Saturday, July 27, 2013

TECH PLAY # 2 ePortfolio Tools

   This week I have been exploring and play-testing with different eportfolio tools. I have looked at such sites as Wet Paint, Wix, WebNode, Simply Box, Portfoliobox.net, Posterous, ScapBlog, PBWiki, Carbonmade, Folio For Me. There were several of these sites that had been removed or were not available. But the biggest drawback or obstacle for me was their difficulty in using. If I were to present these tools to some Elementary kids they would have trouble understanding how to use these even with good instruction. The site I found with the most user-friendly tools was Weebly. It consists of click, drag & drop site creator, and it automatically saves all your work.
 
AFFORDANCES

   When I teach my students, it will be wonderful to have affordances such as click and drag, easy to find tutorial helps for every imaginable issue, image transfer tool, embedding code made simple, to teach how to create a web site for building eportfolios.  

CONTEXT CONSIDERED

   When considering blogs and eportfolios I have considered kids from kindergarten to high school seniors. I feel sure that by teaching early childhood how to navigate through Blogger, they wouldn't have any trouble knowing how to design their blogs. Now when I considered high schoolers, building an portfolio on Weebly would make them very happy to have the easy set-up of click & drag, image transfer, video, prezi, embedding tools, and a very user-friendly site. I would  teach them how to collect good artifacts to use, select the most impressionable to post, how to reflect on why they are using them and what they gained by doing this project then how to connect all the above together to make an ongoing eportfolio.

     

Sunday, July 21, 2013

TECH PLAY 1: TPACK Mashup in Blogging



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   This will be achieved by having the class being split up into groups of 5. Each group will be considered a team and they must choose a leader or captain. They will be given a week to come up 3 routines and post them to Safari Montage. Then on Friday they will demonstrate their routines on the smart board in front of their peers. To conclude this lesson there will be a performance of leadership by having “Game Day”. It will be time to put these routines in action. A tournament of 5 on 5 games will commence until a winner is decided. 


  The overall goal of this lesson is to teach that “Leadership” is learned and not something you’re born into. The objective of this lesson is to reinforce that “Real leaders are ordinary people with extraordinary determination”- Unknown.  The students (6th-8th grade preathletic boys) will be using Safari Montage to create three routines for wide receivers.  Safari Montage is like having a digital recorder, video player, record player, overhead projector and a laptop computer all in one place. The final will accomplish the boys learning new technology and teamwork. Each group in turn will teach the other teams their routines.


   When the boys finish their computer lab time, the last ten minutes will consist of a daily blog in blogger.com. Weeks prior to this Tech Play has been spent teaching my boys how to use blogger. They have learned how to create blogs, how to add text, images, embed technology like Prezis, , videos such as Youtube, images and videos they have created from their iphones, and how to use tutorials to help them when they become confused. How to use design templates and fonts to spice up their pages. But the  best part of these blogs will be to see how the boys develop and grow. 

TPACK Model Applied:
TECHNOLOGY
The technology used is Safari Montage and the boys will have time to play with it and learn from each other as they set up routines on a chalk board and develop the best routes for wide receivers. This can be short distance, deep pass routes, reverse routes, statue of liberty schemes, or even screen passes.
PEDIGOGY
My pedagogical design would be more along the lines of a constructivism model. It is a hands-on type of task where the affordances would be to remain on task to lead your team to have the most effective routines and ultimately win the championship game. The team will have time in the computer lab to construct their routines during the week as they use Safari Montage.
CONTENT
My content will address these Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills Standards:
(5)  Physical activity and health. The student understands and applies safety practices associated with physical activities. The student is expected to:
(A)  use equipment safely and properly;
(B)  select and use proper attire that promotes participation and prevents injury;
(C)  include warm-up and cool-down procedures regularly during exercise; monitor potentially dangerous environmental conditions such as wind, cold, heat, and insects; and recommend prevention and treatment;
(6)  Social development. The student understands basic components such as strategies and rules of structured physical activities including, but not limited to, games, sports, dance, and gymnastics. The student is expected to:
(A)  know basic rules for sports played such as setting up to start, restarting, violating rules; and
(B)  keep accurate score during a contest.

From the New Bloom’s Taxonomy my boys will use:
-          Creating
-          Evaluating
-          Applying


OBSTACLES
My drive is to go around the biggest obstacle in most schools and that is the availability of computers in the home. Now my dilemma would be in having access to the computer lab during school hours.


The next four blogging posts consist of my research into emerging technologies and their affordances. I had the opportunity to learn about the CAD system for US First Robotics program, Legos Universe, CreatingMusic.com, Apple Apps, Safari Montage, Discovery Education Streaming, Technology Based Rubrics by Kathy Schrock, Clicker assessment Tools, and Inspiration/Kidspiration Software.