EDET 628 Technology In Education - Rodawalt

Blog reflection question: Reflect about the information that you have encountered this week, the conversations you've had, the learning community you've built, and the progress you've made in this class.  Post a reflection post to your blog that outlines your areas of confusion, celebration, and of interest.  Be sure to share the link to that post to this assignment .   I am finally seeing my students turn the corner on Google Sheets this week.  The unit design I am doing for this class is related to the class I am teaching in personal finance this term.  I have been using https://screencast-o-matic.com/ to post videos tutorials on my website ( http://www.maximumachievementprogram.org/Business-Math.html ).  Actually I am using it for my Alaska History class too.     In the Personal Finance class I have a lot of the kids who struggle with math and I am using Google Sheets to show them how to use fairly simple concepts in Algebra. I ha...

An essential question to consider: How can you use these tools and techniques to promote collaboration and build community culture in your classroom? A constant challenge in working in a small alternative school is the intersection of small class sizes and problems with attendance that make collaboration and group difficult to sustain.  Often I have barely enough students to divide into groups and then when groups get form, almost invariably, someone is absent and the group project turns into an independent project. It occurs to me that one way I might try to approach this is by doing some sort of asynchronous collaboration, but often, when students return from absences, I am so focused on "catching them up" that I feel like the projects get more in the way of progress than helping the kids move forward.  Right now, I am working with the kids in my Junior English class on doing storyboarding.  We are reading the novel MONSTER and I have ask the kids to write a scr...

Blog reflection question: Reflect about the information that you have encountered this week, the conversations you've had, and the progress you made in class.  Post a reflection post to your blog  that outlines your areas of confusion, celebration, and of interest.  Be sure to share the link to the blog post to this assignment. One of the things I have noticed in the last couple weeks is that I have become more aware of or open to doing more things with technology in my classroom. Two examples from this week: Example 1: I have a special ed student who was having difficulty in completing his math assignments.  I decided to try to present the assignments in a different format.  I have transferred his assignments to a Google Sheets document and I am breaking the problems down for him into the smaller steps.  In a way I am ripping off a lot of the concepts from Saxon Math and applying them to math Personal Finance class for him.  I am givin...

An essential question to consider: How can you integrate these tools into your classroom to promote higher order thinking in your students' learning experience? Colin and Nicole have asked Catherine and I to lead the Twitter conversation this week so I spent a fair amount of time investigating some tools that might lead to higher level thinking skills in the classroom.  I started off my search by going back to a lesson I did a few years ago in Physical Science using a Roller Coast Builder on www.brainpop.com/games  .  We were learning about momentum and velocity.  Momentum is a function of velocity and mass.  The Roller Coaster Builder allowed students to play with the mass of the coaster as well as the height of hills which changed the potential energy.  In building the Roller Coaster, one had to build it in such a way as to eliminate any potential energy by the end of the ride to prevent the roaster from crashing. While the Roller Coaster is no longer...

Reflect about the information that you have encountered this week, the conversations you've had, and the progress you have made in this class.  Post a reflection post to your blog that outlines your areas of confusion, celebration, and of interest.  How might this week have been better for you? One of the frustrations that I had with these readings, is that I felt like I was wading through a sea of justification for the approach before getting to the meat of the Understanding by Design stages of backward design.  When reading through the approach, it seemed pretty similar with other sorts of approaches I have been exposed to in the past.  The idea of starting with what you want kids to know is a pretty basic idea in education. But for me, this approach starts well before I am planning for the class, it starts with the consideration of the text I want to adopt for a particular course. Now I understand that this may appear to fly in the face of the backwards des...

I've looked at a few of the tools suggested and I think the one that I personally find the most useful is Symbaloo ( www.symballo.com ) .  I am going to play with this as a way to share information with my students.  Although, to be honest, I would hesitate to require kids to use any of the tools presented.  My reasons are two-fold.  First, is that I feel that people organize themselves in different ways and trying to impose a tool on someone sometimes stifles their organization more than helps it.  As teachers I am sure we have all been in classes or in-services in which a particular tool is being touted (or imposed) and the tool does not fit your organizational style. The second reason that I hesitate to impose a tool on the kids it that all of these sights seem to have the same financial model of trying to collect information on the users that can be used to market to those users.  I feel like we already give up way to much information to entities that ...

Probably my most common current use of technology which enhances education is the use of screen sharing software that our district employs, chiefly as a way of monitoring students' computer use.  I do use the program for this, but I also often and working at my desk when a student may have a question about an assignment they are working on using their computers.  By pulling up their screen I can help them with editing of documents or technological problems they are having with the program they are using.  I can take control of their screens and give them instruction on how to use the program or I might  pull up a browser and show them some alternate search options or take them to a particular website. The screen sharing software also has a chat feature, and I sometime use this as a private way of redirecting behavior, or, if I have a concern about the student I can chat with them privately without calling attention to them. Some of the things I am exploring are the...

My classroom has no outside walls and is about 30 feet from an exit to the building.  It also has a hallway that goes directly to both the high school gym and another that goes to the Middle school gym.  Because of this I think the security people like it.  So far I have had one Senator, the US Secretary of the Interior, and a President of the United States use my room as a "green room" while visiting Dillingham.  The day before the Obama visit I was going to get some stuff out of my classroom only to be confronted by four Secret Service agents hooking up more cables than I have seen in my life in my classroom.