Blog Post 10 - REVolutionary Teaching

In Sir Ken Robinson's video, Bring on the Learning Revolution, he talks about how we, as educators, need to stop teaching in such a way that generalizes students' futures. He says that students need to be taught in a way that will appeal to their creative side and whatever sparks their interest. We need to determine what their niche is at an early age to avoid training them their entire lives to be someone that they are not. When I graduated from high school, I was going to start massage therapy school because that was the talent I had discovered at an early age, but after way too many arguments with random friends and ex-significant other's moms, I decided I would take the "normal" path and go to nursing school. I had always been a caring person and I loved seeing people recover from tragedy, so I figured it was where I belonged. It didn't take long for me to realize that blood makes me queezy, bodily functions disgust me to no end, and vomit will make me vomit in 10 seconds flat. What could I do? I had already been in college for two years and I was already in nearly $20k worth of student loan debt. I spent the summer searching for answers and taking everything around me as a "sign" as to where my future was going. I began taking education classes and I immediately knew that teaching was my calling in life-my natural ability to care was meant for children, and my want to see people "recover" was really a want to see small people succeed. Sometimes I wonder where I would be had I stuck with massage therapy, because I still really love it as a professional trait and/or hobby...but I know I'm right where I should be. Our students should never feel like they aren't good enough for something or like they can't do what they love simply because the field may not be in the best shape or because others have talked them down so much that they don't have a clue what to do. We're their teachers, the people who teach them how to do life. The people who teach them how to figure out what they love. And the people who show them where to go once they find their niche. We are responsible for not only their grades, but their futures, and we need to get and stay in that mindset as long as we are educators. These kids are a whole new generation, and I don't know about you, but I would love nothing more than to see them doing what they love every single day, rather than spending their days doing a job they hate and just waiting for the weekend. Let's teach them to love life and how to enhance the abilities given to them. Let's be REVolutionary educators!

Project 15 - PBL Independent Plan

The Human Body! As a former nursing major, I found this topic to be particularly interesting, so I would love to teach a future third grade class all about how their little bodies work! Enjoy:

The Human Body

Project 12A - SMARTboard Tools

Blog Post 9 - What can we learn from Mrs. Cassidy?

"Education is evolving due to the impact of the Internet. We cannot teach our students in the same manner in which we were taught. Change is necessary to engage students not in the curriculum we are responsible for teaching, but in school. Period." -April Chamberlain
In Mrs. Cassidy's Skype videos she discussed the importance of having updated technology in the classroom, because it isn't going anywhere; it will only advance from here. I believe it is important to find ways to obtain the technology we need in classrooms, if it isn't already available to us. We have to find new resources that will make learning more enjoyable for future generations. When I was in the first grade, like Mrs. Cassidy's students, we learned everything by charts and lessons that required us to hand-write things; whereas today, children are learning by means of personal computers, Smart Boards, and iPads. One of the most fascinating lessons I have witnessed so far was in my field experience from this semester when I observed a first grade class at Griggs Elementary School. The students were in the library learning about how books are organized on the shelves, and the kids were completely baffled by the process...until the librarian made the lesson interactive. The children were able to drag and drop things all over the screen to place the books in the correct order and they used the markers to write the letters to check themselves. This may seem like a lesson that isn't that big of a deal, and maybe it isn't, but learning how the Dewey Decimal System isn't exactly the easiest thing to grasp when you're six years old. I would love to incorporate interactive lessons like this into my classroom, and I hope that whatever school I am teaching in has been blessed with enough iPads for each child so that I can do lessons with the class as a whole, while they work independently on their own iPads.

In Little Kids...Big Potential, Mrs. Cassidy's video about how she runs her classroom, I learned how important it is to teach children to use technology for more than just research or playing games. The students in her class have blogs that they post images and classroom lessons on regularly. Her videos were truly inspiring to me as a future educator! I hope my classroom will be as enjoyable to be in as hers obviously is.

Blog Post 8 - Resources for 21st Century Learning

Throughout the semester, I have had a love/hate relationship with the idea of technology taking over the classroom...why? Well, I was raised by the philosophy to "think for yourself" and taught to learn independently without ever having to rely on a person or a machine. However, I have changed my perspective completely because of this course. I believe the ability to be comfortable in social settings is very important, but I now see that the ability to use smart devices or other forms of technology is equally as important. The sites I found useful for my classroom are sites that allow you to interact with others around the world who are seeking the same information you are-sites that allow you to correspond with classmates, teachers, or future educators who want to share and receive information with other people.

Using Tokbox, you can chat with up to 20 people online. The majority of people who use this site use it as a platform for products that they are endorsing, but there are several teachers who have stated online that they use this site to enhance their student's ability to hold mature conversations. I believe this site would be extremely helpful because it would be something I wouldn't necessarily have to monitor at all times. When you set up an account, it is much like having a Facebook-you choose who you want to talk to and you choose to allow certain people to be on your "list" or not. A lot of people have issues with sites that resemble chat rooms because of the uproars those have caused in the past, but I would only use Tokbox in a group setting. I would set aside days and times during the week to chat with people who could help with lessons we may be learning at the time. I believe this site could be very helpful in a classroom because it allows you to have several people in one conversation. More people = more opinions.

Hey, look! Everybody knows about Instagram! But, if you don't, it's a site/app that allows you to take photos and share them with the people who "follow" you. Instagram has been used for so many different things since it became popular, such as: selling items, promoting businesses, bragging about life happenings, announcing engagements, and now people are even creating their own hashtags for their weddings. Hashtag? What's a hashtag? This is a hashtag: #...or a number sign. With Instagram, you can hashtag things about the photos you upload which instantly creates links to other photos all over Instagram with the same hashtag in them. Let's say I upload a photo of a bulletin board that I did that I was so proud of that was all about how to use the iPad int he classroom, I would hashtag #bulletinboard #classroom #ipad #howto #teacher. All of these hashtags would take me to different instances on the app where people have done the same thing. This app could help teach students to use the internet to learn how others view things. I would give assignments where the students had to find objects in the classroom, take photos of them and upload them, hashtag, find other people's photos with the same hashtag, and report back what the photos were of-almost like a scavenger hunt.

My final resource for learning in the classroom is called Edmodo-a site that allows you to connect with strictly teachers and other students around the world. Edmodo is similar to Tokbox because it is chat-based, but completely different because Edmodo is monitored for content that is age appropriate for children. The site only allows people involved in the school system to have accounts on the site, which leaves little room for strangers or "unsafe" people to show up on the other end of the chat. The downfall is that, in comparison to Tokbox, you can only chat with one person at a time, whereas with Tokbox you can chat with up to 20 people at once. Ridiculous, I know. I would probably use this site if I were teaching about other countries or different races, because I would be able to set up a chat with someone from another part of the world (who is a teacher, as well) for my class to talk with. Edmodo makes me a little more comforatble that Tokbox does, but I believe they are both extremely helpful when teaching about technology, or with technology, in the classroom. This would also be fun to use in multiple classrooms at once-maybe have a teacher set up their webcam in their class, and my camera in mine, and have the classes learn from one another as the material is being taught simultaneously.

Summary of Wesley Fryer - C4T #2

My C4T #2 was Dr. Wesley Fryer, an educator and researcher. His blog is full of posts summarizing conferences he has attended or held where the discussion topic is usually about technology in the classroom and/or how to help students reach their full potential when using their imaginations. I honestly enjoyed reading his entries and viewing his slideshow presentations because I found them to be full of resources and useful information that I could use in my own classroom in the future. Here are the comments I left him:

Mr. Fryer, Hello! My name is Catherine Stalvey and I am an elementary education major at the University of South Alabama. When I started this semester, I was anti technology in the classroom because I didn't like the possibility that it could decrease a child's ability to lead a normal social life. However, my view points have vastly changed, because I now realize that technology is actually enhancing the way our children are able to learn. I'm a human being and my teaching methods will always be flawed, but technology is hardly ever inadequate. My only concern is, what will we do if something crashes in the classroom? I observed in a middle school a few weeks ago and out of nowhere, the computer/Smart Board crashed in the middle of a lesson. My teacher had to improvise (luckily she's incredible at her job), but it made me wonder if you were a first year teacher, would it make teaching even more difficult if your resources were to stop working temporarily? I really enjoyed the slide show you put together about improving writing skills with an iPad, and I thought your "Saturday morning cartoons" joke was hysterical. I would love to be able to use iPads in my classroom one day, and I will definitely look into the apps you suggested throughout this presentation. If you would like to check out my blog, feel free - stalveycatherineedm310.blogspot.com And I would so love a Tweet from you (I just started following you)! @cd_stalvey Thanks for your time!

Dr. Fryer, This is Catherine Stalvey again, the student from EDM 310 at the University of South Alabama. I enjoyed watching your slideshow about the notes you took at this conference, and I really appreciated how many different places you found proof of your theory about visual note taking. I took a course last semester where my teacher required us to create a visual artifact journal where we were given prompts to write and draw about. We were supposed to draw the first picture that came to mind, then write words or phrases about that picture, then continue to draw pictures and write cues until we ran out of room on the paper. When I saw your slides on visual note taking, this is exactly what I thought of! I have always been a visual note taker...although I thought I was just notorious for doodling on my notes. All of my goofy little catch phrases, weird songs, and silly pictures in my notes have always been the things that I remember the best. Your concept of sticky learning was very insightful to me-I have a niece and nephew whom I love to teach new things to and learn new things with. When I saw your slides, I immediately thought of all the fun, interesting things I could help them learn! For instance, my fiance' and I are planning to build kites and take them to the beach to fly them this weekend. We are building the kites form scratch with my niece and nephew, and letting the kids paint and decorate them however they please. To me, sticky learning is learning in a way that is hands-on and memorable, just like kite building. Thank you so much for revealing your notes and giving some great advice for future educators! I will definitely be keeping up with your posts in the future.

If you would like to check out his blog yourself, go...here

Project 14 - PBL Independent Plan

For my independent learning plan, I wanted to teach my students about music and how it is both fun and educational. This lesson plan is a three week long project that involves assessments, online blogging, in-class journal entries, a poster project, a song creation, and the incorporation of musicians from the community. I asked my 7-year old, first grade niece what she thought about these plans and if she thought she would like to learn about all of these things, and she said "Of course, Catherine!". She's a musical little thing and she loves to have fun, but she is great at being brutally honest. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed imagining and creating this project! Enjoy:

Making Music

Project 9 - Marc Prensky's Teaching Digital Natives Overview

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Project 13 - PBL Collaborative

This is my group's Project-Based Learning Collaborative Lesson Plan, Calendar, and Overview.

Dr. Seuss

Blog Post 7 - Randy Pausch: The Legend

In Randy Pausch's final lecture, Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, he discusses the importance of not letting anything stop you from achieving your dreams and of fighting for your dreams. This brave man battled with pancreatic cancer, but he never let that stop him from being able to touch people's lives with his powerful words and life-changing lectures. The most important thing, in my opinion, that he discussed in this lecture was that even when you hit a brick wall, do not let that stop you. Brick walls are placed into our lives to strengthen our will-power and to test our skills; they are there to help us. An example of a brick wall would be a teacher who has been teaching for ten years and has yet to come across a challenge she cannot not face, until she meets Jimmy. Jimmy is a stubborn student who refuses to do anything that is asked of him, even when the teacher tries giving him rewards for good behavior, he still does not obey. Now, the teacher could very easily give up and call Jimmy "hopeless" or "not worth the headache", but that wouldn't be pushing through a brick wall, would it? Instead, she works with Jimmy outside of school hours to help improve his performance and abilities...pushing through her brick wall.

The "head fake" is something we have all experienced at some point in our lives, probably when we were given an assignment that we deemed pointless. The head fake is a great example of how to teach students about collaborative projects, teamwork, and project-based learning. Let's say a teacher gives an assignment where she tells her students to choose a well-known president and write a three page essay about every fact they can find about the president they choose. If this is a group of tenth grade students, how much could they really learn from 20 or so papers about George Washington? Probably not a lot...unless this was a group assignment where the students had to learn without using any technology as resources. They had to learn from one another and learn together. A "head fake" is when you trick your students into thinking that they are learning one thing, when they are actually learning something entirely different.

The final thing I appreciated hearing from Randy Pausch is that it is so important for us to stop trying to change thing about our futures or our students. We are all learners and we are all constantly learning. We are all dreamers in some way or another, and we should always encourage our students to dream BIG and dream like crazy. We have to always remind our children that no matter they may do in life, right or wrong, they are destined for greatness and they are more awesome than they are aware of! Randy Pausch said that we must remember that we are never in control of the things we may face in life, and that we have to make the best of the situations we are in at any stage in life. I thought this was really impressive coming from a man who was diagnosed with a disease that is, in most cases, fatal. It is so cool to me that he was able to overcome his circumstances enough to influence people in a positive and legendary. Long live the legend.

C4K February

In the month of February, I was given the opportunity to communicate with a student from Nebraska and a student from Canada. Both of the children I was assigned were in elementary school, but had written blog entries that were very impressive for their ages.

The first student I had was Cooper C. from Mrs. Geldes class in Nebraska. Cooper had created a PowerPoint presentation about how to add fractions, this was my comment: "My name is Catherine Stalvey and I am studying to be an elementary school teacher at the University of South Alabama. I am 20 years old and I am so excited to finish school in two years! I have never been to Nebraska before, but I am sure that it is a lovely state! I am very impressed with your math skills, because fractions have always been difficult for me. I just took a math class at my school where I had to learn about fractions all over again, and I couldn't remember anything. Please always remember how to do these things, especially if you want to be a teacher one day, because it will help you out a lot to already know what you're doing. I also really like the way you set up this post! The pictures are the perfect size for someone to read without any difficulty, and you made your directions simple enough for anyone to learn. One of the things I want to do when I am a teacher is to make sure that my students enjoy learning, and that they will remember how much they loved being in my class. I hope you are doing great in school and I hope you always love to learn! If you would like to respond to me, your teacher is free to email me at cdstalvey@gmail.com, or she can tweet me on Twitter @cd_stalvey. I began following her on Twitter this morning!" I actually tweeted his teacher that same day and had her tweet me back about how excited she was to read my comment.

My third C4K was the same child, Cooper C. from Nebraska. This time, he posted about his birthsone and what he thought about it and how cool it was to discover what your birthstone is. Here is my comment"Hi Cooper! Catherine here, again. I hope you and all your friends have been safe in this crazy cold weather. I think it is so cool that your birthstone is Opal, because I love that color! I have always wanted a piece of jewelry with that color stone in it. My birthstone is Topaz-my birthday is November 11. I was born on Veteran’s Day and my mom’s birthday is actually 3 days after mine, so when I was born she got to bring me home on her birthday. Cool, huh? Is your birthday on a holiday? If you could pick any other birthstone to have, what would it be? Mine would actually be Opal! Hope to hear from you soon!"

My seond C4K student was Kaija from Canada. This little girl had some spunk! All of her posts were full of energy and excitement. The post I commented on was about why tigers and lions are her favorite animals...although I wish I had commented on one of her many posts about how much she loves Minecraft. Here is my comment"Hi Kaija! My name is Catherine Stalvey and I am in my third year of college at the University of South Alabama, in southern Alabama, here in the United States. I think it is so cool that you live in Canada! It must be really cold there-I have never experienced really cold weather, because it usually does not get very chilly this far south. Have you ever been in the United States? I think that tigers and lions are so cute, too! I have a pet golden retriever named Murphy and sometimes his face looks a little bit like a lion, so his nickname has become "the friendly lion". Tigers are awesome, as well! Have you ever seen a white tiger? Those are crazy beautiful! In your sentence that says "It would be cool too Rome in the woods...", I believe that is so true! This looks like a silly thing that autocorrect did on an iPad, but "Rome" is a city in Italy and the correct spelling for what you were saying would be "roam", and "too" should be "to". You writing skills are so incredible for someone your age, and you seem so excited about learning! I mess up with my writing a lot, because sometimes I just forget how to spell stuff. It happens to everyone! Good luck with the rest of this year in school! Tell your teacher and your friends in class that I said "hello!"

I really enjoyed all of the posts I read by these two students, and I actually plan to keep up with their posts in the future as well! I think it so fun to see how other educators around the world are influencing the lives of children in such a positive way via technology.