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In this one year that I have spent dealing with educating students in my education classes I have learned so much knowledge. One of the most important things I have learned is ongoing use of new technology that is being introduced and used in classrooms today. Blogging for instance is a great interactive tool that can be used by both teachers and students. The classroom blog can be set up so that the students can see what is going on in the class and what is coming up like test or field trips. A good instructional tool would be the podcast, they can be posted for the students to download them and put them on their ipod. This way student can have their lessons and listen to them whenever they have a chance throughout their busy day. Students also have access to sites such as Wikipedia and youtube which can be used as a helpful source for things they do not understand. Wikipedia is a good starter point for research but should not be used as a reference. Google also has its own tools that are helpful like google docs which lets anyone with internet access be able to get on.
Burp back education was another thing that I learned about this year. Burp back education is when a student just repeats on paper what he has hears from the teacher. Burp back is mainly the teacher’s problem because they do not try to get the children to interact with the lesson which in return the students do not learn anything. The teacher actually needs to put some thought into the lesson and figure out how to make it fun. The more fun and interactive the lesson becomes the more the students will learn. Burp back can also be the students fault to. Children these days have become listen/watchers which means they would rather watch then do. So encouraging the children to interact with the lesson and planning more hands on work will help the learning process to.

The Music from Sand

Booming Sand is something that I can truly say I have never heard of until today. Booming sand is the name that they have given to the sand dooms that put off sounds. Cali tech team did a study on this phenomenon to see why the sand makes this sound. The team discovered that one of the reasons behind it is the layers or sand that makes up the sand dooms. There are two layers to these sand dooms the top lose layer and the damp layer underneath that creates surface tension to keep both of the layers together. Once the top layer dries out that is when cohesion begins and pretty much cause the first layer to shed off. This sends an avalanche of sand down the dooms sending the potential energy into kinetic energy as the sand moves.
The researchers when out to the dooms to test their theory by having five or six different people sliding down at once to try to send the first layer down and make a sound. The experiment was a success then they did further testing that reviled these sand dooms as having a unusual trait that made them different from the rest. The difference is these the sand grains of these sand dooms are all the same size so when they hit each other they hit at the same frequency. The last thing they discovered was that the degree of mobility of the top layer compared to the layer underneath was another factor that causes the sound. They are still doing studies on it though hoping to one day find all the answer to why the sand makes noise.
As a teacher and student it is pretty neat to see the booming sand on video and not only that but to learn about something in another place of the world. It helps us be more knowledgeable about the world and not just what is going on in the United States.

Seeing the world from a new Lens

Today I learned about Infrared lights off of my ipod and it was pretty neat. I knew you could hook up videos to your ipod from learning about ituneU but this was the first time I really ever messed around with it. Then as I watch it I realized how much of an asset this can be to classrooms.
The Lesson on Infrared lights was very education it talked about how they worked and what they are being used for to help out in science. Infrared lights are used to pick up the lights or objects temperature. Each color light has its own different temperature and sets off its own distinct color under an infrared camera. The colder the object is the darker the color it puts off and the hotter it is the lighter the color is. There are also different sizes of lights the smallest of them all are called gamma waves and they happen to be smaller than an atom. Then the largest are radio waves which can have waves larger that then size of earth, neither gamma nor radio waves can be seen with the eyes. Infrared can also pick up things that are stop by visual lights like seeing a persons hands inside a garbage bag. Infrared is blocked by some things though that visual light can get through like a piece of glass or the earths atmosphere, which is why the earth is getting warmer.
The way that infrared lighting is being used today is by firefighters who use it to find people through the dense fog of smoke in the burning buildings. Astronomers are using it also to find new planets around other stars. The planets put off no light and are hard to spot out between all the stars and that’s where the Infrared light comes in handy to spot them out. Infrared lights will be used more in the future and will be able to give us a more complete view of the universe which will finally let us see more than our eye can see.
Learning all of this about Infrared lights on my ipod was very cool. I mean first I did not see it as a big help or big deal but after being able to use it changed my whole perspective. It is like walking around with a classroom full of lessons in your pocket. This helps out teachers to if they did not get everything they wanted to discuss in the classroom or forgot the movie they wanted to show them at the house they could just upload it to itunes and tell their students to get it off their. By being able to load videos and lessons on to the computer has started a new cool way kids can have fun learning information.

iTunes U

iTunes U puts the power of the iTunes Store to work for colleges, universities, and other education organizations, so students can easily search, download, and play education content just like they do music, movies, and TV shows. Learning no longer happens only at a desk. Students now expect constant access to information, no matter where they are. Which is exactly why more and more faculty are using iTunes U to distribute digital lessons to their students. Audio and video podcasts let students study at their own pace, wherever and whenever they want.
iTunes U, part of the iTunes Store, is a free educational media available to students, teachers, and learners. With over 100,000 educational audio and video files available, iTunes U has quickly become the engine for the mobile learning movement. It puts the power of the iTunes Store in the hands of qualifying universities so they can distribute their educational media to their students or to the world. Teachers are using iLife and iWork applications on the Mac to create customized educational materials, such as language lessons that students can listen to on the bus or at home. And with the help of tools like Podcast Producer and Wiki Server IT professionals at your school can help you produce and distribute all kinds of multimedia content on iTunes U.
Administrative access is integrated with Apple ID, and so for student access their own account they need a password for the iTunes U site. This also enables the student to create and manage the content available on the site, while controlling who can access and download resources from it.
I think this is a great idea so now we can all have access to the classroom information anywhere we are. So there are no excuses to teachers for not getting the assignments anymore if the student was sick or out a day. This also helps the student so that they do not get behind in the class.

iPods can Teach

The classroom band on electronics might be over for good now. When I was growing up there was no uses of any pagers, phones, or cd players in classroom because they cause to much of a distraction for students but now they are learning that they can actually help the students education, well not pages but phones and ipods. With the new advancements in technology it looks like students or going to not have to hide that ipod anymore.
iPod and iTunes, mobile learning is changing education in a big way. In Hudson County teachers have been handing out the portable digital players to help bilingual students with limited English ability sharpen their vocabulary and grammar by singing along to popular songs. Also there is the Union City district that will give out 300 iPods at its schools as part of a $130,000 experiment in one of New Jersey’s poorest urban school systems. But these devices are not just being used for their original music purpose with the internet connection that they have student have access to podcast put on the schools websites by the teachers also they can use it for research purposes to. iPod and iPhone devices are becoming people’s portable computers so they can come to class with the Internet in their pocket. Students have 24/7 access to content, so they can connect and study when they want, where they want.
At Duke University they are using the iPods as a place to set up peer reviews and audio feedback on them. Julie and Vicki noticed that when they gave students feedback on their writing, audio feedback was more time-efficient and seemed to be of higher quality than written comments. So listening to things has show to be more education than reading them.
The draw back to iPod education is students using them for other purposes in the classroom or students loading answers or formulas onto the iPod so they can cheat on test. But cheating and distractions are going to happen in classrooms anyway the job is just to limit them by making education fun for the students. I think that using iPods would be fun for the students to so it will limit the distraction and it will be a great information tool to be used.

Dr. Alice Christie

Dr. Alice Christie Use to work at Arizona State University in the College of Teachers Education prior to that she taut for twenty five years in K-12 schools. Her passion is to teach students and educators the use of technology that can be used in classrooms. She does national and international workshops on the use of technology used in classrooms, she also has her own website that I explored with the great information on technology to.
Dr. Christie’s website had great information on how to enquire technology into 21century classrooms. Her believes are that technology continues to expand and grow so in order to keep up we as teacher must incorporate into the students lives. We as teachers need to teach the students how to learn and develop critical thinking skill through the internet and technology to better understand the world around them.
The way to accomplish this goal is to teach the students about the technology that already exist. For instance the emerging technology tools like the GPS which is a 12 billion dollar satellite system that the United States government put into place. The Internet is on of the most valuable that needs to be taut more about though. The internet can help everyone by its use of being able to search information, ideas, graphics, sound recordings, videos, or blogs. To use the internet as a tool effectively though students must be familiar with the tools currently available on it like search engines, online research sources, and databases. Internet communication is also a big important to teachers to and can be a big asset to their classrooms. Well designed websites made by teachers, like Dr. Christie’s, can help students and their parents have a better understanding on what is going on in the classroom.
Dr. Christie’s website was very interesting and gives a lot of good pointers on how to improve a teacher’s classroom by adding a little technology to it. The website also had links so and videos to explore but my computer was acting up and would not let me watch them. The general information on it though was very helpful and inspiring.

Wikipedia Scanner

As I was reading this article it was interesting to learn when I do my research papers that Wikipedia doesn't always have real facts. It is one of the first fact-checking sites to come up when people searching a topic. But this encyclopedia is also maintained by its users. In this case articles can be changed by companies and individuals who are subjects of the entries. Thanks to a graduate student there is now a tool known as the Wikipedia Scanner to help keep facts real.
This new tool gives you proof of why you should not rely on Wikipedia as a source. More than likely the article you read has been edited by an individual with there opinions. Wikipedia calls itself "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", which is another way of saying it is not fact-checked. It is not illegal, the point of Wikipedia is for readers to see facts and to share the facts they know on the article. But if you follow the IP address you'll see that most people who edit the article are not interested parties who want to make sure the facts are straight.
As I continued to read more on WIkipedia they showed examples such a Wal-Mart entry. The original entry stated "The average wage at Wal-Mart is almost double the federal minimum wage (Wal-Mart). However, founder Sam Walton once argued that his company should be exempt from the minimum wage". Someone with an IP address from Wal-Mart changed the entry to "Wages at Wal-Mart are about 20% less than at other retail stores. Founder Sam Walton once argued that his company should be exempt from the minimum wage".
The Wikipedia Scanner was a tool created by a grad student from California Institute of Technology known as Virgil Griffith. It was created to trace the comments and edits on Wikipedia entries back to their source IP address. The entries left anonymous are no longer anonymous on the site anymore. In results hoping to change how the entries are edited with real facts. Watching the video in the interview with Renee Montagne, Wired magazine Senior Editor Nicholas Thompson predicts that tool will eventually improve Wikipedia.

Randy’s video was very inspirational to me. When it first started playing I am not going to lie I thought this guy was going to be boring to listen to for an hour. Then when I looked down it was already twenty minutes in and I was glued to my seat listening to him. He was a very lively man and a great educator which made him fun to listen to. In his lecture he talked about three main things on how to achieving dreams.
Randy started his lecture off telling us about his dreams of zero gravity, playing in the NFL, being in the world book encyclopedia, meeting Captain Kirk, winning a stuff animal, and being a Disney imaginer. The different between Randy and most people though is that he actually went after all of his childhood dreams with full forces and believes that nothing could hold him back. He tells us about the brick wall that gets in all of our ways is there so you can show how badly you want something not to stop you from getting it. He achieved almost all of his child hood goals (except for the NFL) from riding in the vomit comet to helping with the Aladdin virtual reality ride.
After discussing his achievements he told the audience that he wanted his students to experience this kind of success in the classroom. So he created a pioneer program (one that has never been made) called Building Virtual Worlds. This course had students from all sorts of departments around campus working together in teams to make virtual reality projects. After this he created Alice, which is a program to teach computer programming in an edutanment manner (educational entertainment). His teaching strategy was to help kids have fun while learning very complicated things. This strategy is called a “head fake” which is teaching by making the person think they are learning something else more fun.
Then towards the end of his speech he gives the audience things he has learned that might help them out. The one I found most interesting was him telling how to get people to help you. First you must always tell the truth and be honest. Then a person must be apologetic and not focus on themselves. After he said the focus one he gave his wife a birthday cake to show how much of the focus is not on you but the one you care about the most. The real head fake at the end was that the whole lecture was not only about achieving dreams but also how to lead your life and it was not to everyone, but to his kids.

The first podcast that I listened to was about “How technology is used in classes at South” by Mat Cline and Jill Ravette. I though that they did a good job discussing how we use technology in the classrooms. They went over our online classes we offer, power points given by teacher, and how we use blogspot to communicate with other classmates. By using their personal experiences it made the podcast sound more genuin. Matt talked about how he struggled in one class because the teacher did not have power points to give out which made it hard for him to study. Then Jill discussed all the perks of having an online class and the people it helps out like the ones that are to busy to fit class time into their schedule. Over all I think it was a good way to tell of South’s technology filled environment that we offer.
Things that I would have changed about Matt and Jills broadcast to improve its quality for there listeners would have been the way they talked throughout it. Matt used the word “uhh” to much which is a connecter word that is used to get your thoughts together. This word “uhh” makes the person talking sound like they really do not know what they are talking about. He should have collected his thoughts and then said something in a complete sentence with out using his connecter word. Then for Jill she was thinking of all the information she had written down that she had to get across. By her thinking to much caused her to speed up her speech which made it hard to follow what she was saying. The best thing for her to do is to have note cards make with bullets of what to talk about.

The second podcast that I listened to was “Burp Back Education” by Ashley Denson, Sandy Presley, and Robyn Terry. They did an excellent job with this one it was very informative and gave examples on how to prevent burp back education. Ashley started it of by telling what burp back education is and how it is pretty much just students hearing then repeating on the test what the teacher has taut. In this education there is no chance for the student to interact with what they are learning so they can not retain the information is what Sandy shares with us. Then all the women give examples on how to prevent it.
Burp Back was an awesome podcast and very well put together but if I had to change things there are a couple of adjustments I would make. I would try not to interrupt each other when speaking. Then I would also try not to speak monotone either. After Listening to both though it sounds pretty tough but now hearing them has given me some ideas on how to make my podcast a success.

The blog that I chose to write about from Karl Fishbowl’s post was his December one about “What IT Wants.” In this post Karl talks about the panel discussion at Regis University that he got to participate in where He and other people like Dean Tucker got to speak at. I found the comments that dean tucker made very interesting. One of them said that you can not make the people drink the water, but you can tell them the importance of drinking the water. I find that this saying implies to schooling to if you tell your students how important something is and show how it is important to their lives they will find the information more interesting. I know from being in class as a child that the most information I retained was from teachers that showed the information’s important to use first. Another saying from Dean was telling about the best way to maximize your company’s success is to make the profit way down the list of your priorities. Out to the side of what Dean said Karl states that teachers should not make test scores or preparing for the workforce their primary purpose for education. I totally agree with Karl to on this one that we as teachers should not focus on the success rate of our class scores but to focus on building each child up as a person and to make them more knowledgeable.
The panel also talked about what they would like to see the ideal graduate from schools look like:
• Passionate about learning.
• Self-directed, motivated.
• Curious.
• Creative.
• Global perspective. De-centered – focus on others.
• Tech enabled.
• Be problem solvers. Also problem finders.
• Able to be given a “big picture” overview of an assignment and go for it without a lot of direction.
• Collaborative.
• Learn how to learn.
• Don’t stop at the first right answer.
• Producers, not just consumers.
I think that these are all great qualities that everyone should poses and teachers should help by getting these qualities into students. By possessing these qualities it will help the students become better employees out in the work force to.
To help students become the ideal graduate teachers must focus on learning, thinking, and doing. Teacher’s need their students engaged in activities that are challenging and fun enough where the student can use there thinking skilled to figure thinks out. The activities also need to be something that can help bring out the creative side of the student, that way they can learn how to express their own creative skills in life. The goal here is to help prepare students to be successful learners, citizens, and human beings in the 21st century.

International teaching

International teachers where hard to find blogs on but the ones I found were very cool. Mr. Fisher’s class at Joseph H. Kerr School in Snow Lake, Manitoba is one of the most high tech 7/8 grade class I have ever heard of. His approach for his class is to let them interact globally with the whole world. He has the class do blogs, podcast, and shoot videos so they can be more familiar with the material. They believe that class work and homework hours spent only helps students retain so much but being able to discuss the information online to peers helps the students understand it even more. Also in class he has the students bring in different perspectives from their own on the issues at hand. By doing so helps them consider other people’s thoughts and opinions on different issues.http://mr-fisher.edublogs.org/

Classrooms with Blogs

While looking for teacher blogs I happened to stumble upon Mrs. Elliott site (Mrs.Elliott’s classroom/a>) which was really informative and gave me a better understanding about blogs and how they can be useful in the classroom. Mrs. Lori Elliott is a fourth grade teacher who works at Century Elementary in Nixa, Missouri. Her school Century Elementary is one of the schools in Missouri that has eMINTS classrooms. The website that she set up for her class contains a variety of things like homework, power point presentations used also in class and even blogs for the students to write in. It also has pictures and videos of the classes’ activities, so it is pretty much her classroom online. This helps the students getting use to using the computer for future usage in the classroom. It also helps the students that were sick at home get online and catch up so that they are not behind. The neatest thing about the website is where the students get to blog and write there own opinions about books or movies watch in the class. This gives the children in the classroom the opportunity to voice their opinions, as well as to express themselves.
After reading Mrs. Elliott’s webpage, I did some research on just what eMINTS is and boy did I come up with some information. EMINTS stands for Enhancing Missouri’s Instructional Networked Teachering Strategies; it is a program that is intended to give students skills in using the computer and multimedia technology for their learning process. It helps the students be able to use programs like Word, Power Point, and Excel to form useful techniques in the technology filled world we live in today. On a website that I read by Lincoln University they say that the programs goal is to inspire ,creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, and the resolve on the student’s part to ask questions and look for more than one right answer http://www.lincolnu.edu/pages/882.asp .


Mrs. Myrmel is another teacher that I came across who is a blogger but she uses her blog page a little different then Mrs. Elliot’s. Mrs. Myrmel’s posts on her blogs are about what she does in her classrooms and the lessons she has gone over. Her page is made for the parents to be able to see what their child is doing in the classroom and how to help out improving their child’s performance. The webpage also has news letters posted on it just incase the student lost their book order slip or other things like that. Mrs. Myrmel site may also be very informative to other teachers that look at in and can get ideas for their classrooms. http://jmyrmel.edublogs.org/

Teaching with New Technology

Reading, writing, and arithmetic these where the three thinks students were expected to learn in a classroom in the beginning of the 20th century. Now as we are making are way through the 21st century students are starting to use all of the three on one machine, the computer. The computer’s capability with the internet has made itself a big necessity in the world. So to keep up with everyone else we must teach the students about technology and its usage is the classroom.
Using the computer in the classroom helps the students in all sorts of ways. One of the ways it to get them more familiar with the programs it offers like word, excel, and power point. These programs are used daily in many jobs and computer skills are becoming more and more necessary in the job force. The students also get to experience other peoples opinions on different matters which let the students think outside of their own opinions. The biggest out of all the way is that it gives them a global perspective of the world instead of just what is going on in our country.
The students are not shown to be the issue of this matter with technology though but it is the teachers. Karel Fisch tells us in his blog



The rest of this got deleted when i cut and paste it from word it and my one about podcast I can not find it on my computer either

The video on “The Fischbowl” was very interesting and educational. I did not realize how much computers has changed our lives and how we have all become dependent on them. Our society now revolves around technology so much so that we now have to incorporate it into the educational setting. I found it very interesting that it only took the computers four year to reach an audience of 50 million people when it to the radio and television almost three times longer. Then when the internet came along the computer was not just used for process information but also connecting other people across the globe.
So the question is now how do we prepare the future generation for the new jobs that will come about though our technology filled world. The thing is that there is no way to prepare for the upcoming jobs that will open up from technology. The only way we can help the future generations is to help them prepare for the changes that come and will come about.

Alex is a website based on the Alabama state course of studies made for teachers so that they can plan their lesson plans around the states requirements. The website also gives examples of lesson plans made by other teachers. The parents of the students have the choice to go on the site and help the child meet school expectations. The activities are made to promote student activites in classrooms and most activites are supplied by Verizon Foundations.

From personal experience, my sister is a High School teacher in Mobile county and curriculums are supplied for teachers, thus the ALEX site is useful but not nessisary. Mobile provides its own curriculum guide for all teachers that instutes specific teachings and fundamentals for student grade requirements. Ultimately ALEX is a helpful site for teachers looking for curriculums for educating students, yet is not nessary for some countys in the state of Alabama.

First Post

Hey there my name is Heath Lee I am twenty years old and I am from Satsuma , Alabama. I have one brother, four step brothers, one sister, one step sister and including my parents makes us one big family. I moved out of my moms house when I was nineteen years old and moved into a house with my step brother and my best friend, but that did not go so well because we partied way to much. So now i am currently sharing a condo with my sister and it is probably the best move i have made other that we have not got cable or Internet hooked up yet.
What I love in life is working out, it is my favorite thing to do. Working out relieves my stress that the day has brought upon me. I also enjoy playing sports any kind of competition is fun to me. I just took up tennis this past year which is a really fun sport and great endurance work out for anyone that wants to try it out. I love trying new experiences anything that is out of the ordinary and spontaneous count me in.
I graduated from Faulkner last year and this is my first year at South Alabama. Where Faulkner was more of a laid back college South is so much more fast paste and this transition has cause me to be in a little bit more stress than usually but I think now i am starting to figure things out here. I am studying to be a P.E. teacher because i love kids and helping them with their body and teaching them how to stay active will be a big help for them later on in life. I have a totally different perception and more respect for teachers now that i know what all they have to go through.
That is pretty much me in a nut shell other little things would be that i am short which I hate I wish my parents would have been taller to give me better genes. I drive a red Honda civic and I just ended up paying a three hundred dollar ticket on it because I was playing my music to loud. And I have five family members who are or have worked for the mobile county public. Plus my dad is the head coach at one of the biggest high schools around called Murphy.