Blog Post #5

Personal Learning Networks.

A Personal Learning Network is your collection of people you give and get information from. As

future educators, PLNs' are very useful to us. We can learn new things from everyone else in your 

PLN and others can add you to their PLN and learn new things from you. In Michael Fawcett's video he 

stated that his students used their PLNs' to ask questions and get instant answers. 

I looked into they ways you can organize your PLN and I thought Symbaloo was a great way to start. 

All of your social networks and pretty much anywhere you would go on the internet to gather 

information is right there in an organized grid.

Source: http://www.symbaloo.com/home/mix/13eOcK1fiV#

My Sentence/Passion videos

Project #3 Presetation

Search Engine Blog Post.

I chose these eight different search engines to look at, try out and review.

1. DuckDuckGo. This search engine was pretty good. You kind of had to dig around to find what you wanted but the best thing about it is that it is completely private and they keep all of your searches anonymous. 

2. Blekko. This search engine was very good. It was very easy to find what your are looking for because they edit out all of the sponsored sites and pick the sites that actually relate to your search. I think this would be useful if you are researching something popular or that has a lot of different websites on the subject.

3. Wolfram Alpha. This search engine was very interesting. It uses human knowlege to solve equations. It would be best to use it  to ask logical questions and anything to do with numbers and percentages.

4. Bing. I have used Bing in the past but not extensively. It looks similar to Google in its layout. I feel like this one was the opposite of Blekko. I did not give specific enough results and gave really low quality websites. 

5. Yandex. This search engine is unique in that you can search any website from around the world in English, French and German. This would be useful if you were researching something about another country, especially news stories in that specific country.

6. Gigablast. I liked this search engine because it tells you exactly why the search results are ranked the way they are so you can add more specific details if needed. 

7. Ask. I have used Ask.com many times in the past. It is very useful because you can pose a question and anyone can answer it. This means if you cannot find an answer to a question anywhere online, you can ask it here. This also gives the opportunity for those questions to appear in other search engines.

8. The College Search Engine. Now I was a little skeptical about this search engine because the design of it was very bad but it is very useful. It searches websites of universities and colleges around the entire world. With this you know you are getting valuable and  creditable sources. 

C4T Blog Post

I was assigned Daniel Edwards blog entitled Learning and Innovation. His posts were very interesting, especially for this class. Both of the blog posts I read had to do with different technologies.

The first post I read was Pedagogy First – Technology….. He talked about the different technologies that are being put into classrooms and how some teachers are opposed to them. He states that teachers should use the different technologies we have acquired  and become learners ourselves when we are faced with these new technologies. I commented that I agreed with his claims and that I thought that it related to what we were learning in this class.

The second post I read was Top 10 Apps in an Established 1:1 iPad School, which was a list of ten apps that could be used in specific classes along with general classes as well. I commented that I could use these in my future classroom and that they would be very useful to me.

Source: https://twitter.com/syded06

Blog Post #4

What do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher? I never really thought of this question before. Why do we as teachers need to ask questions?

I learned a new strategy about asking questions from the article The Right Way To Ask Questions in the Classroom by Ben Johnson. He states that we ask questions to make sure our students understand the material, but we need to be careful because only the "smart" or "confident" children will answer and the other children would not be even pay attention to the answers. 

Johnson states that we should ask the question, wait a few seconds and then pick a random student. While I know some students would think this in unfair or mean, I think it would be effective. If you did this on a regular basis as a teacher, it would make your students actually listen to what you are teaching in order to be able to answer your question if they are picked at random. 

Another strategy I like to use is to ask the children their opinion on the subject. It helps me get a good idea if they are absorbing the information and it gives me ideas on how to teach it by hearing it in their own words.  

Source:www.bayberryhomes.com

Blog Post #3

All of these videos and slideshow had the same thing in common, teaching us how to participate in a peer review. These videos were nice and concise and were very easy to understand, I could use them in my future classroom! In the slideshow Peer Edit With Perfection and the video What is Peer Editing? I learned more of what a peer review entails and that the three steps you need to complete while doing a peer review are to give the paper compliments, to give your peer suggestions and to correct anything you think needs to be corrected. 

I also learned what not to do while in a peer review from the video Writing Peer Review Top 10 Mistakes., which was very enjoyable and the children were so funny! You should not be rude while giving your review, you need to be specific while giving your corrections, not to be distracted while giving your reviews and to not take your peers corrections negativity. They are just trying to help! 

Peer reviewing is a great way to help with the writing process, especially in children. It helps them get different ideas for their own papers and helps them get feedback on their papers to make them better.

                                          Source:www.edweek.org