Brittany Leathers' Blog
My Portfolio for the Education WorldGarageband Project/Vocab Project
Garageband is an interesting thing to use. It’s not to hard to use, but it isn’t very universal. If you don’t have a Mac then you can’t use Garageband which makes it hard to use. I used it in class, but I had problems with it, so I couldn’t complete it. I did learn a lot using it though, so it was a good experience overall. I don’t have anything against Macs, but programs that are only available on Macs aren’t very universal.
Tags: DED318 projects, Reflections, Resources, technology
Digital Citizenship Glogster
http://www.glogster.com/blleath/cyber-bullying/g-6lsqcesnncbeq33onla6pa0
Above is my glogster on cyberbullying. I believe that glogster is the new poster board project for my students. I think it will be a great tool for my students to create posters on different topics in history. It’s a bit confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’s not too bad to use. I’ve used it before which I think helped a lot during this project. It’s not my favorite tool, but definitely a useful one.
Tags: blogs, ded, DED318 projects, Reflections, Resources, technology
Week 13 Reflection: iTunes U Podcasts
The first podcast I looked at was done by a professor at the University of Notre Dame. He is a teacher who teaches a class on using iPads in the classroom and shows the students how to utilize new technology. The podcast is titled Reimagining School the episode I watched was episode 11 eReader Study.
The second podcast I watched was Storynory-Stories for Kids. I listened to the first podcast which was called Three Bright Aesop Tales. This is a podcast that brings and audio story every week. The stories are read by Natasha Gotswick. I think that using a podcast like this in the class room can be a lot of help when trying to reach students who possibly have a hearing problem. This could help those students because they can listen to it independently with no background distraction.
The third podcast I listened to was The English We Speak I listened to episode 7 The English We Speak: Playing Up. This is a podcast that takes a new English phrase or piece of slang and discusses it with it’s viewers. This could be really helpful for English as a Second Language student to help them be familiar with the english language.
Tags: blogs, DED318 projects, Reflections, Resources, technology
Week 13 Reflection: Teaching Blogs
Read, Write, Connect, Learn by William Richardson was the first blog I saw that I really enjoyed. On his website he says he is trying to answer the question “What happens to schools and classrooms and learning in a 2.0 world?” This is what really grabbed me to dig deeper into his website. This question should be asked by all future and current educators. His website provides the opportunity to explore the changing face of education that deals with technology advancements and helping adapt to such advancements. He is an author who has written many influential and well respected books about this very issue of the future.
iLearn Technology is an educational blog about how to integrate technology into the classroom. It is created and organized by Kelly Tenkey. Her main goal seems to be to help interest teachers into involving technology into their classroom as much as their students have developed and interest for it. Tenkey says, “My belief is that technology meets students needs, engages them, and helps them to be the best learner they can be.” This is true, students and today’s youth as a whole is consumed by technology and all it provides. Combining this with education will benefit everyone as long as teachers can adjust and implement it properly into their classrooms.
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Week 10: iPads in the Classroom
iPads are becoming one of the major impacts in schools today, first we started off with laptops, then every student in some schools got to take home their laptops, now we have iPads being integrated into many schools. Although I do believe iPads can be a major resource for students in the classroom I also believe they can become somewhat of a distraction to what is really important throughout the year. In Technology, Bits, Bytes, and Nibbles by Cindi Danner Kuhn there is a lot of useful information on the iPad and how it can be used efficiently in the classroom. A few more resources are Getting Started With iPads, Bloomin iPads, and iPads in School LiveBinder these pages all have many different techniques and resources that show how beneficial iPads in the classroom can be. A website that shows the problem with iPads and how they could be taking over education is Will the iPad Dominate Education? These are all websites that can show the advantages and possibly even the disadvantages to integrating iPads into the school. I personally believe they can be useful and are a good thing to have, but I do not believe everything needs to revolve around them nor do students need to have 1:1 iPads in the classroom.
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Week 8 Reflection: 50 Sites in 60 Minutes
Education blogger David Kapuler (Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero) has created a free slideshow of 50 great sites for education, creativity, organization and more. Each slide includes basic information about the site, a link to the site, and a link to Kapuler’s review of the site. My top 5 are:
1. Cacoo is a online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. It’s free of charge, and pretty cool to use. I looked around a little bit, and it seems helpful in the classroom because diagrams can simplify some hard topics by organizing them.
2. Better Lessons: Share What Works is a very nice website and it is free. It has different lessons online to help teachers find things that other teachers have used and had work well for them. It could be a very useful tool for a new teacher or a teacher who wanted to change up their plans.
3. Culture Crossing is a website to guide students through exploring different cultures, or even their own, and learning new things about these other cultures while also teaching them to appreciate them. This website would be excellent for a school with a diverse classroom or even just a social studies lesson.
4. Plagiarisma is a website where you can paste some of your text from a paper a student could be writing for a class as well as the website where they found the information and it will let them know if they have plagiarized any of the material. This would be great for students to use in the classroom when writing papers because it would show them how much they are allowed to borrow from another source and it would keep them honest and not allow for cheating.
5. Present.Me is a really fun and easy way for students to make presentations for school. This is a great way to get students more involved in learning and creating things to share with others. It’s fun and the students will really enjoy having a little more freedom and getting to explore the subject more on their own.
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Celebrate Kansas Voices Project and Reflection
http://voicethread.com/share/2518230/ <–my link to my voice thread.
Celebrate Kansas Voices project was an enlightening project. It’s so cool how people come together to celebrate Kansas. It was cool getting to put together a project about my hometown, Quinter, KS. I watched some of the other videos and they all seemed like there was a good amount of time put into them. It’s a pretty easy project. The hardest part I believe was Google Maps. It was kind of confusing at times, but tutorials simplified things a little bit.
View Larger Map
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Using Photos in the Classroom
Brad Patterson’s Blog Challenge: compare and contrast photo is a great blog that allows teachers resources for using photos in the classroom. It’s creative to have your students compare and contrast photos. You can use it for famous people, and it would get the discussion going for a social studies class. It amazes me how people come up with such clever ideas. 
Tags: blogs, DED318 projects, Reflections, Resources, technology
Final Reflection: Question 3
Semester Favorites: Reflect on two tools or activities or resources that we used and discussed this semester. Why are they your favorites?
One of my favorite things we used this semester was the Wordle. I think it’s cool how you can just enter words and it forms the cool design and you can change the colors and etc. I think they’re pretty clever to use in the classroom and the students can use them as a project. I think a lot of the technology is pretty easy to use and students can handle it for project making.
Another thing I enjoyed was QR codes. It’s creative that you can use QR codes to bring students to different websites or things. It cool how you can generate them yourself. I didn’t realize that was possible. QR Codes are really helpful in the classroom and are a new coming thing in technology.
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