders is a great place to save your favorite webpages and documents. It is a great tool to present your findings on one subject. You can either make your binder viewed by the public or privately, for your eyes only. Sometimes though it gets slow and freezes. So be patient when it happens.

WIX

Wix.com is a free leading cloud-based development platform with millions of users worldwide. This site has lots of beautiful designs and templates to create a professional web presence. Create your own website to promote your business, showcase your art, set up an online shop, or like what we use it at school – create a website to present our ideas and findings.

My view on Wix: Wix.com is such a great website creator to use because it’s simple and the designs that you get to choose from are beautiful. If you don’t have a design or template to your liking, you can upload a picture or start from scratch. The downfall that I found when using Wix.com is that when you edit the website with fellow editors, it may not save the changes you have made. It may also kick out the last changes that another editor has made.

KIZOA

Kizoa is a website where you can create slideshows, videos, collages, and edit photos all in one place. You can make slideshows and videos with effects, text, and music. Once you have made your creation, you can share them online through email, FaceBook, Twitter, blogs, and websites. Also, you can convert it to video and upload it onto YouTube. Lastly, you can burn it onto a DVD so you can keep this memory forever.

My view on Kizoa: I love Kizoa. I take lots of pictures so when I saw this video maker, I thought to myself that I can save all my pictures onto this and burn the slideshow onto a DVD. In addition, you can upload your own music onto the website instead of using the music from them. The only downside to this is that you can’t use your own voice for a narration of the slides or videos. I hope they update it with this feature.

QUIZWORKS: ONLINE QUIZ CREATOR

QuizWorks: Online Quiz Creator allows users to create fun quizzes that offer an engaging experience to your audience. This wonderful quiz creator allows you to challenge your users on any platform: computers, tablets, and even smartphones. The website allows you to choose from lots of question types, such as text questions, mulitple choice, image questions, and multiple answers. At the end of each quiz created, there is a leaderboard, rankings, and statistics.

My view on QuizWorks: Online Quiz Creator: As a future educator, I find this Quiz Creator very useful. Not only is it fun, but there is a leaderboard after each quiz. You can edit the questions and timer that comes with having to answer the question. Once you answer the question correctly, it adds 5 seconds to the person’s timer. I think it can use a bit of sound effects, like the ticking of a clock while the quizzes are being played so it adds a bit of suspense or thrill for the people playing.

PREZI

Prezi is a presentation tool that can be used as an alternative to traditional slide making programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint. Instead of slides, Prezi uses a canvas that allows you to pan and zoom to various parts of the canvas and emphasize the ideas presented there.

My view on Prezi: Prezi is a great presentation tool to use if you want to use something different from the standard PowerPoint. It’s pretty amazing when it pans and zooms out to different parts of the canvas. However it can make the audience dizzy from all the zooming and panning out. Another great thing about Prezi is that you can upload slides from Microsoft PowerPoint onto Prezi and it will reformat the slides onto the Prezi slides. The downfall with using Prezi, especially on campus at the University of Guam, is that it will lose signal and connectivity.

*** If you click on the logo of each technology tool, it will take you to the website of the technology tool itself ***

Is there still a way to be safe online?

Do you feel safe online? As technology progresses in our world, our privacy then is at stake. Many people feel freedom when they post their thoughts online, not knowing that this information would be available to anyone reading it. These small things may lead to something much bigger than what it really intended. According to Metropolitan Police Service, "if you use the internet, you could be at risk of illegal activity or abuse - be it bullying, fraud, or something more serious."

Personally, I feel very unsafe online when it comes to using social media websites like Facebook and Instagram. I have deactivated all these accounts due to the online trending of digital kidnapping or what is more known as Baby Role-Playing. Digital Kidnapping is when another person saves a child's picture and reposts it on their Facebook or Instagram, claiming that the child is theirs. As a parent, I find this very disturbing because these are babies and children whose identities are being stolen right from their mother and father's Facebook or Instagram pages. The scary thing is with this form of kidnapping and identity theft is that it is not illegal. Police and authorities have claimed that since it is not harming anyone directly, they can't do anything about other people saying that the child is theirs. 

As a future educator, I will certainly teach my students how important it is to be safe online. Many kids want to be part of the "in" crowd and with this generation, being "in" is to have a social media website account. Being an Elementary Education major, I have looked for tips online on how to teach online safety to these children. As stated by National Cyber Security Alliance, "it is essential that students understand and commit to not sharing personal information with anyone they meet online." As these students move on from one grade level to the next, they must feel that online safety is as important as being safe out on the streets, at school, or at the mall. 

For this project, we had to work again with our group. I found the assignment simple enough to do. We had to obtain information relevant to our subject, which is Digital Safety and Privacy. We got to work on our presentation through Weebly. Although this tool was great at having all 3 of us working on it at the same time, the way the website can be edited is very limited and a bit sloppy. A great tool for creating websites is Wix, however it's difficult to have all members of the group editing the page at the same time. 

As with every group, there will always be that one person who will just contribute the bare minimum and who will not communicate as much. According to Schatz, "the most effective teamwork happens when individual contributors harmonize their efforst and work toward a common goal." With this project, I was very much under stress because one of our group members was not communicating with us and she stood us up on a very important meet-up. I found it very disappointing when this happened and just wanted to get this project over and done with. 

In the end, we managed to learn more than what we already knew about the online world and digital safety and privacy. The most important thing to know when being online is to not give out any valuable information - address, credit card information, your whereabouts. There are many people out there waiting for you to mess up just one small bit and then your whole life can be in ruins. 

References:

Metropolitan Police Service. (2015). Internet Safety. Get The Facts. Retrieved from:

http://safe.met.police.uk/internet_safety/get_the_facts.html

National Cyber Security Alliance. (2015). StaySafeOnline.Org. Retrieved from:

https://www.staysafeonline.org/teach-online-safety/grades-k-2

Schatz, T. (2015). What Makes Teamwork Effective? Retrieved from:
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/teamwork-effective-694.html

Baby Roleplay - The Instagram Game Using Stolen Photos of Other People's Children: BBC Trending. (2015). Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm1zi4uQJ2I

An Opportunity for Every Child

Growing up on Guam, our classes were never inclusive. According to Study.com, "an inclusive classroom is a general education classroom in which students with and without disabilities learn together. It is essentially the opposite of a special education classroom, where students with disabilities learn with only other students with disabilities." However in this generation of education, we are slowly getting rid of these "special education" classes and blending our classrooms to ensure every child's right to equal access of success and education.

As teachers, we must figure out our students' strengths and weaknesses when it comes to learning something new and how they learn the material. We were introduced to the ASSURE model lesson plan in class and I believe that when using this lesson plan, the parts that will include opportunities for students with disabilities to be successful participants would be under the second "S" - Select methods, media, and materials. The ASSURE model lesson plan is great for children with disabilities because this lesson plan is designed for technology usage in the classroom. As shown in the video of "Enabling Dreams", children with disabilities find it very useful to have assistive technology in the classroom. These gadgets help them communicate with their teachers and even their parents.

As a future educator, I will ensure that all my students have the opportunity for success. Since watching this video on assistive technology, there are several ways, gadgets, and tools for children with disabilities to be able to succeed in the classroom. I will learn of their disability and keep their parents involved in their child's education. When the child feels that they can succeed, they will have a mindset that they will succeed.

Children with disabilities have a difficult time engaging with regular children without disabilities and it's saddening. So when children with disabilities have a hard time with learning a lesson or taking on a task in school, it may lower their self-esteem or discourage them from even trying. As I mentioned earlier, I will learn of my student's disability and find the necessary tools that may help them succeed in the lessons being taught. The assessment would somewhat be revised to accommodate their disability with room for constructive criticism.

After watching this video about assistive technology, I thought of my nephew who was diagnosed with mild autism back when he was 3-years-old. He is now 6-years-old and has a difficult time expressing his feelings and what he wants to say. He babbles still and when he tries to speak, his words are all jumbled. I found a website online that shows the different assistive technology that may help him in the classroom. In addition to this website, Sampathkumar talks about this one app in particular called YuuDee, "using a base library of over 400 easily identifiable icons, with the option to customize and add thousands more, YuuDee helps autistic children articulate the basics, such as hunger, thirst, uncomfortable clothes, an itch, or a pain." With this app in mind, my family and I will be able to communicate with my nephew and get to know what he is going through.

Assistive technology helps children with disabilities succeed along with their peers without any disabilities. Teachers all over the world should consider doing research on the different types of tools that will be helpful for their students. I know I will go the extra mile for my students.


References:

Sampathkumar, M. (2015, July 01). How Apps Are Helping Kids With Autism Learn To Communicate. Retrieved from
http://magazine.good.is/articles/how-apps-help-autistic-kids-communicate

Study.com. Inclusive Classroom: Definition, Strategies and Environment. Retrieved from
http://study.com/academy/lesson/inclusive-classroom-definition-strategies-environment.html

A Lesson Plan That Works

The Fun Thing with Group Work

We got into our group of 3 and had to decide on an online educational game for review. What game is good to present on for this project? We first asked each other what our area of concentration was in the field of Education. I answered with Elementary Education, whereas my other group members answered with both Secondary Education, but one with a concentration on English and the other in Math. We came to a consensus and decided on an online educational Math game called Number Cop.
We needed to familiarize ourselves of this game for a good understanding of how we want to grade it. Our first assignment to this project was to create a rubric. We looked online for the basic outline of an educational game rubric. After we got an idea, we came up with our own categories and criteria for this game. The difficulties, I believe, we came across while working on the rubric was the wording of our description of each category of accomplishment and the editing of the whole table on Google Sheets. The wording was a tad difficult because we wanted for our audience to be able to understand the different aspects of our rulings without sounding too colloquial. The other difficulty was editing the table on Google Sheets because it was my first time working with this new technology tool. I have been working with Microsoft Excel and the two are very similar, so all I had to do was play around with it a bit till I got used to it.

Since I am majoring in Elementary Education, Number Cop is a great game I can incorporate into my Mathematics lessons. The first way I can use this game would be in class itself. Hopefully, the classroom that I will have as a future educator has a computer with internet access so we can play this game. I would then break my class into groups of 4 where each group can take turns during Math time to play one game each. They would watch one another and take data of how each of them are doing. According to Garfield (1993), children who work as a team to solve a problem, complete a task, or accomplish a common goal lead to better group productivity, improved attitudes, and sometimes, increased achievement. This activity will not only help them with improving their math skills, but also the skill of learning how to work with other people to accomplish a common goal.

In this world that we live in, it is very easy to communicate with one another without having to meet face-to-face. As stated by an online website, new communication technologies can create new environments that produce more open, fluid, and dynamic small group environments ("McGraw Hill").  The best tool we used was Google Sheets because we got to make the rubric together in real time, as long as we were online. We made edits where it was needed without having to leave our front door. For our presentation, we decided to use Prezi, a different, fun way, to showcase our game. Although these tools were very helpful in our group project, I would have to say that our favorite tool is Whatsapp, an app on our mobile devices where we are able to text one another using WiFi. Through this tool, we were able to communicate faster since the messages came like text messages on our phone. In addition, if we had questions that are hard to explain, we can send pictures using this tool. 

In the end, I had a wonderful time while working on this online educational game group project for many reasons. I learned new technology tools that I can use for future assignments and as a future educator. In addition, it was a way for me to be able to get to know my group mates more. Through this process, I have learned what each of our strengths and weaknesses were and how we can help each other. Like I mentioned earlier, working in groups leads to better productivity, improved attitudes, and increased achievement - which I believe my group and I achieved. 


References:

Garfield, J. (1993). Teaching Statistics Using Small-Group Cooperative Learning. Journal of Statistics Education v.1, n.1.
http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v1n1/garfield.html

McGraw Hill. Technology in Small Groups. 
http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/comm/group/students/new_com.htm#online