IPL "Design" - Prezi

For my first Independent Learning Project, I designed a lecture Prezi on the Avant-Garde movements of the early 20th century. I have always likes Prezi presentations in class because they are typically more artistic and engaging, but I have never taken the time to learn the Prezi software to create one. This project helped me familiarize myself with the tool itself and feel comfortable using it for future presentations. My topic is directly related to my research interests for English Literature, but for my presentation I focused on the study of visual art instead of literature from the beginning of the 1900s until 1945. These movements, collected to make up the Avant-Garde, are extremely political and have a lot of energy behind them which is what I particularly like. In my presentation, I go through each movement and outline the basic principles of each one. Most people think of Modern Art as meaningless or impossible to interpret. I hope through my presentation you can find that Modern Art is valuable because the meaning lies in the artist's intent rather than the actual piece of art you are observing.

https://prezi.com/67slxzoyiamv/modern-art-with-a-focus-on-the-avant-garde/

Blog 6

• I went to The Walker School's website and found a First Grade class page.  In the page you could see articles about presentations, celebrations, and changes being made to the classroom. The teachers also posted a lot of photos so it felt like you were actually involved. I imagine this is very nice for parents and helps them feel like they actually know what is going on in the child's school life. 

For my professional responsibilities as a teacher I would use Microsoft Word to create news letters and a class blog to increase parent, student, and teacher communication. I think I will be moderately involved with technology in my classroom. Word and Excel are really what I need to accomplish my activity tasks, but I like the idea of a blog to inform parents about my classroom. I also like that the blog allows students to interact. I think younger students especially need to develop social and literacy skills from an early stage in their academic career. 

In the technology sandbox we tried a new piece of technology called the Apple pencil. Writing notes on an iPad has always seemed harder than writing notes on paper because the pens usually don't work well. However, the Apple pencil is probably the nicest iPad tool I have ever used. It was smooth and it made note-taking fun. I think this could be used as an excellent resource in a classroom. In a math class for example a math teacher could project her or her iPad on the screen for students to see and use the pen as they write their notes. Then the teacher could save the notes on the iPad and put them on a class blog for students to have access to. This would help students because they will be doing math at the same time as their teacher, but they will also have the teacher's notes to help them at home. 

Blog 5

I think that blogs are the most useful Web 2.0 technology. They are an extremely efficient communication tool. Many younger or overwhelmed students forget to relay important information to their parents. With the use of a blog, a teacher can communicate information directly to parents conveniently. I think that blogs are nice too because it is a good way to keep students writing and interacting with each other. Student assignments on blogs will improve technological skills and literacy or writing performance. 

Scribd is an amazing library where users can publish and explore various documents in many different languages. I think it is amazing for foreign language classes and literacy classes because it is very diverse and interactive. Scribd has a huge collection of almost 60 million publications. This means that students have incredible access to a lot of valuable literature. They can also access the catalog from anywhere and don't have to worry about transportation to or dues from libraries. Also, over 1,000 publishers are involved with Scribd which is pretty amazing. Overall, it is extremely accessible and useful for students.

https://www.scribd.com/

I think that cloud computing probably holds the biggest promise for education. This is a solution to the digital divide. A student could store all information on one system that they can access anywhere. This is especially useful for children of divorced parents. It is difficult for students that have to constantly move houses to keep track of their online assignments. The could would also serve as a solution to this problem.

Blog 4

I absolutely love twitter and I enjoy using it as a classroom tool. I have been following a variety of educational technology, English education, and famous educator accounts to try and learn more about the field. I think twitter provides a nice community and you get to create that community yourself. For this class, my community is becoming one of future and current educators and you can always learn from advice or the experiences of others, as they are always relevant to your own experiences somehow. 

The digital divide, when students don't have the same access across the board to technology at home, is a result of socioeconomic variation. When students don't have the same opportunities to work with technology at home, they don't have equal skills and abilities to succeed in your class. As a classroom teacher, one will no doubt come across instances of the digital divide and must create ways of dealing with this problem. A teacher must plan for some way for a student to do an alternate assignment or find a way for students that don't have access to technology to get it. 

I really like the idea of educational games. When I was a student it was a fun way to learn and be a kid at the same time. I think students need a break to learn in different ways and educational games also give teachers a break as students behave well when they are focused on a task they typically enjoy. I want to teach 1st grade, which would involve basic games and basic levels of literacy and math. These go well together in activities for students and younger students get excited with the idea of being able to play games during school. I will probably use academic mapping the least as it might be tedious and a little much for younger students. Academic maps also require a deeper level of reflection and I'm not sure that 1st graders are necessarily ready for that quite yet. 

My Newsletter

Blog 3

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  I think I would do well teaching the "Multimedia" Literature standards to students. I am a literature major and it is what I am passionate about. I am also familiar with analyzing all kinds of literature online and using different kinds of tools to present literature. I think I will struggle however with R7.7 because I am not as familiar with films and other forms of art as I am with literature. But I still feel a very high level of confidence with this standard.
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• I would like to use Powerpoint and Word with my students. I think that they are excellent tools for students to use to build their writing and presentation skills from an early age. There are many forms of presentations that students can do with powerpoint, like Pecha-Kuchas, where they have a certain amount of time to discuss certain slides. I think learning about a variety of ways to present their thoughts on these tools would be beneficial for them in the future. I will be teaching elementary students ages 6-9, so I will need to emphasize how important originality is and giving credit where it is due. I think it is important for students to be learning this from an early age.
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• In the Newsletter Design Assignment I learned how to create a border and add extra effects to make my word documents more appealing. I usually only use word for writing, so I was unaware of all of the artistic options on it. I think I could've chosen a better color scheme to make it nicer to look at. In my future career I will use word to make information fun and enjoyable to look at through newsletters and articles to my students and their parents.
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