Final Reflection

Final Reflection Slate

Enjoy my final reflection. I love creating projects on Spark Adobe :)

Not only my classroom

When I learn a new skill in our class the first thing I can think of is how to bring it into my classroom what things do I want to try the most what things will benefit my students the most. My students get so excited when I show them a new application and they get time to start implementing it. Many of these things seem to be benefiting my students, engaging them, and teaching them new skills.

It takes a while for me to realize that a lot of these skills and applications I can use to benefit my self as well. I have been implementing technology to help with my business and using social media to display specials of the day, getting to know baristas, networking to find private recycle companies to help me and I have been using blogging and twitter to help me expand my knowledge about the coffee industry. It is sad that it too me this long to find out about all of this free knowledge already out there but I am so glad that I am expanding my knowledge in many ways. My employees are so happy about me creating a website where we can access all of our documents in one place and refer to them whenever we want. For the first time scheduling and shift trading is all done online, inventory is done on google docs and such much more. I spend a solid half hour a week just brainstorming ways technology can help me and my business expand and I am glad this class has helped me open my mind to all of these possibilities.

Thank you #teched

Service Learning

Interesting I didn't realize I knew and had learned so much about blogging until our service learning group came together to discuss our findings. I thought 8 different blogging platforms would be near impossible but we had a list that was much longer. It was nice to put a lot of our knowledge on one site for others to access. I wonder how others will be able to locate it. Will it come up in a Google Search? hmmm...

My favorite experiences with blogging is Feedly. I love hearing about other peoples stories or guidance on topics that interest me. I don't have to pay to read them (unlike most books) and they are a super short read. Seriously so glad I discovered Feedly.

Difficulty with student blogging. I am trying to make student blogging safe so I approve anything my students post or comments others post before making them public. I am now wondering if I want to do that again next year. It is hard for me to go through and make each post public. I am greatly slacking in this and it is creating extra work for me. I think for now the district likes the security of the teacher approving everything but I hope once more students in the district start classroom blogging they will become more flexible with this.  I feel bad saying that because I am trying to make my job safer not thinking about student safety but I feel like if students posted something they are not supposed to the other students will read it and tattle on them immediately (like always).

#blogging #classblog

Cyber Bulling

It is sad how prominent bullying is in general. It is also sad that it is a real thing that students suffer. I think parents should be checking in with their kiddos and seeing what they are doing on the internet and discussing their interests with them. I don't think parents should control students passwords and accounts to the extreme but being aware for sure. That way if something like bullying is occurring they can reflect and problem solve on it together. I think the digital citizenship trainings is a great place to start. I think each grade level should focus on a different component of digital citizenship and it can be district wide even if it is just a 10 minute focus once a week.

My school district had a digital citizen training night where they discussed with students and families how important it is to be mindful of your online identity and how it leaves an ever lasting impact. My principal says you are creating an icon you want others to see. What is it you want to portray to others?

I can see how easy it is to cyber bully. I was never apart of it nor have I seen it but it is so easy to instant message somebody or post something without thinking it through. The positive thing about cyber bullying is the victims have more time to come up with a response or they may chose not to respond. They have more time to reflect on the comment and get advice from others if needed. The sad part about cyber bulling is it can be made so public and cover a large area of people very quickly. I could see how many would be hesitant to cyber bully because their is evidence to show what you did but in person face to face it is a lot harder to prove something it is more of taking one persons word over another if they are not telling the truth.

Bullying in general is an issue it isn't only online but more commonly face-to-face. We need to teach our children and students the importance of being kind and respectful to others as well as how to stand up for ourselves in a respectful way. We need to teach them the signs of bullying what to do if they are being bullied and how to report it. Cyber bullying alone is not the issue but hopefully teaching digital citizenship and building respectful relationships can keep our students out of a possible bad situation.

#cyberbully #digitalcitizen

Blogging Time

My students are finally blogging but now the company is wanting to collect payment. I don't think kidblog was the best choice I thought I was doing kidzblog with a z but I forgot the z when I created it but I thought I would give it a try anyway. This page has some good ideas of how teachers are using blogging in their classrooms. I would like to use mine for a science journal as well. I know students love science and it is a great way to share their learnings. But the one reason I like doing book reports better is because each student is sharing about a different book they read where in science I feel like the class would all be sharing the same or similar discoveries and they wouldn't want to read each others posts.

I think I want to focus in on one topic for blogging such as book reports etc.The webiste mentions using it for a digital portfolio. I think it would be great for older grades to use and share their identity and their voice but I just don't know about 2nd graders having a digital portfolio...

I have been using this spreadsheet for blogging that my profession Jane shared. It has been helpful. I used it to show my principal blog examples and to research different blogging platforms.

I love viewing multiple classroom blogs. At first it was hard for me to find and locate example blogs. This page has multiple blogs and gave me tons of ideas of what to do in my classroom. I did notice tho that most of these pages have photographs of students faces....

#kidblog #classblog #bloglife

Privacy

One of the readings this week Champions of Children's Privacy discussed how we should allow kiddos to make a decision on their identity not base it on collecting their private information to target them and provide them with ads. Some schools are making it so students can't use google because they don't want the students to go to forums where their data and information is collected. I don't agree with not allowing the students to go to these sites. I strongly feel that if you educate students about them collecting information and you tell them the causes and what they do with the information and they still chose to go to the web pages that is completely their decision. We should educate students on how to use the internet safely not prevent them from using it. Students should make an informed decision about their identity. I understand how website collecting information can effect these form decisions but I think we need to educate them on that. Just because a ton of rehab and drug addiction sites come to my email and have advertisement popping up doesn't mean I need to go to a rehab. The internet only knows a part of my identity and it confused me owning coffee stands named Addicted with thinking I have an Addiction. I still know who I really am and I was still capable of creating my own identify. We should teach our kiddos how to utilize their online identity. I think the technology teachers in our school should instruct the students how to create a positive identity for themselves.

Personally, I like the fact that I have ads popping up of things I like and that I am interested in I have found a lot of interesting stuff this way. Sometime it makes it really tempting for me to buy items that I can't afford but it taunts me by consistently throwing it in my face. Like most things it has its benefits and drawbacks. #teched

Blogging Group

Jane tweeted me an excellent excel sheet of different blogging platforms. I just created a kidblog.com URL and added the majority of my students. It took me some playing around and it was a bit hard to figure out. I was looking up articles for blogging in the classroom. It seems like a pretty popular thing I am surprised I haven't heard about it until now. My big question is how do I get my students some followers that will provide them with feedback on their blogs? I will continue to seek more information on this aspect. One blog stated that:"Number 3: Blogs, because of their ease of use, and because of the context of news and editorial column writing, have become a highly effective way to help students to become better writers. Research has long shown that students write more, write in greater detail, and take greater care with spelling, grammar, and punctuation, when they are writing to an authentic audience over the Internet. - See more at: http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech217.shtml#sthash.ugRwytB3.dpuf" I could see my students being more cautious about their spelling if there was a larger audience viewing there writing. But I am wondering if they are actually writing better or if they are using spell check to assist them?

I learned that for students it is better to have a blogging classroom software downloaded so they can just click on that instead of connecting to a URL. I have KidBlog but I see a lot of good feedback about Kidzblog I want to try out multiple platforms to see which one I prefer for my students.

It was recommended that I have to view all blogs by my students before they are published but I don't know if I can keep up with all this...

#blogging #classblog