Week 4 Blog EDUC 552

Beware of the Dog screencast EDUC 552

Screencast Reflection

    Screencast-o-matic is a fantastic way to introduce material to your classes. I think it's a great time-saver for teachers because you can quickly access your lessons to help struggling kids, and it provides all of the necessary information for students who have missed class. I can see using this to introduce short stories in Literature and grammar lessons in English. I also think that it would be a great way to break down vocab by talking about parts of speech, word origins, and roots and affixes. It also allows you the opportunity to watch and listen to your own teaching, so you can troubleshoot and become even more effective by tweaking your lessons.

Week 3 Blog: Free Technology for Teachers

    During this week's blog assignment, I visited free4teachers.com which is ran by Richard Byrne. This site offers all kinds of free technology ideas that teachers can implement to enhance their curriculum. Byrne suggests practical reasons and tips for using the technology he introduces which include a wide range of multimedia tools that can be content specific or used for any subject area. One of the really neat sites I looked at was entitled "Literature-Map" which helps students and teachers find books based on the authors they like. When you type in the author of a favorite book, the site generates an author web. This provides examples of other writers whose style is similar to the author of your favorite book or books. Just messing around on the site, I searched 5 different writers, and each time the web was finished, it depicted around 20 different authors with similar styles. Writers closest in the web to your favorite author share the most similar styles. Our school utilizes the Reading Counts program, and when this time of year rolls around, it can become difficult for even the most avid readers to find novels they're interested in (especially if they've read everything by their favorite author). Using Literature-Map with my 7th and 8th grade Literature classes will help keep them focused on reading because once they find a certain style they like, the author web will provide all kinds of new texts to peruse.

 Here's a link to the post about Literature-Map: http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2016/03/literature-map-helps-you-find-authors.html#.Vu3e-hIrLEY 

Here's the Literature-Map link: http://www.literature-map.com/

    I think a really effective blog for students could be used to post assignments for the next day or the week. By doing this, kids would get a heads-up on what to expect for the class. It would also be a great tool for students who were absent or feel the need to double check assignments. I can also see it being used as a reflection on the daily lessons where teachers could provide positive feedback to classes. If I embedded the Literature-Map link, students could use that from the blog and create a running dialogue about new writers they found and their own experiences with the author web.

Thinglink

    I visited Thinglink for this week's blog assignment. I thought it was very easy to use and like most sites, they have a very helpful search page for any questions you may have. Thinglink helps teachers make pictures more engaging for students and encourages adding links to videos and pictures so you can layer your videos and pictures with web links, images, other videos and even student polls. As a Literature teacher, you could tailor this for any lesson. Thinglink gives students a ton of easily accessible sites and images as a precursor to the stories the class reads. Whether it's a novel that takes a month to get through or a short story which lasts only a few days, the amount of information gleaned by using Thinglink is pretty much boundless. Even though students are manipulating the internet, the teacher is in control of what they want the students to focus on. If I wanted to introduce information about a particular setting or characters, I could quickly and easily utilize a number of different videos or pictures that pinpoint those story features.
    For teachers to utilize Thinglink, they should go to edu.thinglink.com and register for no charge. Another cool feature is that the site also allows teachers to create student lists which mass register classes on the same Thinglink picture. This way they can all access the same image simultaneously and individually click on different links. Any age group could use Thinglink because even younger elementary can click on a link to access images and videos. Obviously, teachers would need to make sure they've added age appropriate links to the video or picture. You can also look at other Thinglink projects by searching topics from the site just like you would on Google. It's neat to have access to some of the different creations from other teachers or even students so you can ascertain some ideas for your upcoming projects.

Animoto of "Amigo Brothers"

    I really dig using Animoto, and I had a ton of fun creating a trailer for "Amigo Brothers" which is a short story we read in 7th grade Literature. Since I'm kind of a movie trailer junkie, this assignment was right up my alley. I thought it was simple to use (even for a tech newb like me), and found it much more practical than iMovie or even a Powerpoint presentation. For my classes, I definitely want to use Animoto to introduce the stories we read because some of the video previews that come with our books series are very dry and unimaginative. I may even use it to spice up some of our grammar lessons or as a motivational tool to prompt kids to perform better on our standardized test. By adding dramatic music to images and videos, we can sell what we teach so much better. As a coach, it would be a great way to make a season-ending presentation for the athletes and parents. I can also see using Animoto as a promotional tool to inspire more kids to get involved in extracurricular activities. If kids are intrigued from the start, they are bound to focus better and get involved and that's more than half the battle (especially with middle school students).

Article Review Multimedia Project

    The article I chose for this assignment was entitled. "A Guide to Producing Digital Storytellers". For a tech newb like me, this provided some helpful hints for teaching students about digital storytelling and also offered great ideas that I can use for professional development. The article begins by giving 5 key reasons teachers should encourage students to become digital storytellers and concludes with 5 suggestions for educating digital storytellers.

    As  a Literature teacher, I really liked the fact that critical thinking was at the top of the list of reasons for becoming a digital storyteller. Technology is wonderful and vitally important, but many times it trumps the student's analytic and interpretative skills, or those skills are sacrificed for the sake of technology implementation. Digital stories can also have an impact that reaches beyond the walls of our schools. Because they are easily accessible, parents, friends, and people from all over the world have the opportunity to view a student's multimedia creation if they choose to publish it. Working online also helps students become savvy digital citizens and gives them the opportunities to discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate websites and images. By continually updating and creating stories, students can develop a digital portfolio that they can use to demonstrate proficiency for teachers, promote themselves for any type of job, and get their voice and opinions out to society.

    In the second half of this article, the author gives advice about educating young digital storytellers. Since technology is always changing and becoming sophisticated, the author suggests that teachers should focus on the content instead of the digital apps and platforms. Probably the best advice I gleaned from this article was the inclusion of the SAMR (substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition) model which depicts different levels of technology implementation. By looking at each stage of SAMR, teachers can accurately measure how effectively students are using the digital tools and the level of sophistication within the digital world to create their stories. It's also imperative that teachers create expectations and explain outcomes in advance so the students have a very clear picture how the projects will be evaluated (a rubric would be a great example for clarifying expectations. Evaluating early and often provides feedback that enables students to progress through different phases. Using different methods of evaluating also helps students grow as digital storytellers and expands their horizons. Finally, like any good educator, the author encourages teachers to begin teaching basic fundamental digital skills and progressing to more advanced techniques and platforms as the students become more proficient. This helps build confidence and prevents the technology from overwhelming students

Introduction

    Hi MK! My name is Scott Mallam and I'm a Middle School English teacher in Central City, Nebraska. I've been teaching and coaching for 22 years and had previous stints at Marysville Senior High in Marysville, Kansas and Aquinas Catholic Schools in David City, Nebraska. I'm a proud graduate of the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
    When it comes to technology,  I have what you would call an Atari 2600 background so you could say I'm a little behind the times. But it's also one of the reasons I'm excited about this course. In my classroom, I have the luxury of using a Promethean Board daily. It has been an enormously helpful tool because it can do so many unique things. I'm still in the embryonic stages of using the Promethean, but it has already made my life easier and has allowed me to move into the 21st century technology realm. Since I'm a Macbook owner and our school uses Macs, I'm definitely a Mac person. Their user-friendly style makes it simple for tech newbs like me. I'm currently using Office 2011 for Mac but anticipate an upgrade to Mac 2016 sometime this summer.
    Afer visiting with several of my teaching friends, I decided to enroll at Peru State to get my Master's Degree. They liked the online format, and I knew I needed to go back to school to learn how to incorporate more technology into my classroom because I had fallen behind the times. This will be my third tech class, and I feel like I have benefited tremendously from the other two. I love going into class and showing something new I learned to the kids. Most of the time they're shocked by the fact that I can utilize newer technologies, so it always helps to put a unique spin on class. My degree will be in Curriculum and Instruction, and I feel like it will help me step up my game to become more of an educational leader in my district.