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