Final Thoughts

I really have enjoyed this course. Over the semester I think that I have learned so much about

technology that I never even knew existed! I never thought that I would be able to do so well with the projects that we have done throughout this semester. I definitely had my struggles, but I think that I learned even more from those struggles. They helped me realized that I do have the potential to work with technology and to that I can be successful in doing so.

The one thing that caused me the most stress this semester was definitely the Flipchart. I love the concept of it, however I struggled when attempting to make my own and to assemble all the aspects of it. It look me a lot of extra work, but I finally finished it and I think that they final outcome was okay. I would have liked to spend more time learning about Active Inspire and smart boards in general, but I understand that the time in this course did not allow for that. On the other hand my favorite project would definitely be the digital story. I enjoyed it so much and I really feel that I learned new skills that will help in my own classroom when I want to create movies to teach lessons to my students.

I feel so much more prepared to use technology in my future classroom after taking this course. I think that my website along with my classroom blog will help me to stay in contact with my students' parents and let them know what is going on in my classroom. I am a lot more confident with my technology knowledge today than I was at the beginning of the semester when class first started. I cannot wait to put all of my technology skills to use in my classroom!

Digital Story

I had no previous experiences with iMovie or with making movies in general. I was a little nervous

when we first were assigned this project. However, I was really excited that I was going to get the chance to work with iMovie and to upload my own video to YouTube and to add that project to my website!

I learned a lot from this digital story project. I learned how to work with iMovie since I had no previous knowledge with it. I wish that we could have made more digital stories throughout this semester, because I really did enjoy it a lot! I also learned how to upload my own video to YouTube and then transfer that to my website which i think will come in handy with my future teaching endeavors.

I plan to use digital story projects in my future classroom, for sure! I think that they are a great way to teach students of all ages useful knowledge and skills that will help them to succeed. I think that students will be more open and willing to learn when you present the information to them in a way such as this with music and pictures.

Digital Diagrams

Before this week I didn't know too much about making digital diagrams. I have seen them numerous

times, however. I was really excited when I found out we would be able to create our own digital diagram. I think that visual learning is a great things and that diagrams can be extremely helpful for students of all ages.

I learned that it is actually quite simple to create a digital diagram. It was a great learning experience as well. I did get a little frustrated trying to fit my whole diagram into the allotted size on the monitor, but once I found the right shapes that would make it fit better I was able to figure things out. I felt a lot better when I used the proper boxes and when my diagram was able to fit in the right amount of space. It made me feel accomplished knowing that I took the extra time to make sure that everything was properly done.

I will definitely use digital diagrams in my future classroom. I think it is an awesome tool to incorporate into lessons. I did mine on the seasons and I plan to use it in my future class. I had so much fun getting to be creative, and I hope to carry that creativity into my own classroom one day. I also think that my students will really enjoy learning through digital diagrams!

Interactive Whiteboards Week 2

As I mentioned in my blog from last week I actually do have some previous experience with

interactive whiteboards. I volunteer at Northwest Middle School and we use the boards quite a bit. I think they are a great tool to have in the classroom and I hope that I am lucky enough to have an interactive whiteboard in my classroom when I become a teacher. I think they can offer so much to students and they provide students with a fun, more hands on learning experience.

Over the past week I have learned SO MUCH about interactive whiteboards and flipcharts. I am slowly but surely getting more comfortable with my flipchart project and I think that the outcome will be good! I have learned just how much interactive whiteboards can help students and how hands on they can actually be. I feel that teachers should have the proper training before they begin to use the interactive whiteboards. If they do not, I think that it can be stressful and confusing for the students. I hope that I can take my knowledge I have learned and teach my students using the flipcharts and whiteboards effectively!

I would definitely use an interactive whiteboard in my classroom. I think they are fabulous, especially for younger students. They get the chance to go up to the board and perform an action themselves instead of just watching you do it. So many fun lessons can be planned with these boards, and students can really learn a lot from them! I plan to use the board in every subject; whether it be working out a math problem, structuring a sentence, labeling the parts of a planet, or playing interactive games. Sometimes technology can be a little tricky, but I think that interactive whiteboards are wonderful and that they can really help enhance a lesson.

Interactive Whiteboards

I actually do have some previous experience with interactive whiteboards. I volunteer at Northwest

Middle School and we use the boards quite a bit. I think they are a great tool to have in the classroom and I hope that I am lucky enough to have an interactive whiteboard in my classroom when I become a teacher. I think they can offer so much to students and they provide students with a fun, more hands on learning experience.

When reading the handout on the boards I learned that different studies on interactive whiteboards have show different results. Some say that students are benefiting from having the boards in the classroom, but others say that there is no difference between those who use the technology and those who do not. Obviously not every school is lucky enough to be provided with these boards. Teachers that don't have them are still using effective teaching skills to teach their students and that is why I think some studies don't show much difference. In my opinion, I think every classroom should be equipped with one of these boards. Features such as matching, dragging and dropping, and hiding and revealing can be fun lessons that allow students to learn by going to the board and performing the lesson that you have set up for them. As the handout says, these features can enrich instruction by increasing student attention, motivation, and participation. However, as the article mentions I do believe that every teacher should be properly trained with these boards so that they will be most beneficial to the students.

I would definitely use an interactive whiteboard in my classroom. I think they are fabulous, especially for younger students. They get the chance to go up to the board and perform an action themselves instead of just watching you do it. So many fun lessons can be planned with these boards, and students can really learn a lot from them! I plan to use the board in every subject; whether it be working out a math problem, structuring a sentence, labeling the parts of a planet, or playing interactive games. Sometimes technology can be a little tricky, but I think that interactive whiteboards are wonderful and that they can really help enhance a lesson.

Google Sites

This is the first time that I have ever created a website, so this experience has definitely been a

learning one! I got the hang of it pretty quickly and I enjoyed the way that we walked through the steps of creating our site. I have always wondered how to create a site for myself that I could use in my future career and I am so happy that I know have one of my own.

I have learned so much thus far on Google sites. I now know how to create my own web page and how to make sub pages on my site. I learned how to insert images and change the font and color of my site. I also learned that this site will be very helpful for my students and their parents. I learned how to insert my tech projects that we have done and I think it is so cool that you can see what I have been working on by just checking my page! I inserted my elementary resources and learned how to insert my inquiry based project onto my site.

I plan to use this is my future classroom and teaching endeavors for sure! I love that I can post everything that parents and students need to know on one site. I want to be able to communicate with the parents of my students and I think that allowing them access to see my website would be a great way to achieve this communication. I can post things such as a supply list for my class and resources that parents can access from home. I also want to be able to share my site with my fellow educators so that they can see what my class is doing and so that I can share those resources with them.

Digital Imaging

I came into this activity knowing a little bit about digital imaging. I have a Facebook and an Instagram, and I even used Photobucket a while back. So you'd think I'd be a pro, right? Well...no, even though I had used all of these various ways to share my digital images, I never really realized how much actually went into it. I never realized how much detail has to go in to how many pixels an image has and I never knew that what the measurements of an image meant.


Throughout this week I learned how important it is to re size a picture. You obviously do not want the images you share online to look stretched or blurry. You also don't want the images that you decide to use in class projects to look distorted. Learning how to go in and download an image from a website and then go on to re size it so that it can work for you in the way that you need it to was awesome! I enjoyed working with digital images and getting some hands on experience through our Google presentation along with our class scavenger hunt that we uploaded to Picasa Web. Both of those activities were extremely helpful!


I definitely plan to use digital imaging in my classroom. I love presentations and visual aids, so digital imaging in the thing for me! I want my students to get to see great images that are clear and that fit nicely into any presentation that I may be giving them. I want to pass the knowledge I have gained over this week down to my students, so that when they are making their own Google presentation they will understand that importance of resizing an image and the importance of the number of pixels and the resolution. I look forward to using digital images in my future classroom. I would love to have my students participate in a scavenger hunt as we did. I thought that was so fun!


Below is a link to my website. Under the tab "Tech Projects" you can see the two digital imaging projects that I have completed thus far. I hope that you enjoy them! :)
https://sites.google.com/site/msfellmansclassroom/

Resource Wiki

I had no prior knowledge of resource wikis, however since we have already made several wikis this

semester I felt a lot more comfortable while adding my resources to this page. Using my prior wiki knowledge helped me to succeed in this project.

This assignment changed my view of how to use wikis in the classroom. At first I was a little weary about how I could benefit from wikis, but after this project I am more clear. This was such a great eye opening tool that allows me to share sites that I found helpful with my peers whether that be my co-workers, or the parents of my students.

I will definitely use resource wikis in my future classroom. I think as a teacher I will benefit from it, and that as a class my students will benefit from the resources I post. I will be able to triple to number of resources I have by sharing information with my peers which will be wonderful! I think resource wikis will come in handy a lot over my teaching career!

Inquiry Project

When I first learned that we would be doing an inquiry project, I was a little nervous. As I mentioned before, I am not the smartest cookie when it comes to technology. However, I caught on rather quickly and surprised myself with how much I was able to do on my own! The way that this assignment was presented to us was very clear and understandable. I definitely will use the skills that I have learned in my own classroom. Inquiry based projects are so fun for students, especially elementary students. As a teacher you are allowing them to explore on their own to find answers to the questions that you have presented them with. As students they feel a sense of freedom and they feel pride in themselves because they were able to work on the Internet and find those answers. I look forward to making many more worksheets from online sites. I really enjoyed this project, and cannot wait to use it in my future classroom one day!

Website Evaluation

Completing this website evaluation taught me a lot! You have to be very specific when choosing a website that you would want your students to use. This activity broke down the small details that I more than likely would have over looked. When evaluating the particular site that I used, ABCYa, I went through each category on our worksheet and then did a little exploring on the site itself. My site was all about games, so I had fun evaluating this site! You have to be sure that your students will be able to access websites that you would like them to use whether it be in the classroom or in their homes. It is also important that the site doesn't have any hiccups or technical problems. As a teacher you also want to make sure that your students will benefit from whatever site you may be evaluating. When I have my own classroom in the future I will definitely use some sort of "website evaluation assessment guide" such as the one that we were provided with. It was very helpful in the sense that it laid out small details to me that are so important when you have your students use websites. By the end of the evaluation, I had enough knowledge about the site to determine if I would actually want to use it in my classroom. My answer was yes to ABCYa! It met the majority of criteria on the assessment and I came to the conclusion that I would love to use this site in my classroom, and that I would recommend it to other teachers and parents as well.

Wikis

I don't have much experience with creating my own wiki pages in the past, but I

do however have experience with using Wikipedia. Throughout high school I can remember my teachers telling me that we could use Wikipedia while working on projects, but to not use the site as a works cited source in a research paper. They explained that anyone in the wiki community, if approved, can go in and edit a site. Kind of crazy, right? I never really fully understood what this meant until now.

Through creating my "all about me" wiki page I feel so much more confident about working with technology! I now understand why my teachers never encouraged us to use Wikipedia while writing papers. It is so simple to join the wiki community and to edit pages. At first I was a little confused as to how this particular project would benefit me in the classroom, especially in an elementary level classroom. I soon realized however, how helpful wikis will be for me in my classroom; and how beneficial they will be for my students. I am not the best with technology, so for me to be able to learn how to create a wiki page on my own was a huge accomplishment for me! Children today are so technologically savvy, so incorporating wikis into the classroom should be simple.

Since I will be working with younger elementary level students I want to stick with more simple wiki sites and projects. One idea that I have is to create a multi-author story page. I would start a story and then each student would build off of that. We would end up with a unique story that everyone in the class contributed to. Another way that I plan to use wikis in my classroom is by creating a classroom scrapbook. Each student would create their own "about me" page complete with a picture and fun facts about themselves. I will also make scrapbook pages of the classroom field trips, class parties, class programs, and each students' growth throughout the school year. Lastly, I want to use wikis to keep up with students' progress on group projects. When using a wiki page, I will be able to see how much each student contributed. That will help me a lot to determine which group members are doing what and making sure that everyone is contributing equally. I cannot wait to use wikis in my classroom and I feel that my students will definitely benefit from using this source of technology!

Introduction and Expectations

Hi! My name is Kelly Fellman and I am from Old Hickory, TN. I am currently a senior at the University of Tennessee. I am majoring in Psychology with a minor in Elementary Education. I plan to become an elementary school teacher after I graduate. In my free time I love to be around my friends and family. I also enjoy cooking and crafting!

Technology is not my strong suit, so I was very wary coming into this course. Surprisingly, I have been able to achieve each assignment thus far on my own! One expectation that I have for this course is that I will leave with a better understanding of how to use technology in the classroom, more specially in an elementary level classroom. I also want to learn how to use technology to communicate with parents of my students. I think that it is vital to build relationships with them, and I want to be able to share with them what their children have been working on in my classroom.

I look forward to this semester and I am so excited to learn even more about technology. It's hard for me to believe that in just a few short years I will have to put these skills to the test in my own classroom, but I am ready for it! I have an open mind and I am ready to soak up all that TPTE 486 has to offer!