Assessment

What is formative assessment? What is summative assessment? How can you use these types of assessment? How can you use instructional technologies to support assessment?


Formative assessment is formal and informal assessment that teachers give out to students while they are learning to modify the teaching that is happening to help students achieve to the best of their abilities.  Summative assessment is the assessment of learning and shows teachers the development of learners across a certain amount of time.  I can use these types of assessments to monitor progress that my clients are making over certain periods of time of therapy and use them to test how much they are learning or how my therapy is effecting them.  I can use instructional technologies to administer these assessments or to motivate students to want to learn more by getting to play on the computer to fulfill an assessment.

Professional Development

What are professional organizations for? Which are relevant to your field? Which might you join? What are the advantages of being a member? What are the costs? 


My professional organizations are the National Student Speech Language and Hearing Association and the American Speech and Hearing Association.  These two websites are linked together and are the national organizations that are directly related to my field.  They give information to us about our major and they give information to parents with children who have speech and hearing disabilities.  I believe I am going to join the NSSLHA association because I get to see inside information on job seeking and I get to be updated on new things throughout our field of work.  The NSSLHA website costs $60 but you get a discount for attending the national convention.

Lesson Plan

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_dPLr7oXvaw8tRiqU9fLojVu7O_pEaYGAzKidjQNs4U/edit?pli=1

Questions are included on the lesson plan page!

Mind Mapping

http://popplet.com/app/#/226911

What does Bloom's Taxonomy have to do with mind mapping? How can use each to organize your thinking and learning about instructional technology? 


Bloom's Taxonomy and Mind Mapping are interconnected because in order to create a mind map you have to be able to create, evaluate, analyze, apply, understand and remember how to create a plan to teach our students.  It is easier to organize our information based on those different sections of Bloom's Taxonomy and we can make sure that we cover each section critical to learning.  I can use each to learn about instructional technology and to organize my thinking because it will be easy to find websites to fit into each category and with that, organizing my thoughts into different sections will be a lot easier.

Digital Citizenship

 Discuss why you chose to focus on what you did. How will present and reinforce these ideas in your classroom? What resources might you provide to parents who have questions about their children using the Internet in your classroom and at home? How might you prevent and/or deal with cyber bullying?


I chose these three items to focus on because I believe that they are the most important things about the cyber universe to teach your children.  I will reinforce these by teaching my students to not put important things on the internet that could hurt their identity or have someone steal everything they have.  I will help my students protect their reputation by keeping everything they do on the internet appropriate for everyone to see if someone was to stumble across a page of theirs.  I will also help my students think before they post by helping them decide what's important and what's appropriate.  I will use the resources we have used today in class to show parents if they have any questions because these sources provided great information and gave examples of what to do.  I absolutely will not allow any student of mine to be a cyber bully and I will do everything I can to help students who are victims of this bullying.  This is one of the most prevalent sources of suicide in the country and I would never want any of my students' families to have to suffer.  I am going to teach my students to be aware of this and to report it whenever they see or hear someone talking about it.

UDL

http://bookbuilder.cast.org/create.php

I believe that this counts as "Universal Design for Learning" because it gives pictures, words and help on the side if a student needs to hear what the words are saying.  I really enjoyed this project because it was interesting to learn about how students need different ways of learning to really take things in.  UDL introduced me to many ways of teaching a student and what you could do as a teacher in a certain situation.

Social Media

What counts as social media? How might you use social media in the classroom? Do you feel that social media sites should be used for educational purposes? If so, which ones? Are there some sites, like perhaps Facebook, that should be for socialization only? Why or why not?


I believe that any website that has millions of users that can communicate in any way is a form of social media.  All of the websites that I have programmed into my computer are websites that I use to communicate with my friends, family and teachers from the past.  There are many ways that I could use social media in the classroom. I think that this would be a very effective way to communicate with the generation of students that we are teaching today.  I could use them for class discussions at home over readings or something we talked about in class that day.  I could use social media sites for keeping students updated with new assignments or keeping them up to date with grades.  I feel like social media sites could be used for educational purposes but it depends on the students, school you teach at, if you feel it is appropriate and what content you are putting online for the students.  I believe that teachers and students could communicate appropriately on google+, facebook, twitter and potentially pinterest.  On the other hand, I could see how people would think that Facebook and Twitter should be kept to socialization only because of the background purpose of being social and reconnecting with people.  There are so many pros and cons to whether they should be used for education or for being social but I believe that it should be the school or teacher's decision to do so.

Article Review

http://www.speech-language-therapy.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=featured&Itemid=101 is the website that I did the review on for class today.  The information provided was very relevant and the facts that it provided were comparable to ones that I have already heard and ones I know to be true.  This website has the credentials from HONcode, which provides us with the guarantee that this website is authentic and is giving us correct information.  Along with the HONcode, this website has a copyright certification.  I believe that this site is one that I would utilize when showing future clients something about a speech disorder.  The last thing that tells me this website is a legitimate source for research is that it provides us with the references that she used while she was making her website.  It is important that you give credit and on websites that are not good to use, they will not provide the correct credentials.

Graphic Organizer

What makes instructional materials found online good?  I would have to say that in order to find a good and reliable source online you need to know your sources and the name behind it.  When I look for sources online, I make sure to read what is written on the website, check to see if it is endorsed by any organization and compare their facts to those that I either know or have found elsewhere.  If the website passes all of these stipulations I will utilize this website for my research.  Some examples that I found are from the Merlot website.  http://www.diigo.com/user/taylormarasco/259?type=all has some of the examples that I found that are very reliable and have been edited to be as correct as possible. Knowing the source of your information is very important so you don't use things that aren't true, completely biased, or just wrong in general.  I feel like sometimes it is easy to tell a fake website from one that really knows what it is talking about with the information they are providing.  If I need to do a research project I would utilize these websites from my diigo account so that I know they are proper and full of information that is actually useful to me and what I am trying to research.  I looked into speech-language-therapy dot com and it seemed to be a very helpful website.  I figured that this was an interesting, informational and reliable source to use based on a few things.  It had the credentials from HONcode which proves information to be true.  Also, the information provided was relatable to facts I already have learned and information that is relevant.

Collaborative Learning Continued

These new instructional technology tools that we learned how to use in class this week are going to be very helpful in the future when working with group members and other students or teachers in your school of employment.  These tools made putting websites together and communicating with others a whole lot easier when getting together just isn't a possibility.  These tools provide us with many opportunities to explore the web to websites that pertain to us or what we are doing as a group.  In the future I will probably build a google sites website and have my students go there if they need to do research or find viable resources online for a project.  Group projects are often difficult to do when school time is not set aside for students... I will make sure to help them put together one of these sites so that they can communicate easily and all put in their own efforts toward completing the project together.

iMovie

     If I were to start my video project over I would obviously change a few things to make it more professional and to make it so that I could show it to future students.  The first thing I would change about our project was the background voices.  I was the one who was recording and I really did not like hearing my voice the entire time because it made hearing the main character's voice a little more difficult.  There was no need for the background noise so I would really like to eliminate that if possible.  Another thing that I would like to change is making sure that everyone who is involved in the video project is on the same page with the sequence of the video so we don't sound unintelligent when we are explaining how to do something.  Those were the two main things that I would really like to fix if we were to redo our video project.  If I were to make a few more instructional videos for future use I would possibly think about doing things related to my career (speech language pathology).  I would try to include a video on phonetics, anatomy and how to do therapy on a child with a basic speech impediment.  I feel as if these would be very helpful to students and to myself.  I probably would utilize a few of my teachers, textbooks and a few online websites to back my video with research.

Copyright, Fair Use and Creative Commons

     Before this class, I really had the bare minimum knowledge of all three of these important topics.  Finding out that each of these was more complicated and interesting than I had thought led me to want to learn more about each and make sure that I try to not violate any of these.  Understanding the complete definition of what Copyright means is going to prevent me and any of my future students from accidentally pirating or using someone else's information.  Knowing that it is having the legal right to a certain piece of information, song, etc. makes it easier for people to avoid using it or asking for permission for it.  Fair Use, is quoting someone else's information and using it in a piece of work that you are creating.  This will be helpful to learn more about this when teaching my students or having them do some sort of research project and need to provide facts that they cannot come up with on their own.  Finally, Creative Commons was an organization that was recently formed that encouraged the sharing of artistic work.  Teaching my future students about all of these different concepts will help them to prevent new laws to be passed such as SOPA and PIPA.  In the future when I am writing my personal statement, doing research on a particular disability or something of that matter I will be sure to use my knowledge of these concepts to assure that I do not violate any laws or not give proper credit for information that I got from the internet or other sources.

Collaborative Learning Response

     In class last week we were provided with a video by Steven Johnson about collaborative learning and its' effects on us as students and future educators.  The ideas that he presented were very interesting and it caused me to think about things in a different way than I had before now.  I liked hearing that if you leave time and space for a good idea to form instead of forcing a mediocre idea you will come up with something that is worth thinking about.  I have not personally experienced a long or drawn out "slow hunch" but for me the shorter and quicker "slow hunches" happen quite often for me.  Leaving room in your ideas for the addition of more information or better ideas from other people will give you more time and opportunity for details to be developed.  What I have learned from this video was to give special time to the ideas I am trying to come up with and leave room for other people's ideas to enhance mine to create something big.
     The writing by Davis was almost as interesting and eye opening as the video.  I learned about things that had never been presented to me before.  I never knew that there were so many options for collaborative learning and it was nice to see the different potential things we could do for a group project.  There were so many different options it was hard to choose a few to base or group project off of for class.  I did learn that smaller groups were more efficient and beneficial for learning and accomplishing tasks.  Rules make a group go 'round.  I will utilize these learned skills for future classroom group projects or classes I'm going to take.