Thursday, February 7, 2013

Special Blog post #1

WolfranAlpha

WolfranAlpha search, India has 1.21 billion people, china has 1.35 billion people, and the united states only has 309 million people. I researched annual births in United States compared to China. China has 17.8 million births per year. The United States only has 4.29 million people per year.My second search was "compare the population numbers of Russia, Germany, Australia, and the United States. Russia has 140 million people, Germany has 82.1 million people, the United States has 309 million people and Australia only has 21.5 million people. I would love to live in Australia!

This could be helpful to me in the classroom when I need a visual aid of say numbers of population from different countries. The site has a line graph and that shows the progression of the populations over the past years all the way to the present days. I could pull up these charts to physically show the changes in population, this will help my visual learners. My students could also use this site for fast and easy answers. I can put it on the requirements for a project I may give them or something similar to that.

Gary Hayes Social Media Count

This is astonishing!!! Its mind-blowing! I have never thought about anything like that calculator being out there. The progression of all the categories on that calculator does not look good for my future as a teacher. Yes, maybe the future will be even more technology based then it is right now, but I stand firm on my beliefs that technology should have its limit in the school system. Our students do not need to soupy rely on it and that is the way it is looking like now. There is almost no one under the age of 50 that doesn't have a cell phone. Even the older people have iPhones and androids.

Thats incredible to me, because some of those people become so reliant on those phones that they can't even have a vocal conversation with you without being socially awkward but they can text until their fingers fall off. I like my iPhone, but I do not depend on it. If I did not have it I would be perfectly fine. As a teacher I would be scared of all of the technology effecting the students learning abilities. I would still make them take their tests on paper and not on their computers or anything else like that.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Blog Post #2

Did You Know

I can say that China inspires me. Why should we only know one language? If they learn to take the initiative and make it mandatory that the people learn the english language then that would take out a lot of the confusion in the world between countries. We should encourage it throughout other countries and we should start making other languages here a mandatory thing so that we would all be reliable assets to our country. We should also encourage China in all that they are doing because we want to keep them close when technology takes another leap and bound and they will help us stay up to date and not be behind.

I will am going to always try and stay as technologically advanced as I possibly can at all times because you never know how the technology will be when I become a teacher, so I have to stay on top of the game and always know what's going on. By then the students could have computers in the tops of their desks that are compatible with my smart board and all I have to do is transfer it and they can practice their letters and not have to use pencils and paper. I will still ask them to bring pencils and paper to school because I am going to still use them no matter what happens to the technology in the classroom. What if it all crashes one day? All the other teachers that totally relied on the smart boards will not have anything prepared, but my work with my students will not be affected.

I am ready to educate I know that their will be some people that disagree with me in not using 100% technology but I choose to teach my students the old fashion way and no one will influence me any different. I know that the students need to be shown all the technology of this day and time and they need to be taught in how to use it, and I will do that, but I will also teach them to not be dependent on technology, because you never know what is going to happen to the technology that they relied on they would be completely lost.

Mr. Winkle Wakes

Mr. Winkle Wakes video makes a lot of sense of how some schools in this day and age are not up to par with rest of the technology in the world, but like I said in my previous post, we should not always rely on it. We need to be independent in ways. Technology is always going to be changing but we should also always learn the basics.

Students can take notes on computers, I do support that< but students shouldn't always use only computers. What if your computer dies in the middle of you taking notes, what are you going to do? I have only used a computer when it was necessary, I hand wrote all of my notes and never relied on a laptop. If we only teach our students how to use computers then how are they ever going to learn how to write, and maybe even read. They now have computers that read to you and you don't even have to look at the book. I think that technology in schools should be limited to the use and what the students can use it for.

Pinterest in Education

Using Pinterest in schools is e very good idea. Teachers from all over the country can put ideas that they have come up with that may work for other teachers, and the other teachers have free access to it. All teachers should have an account and they should post unique ideas on it to share. Pinterest is very organized too. It has separate boards for you to "pin" the things you find and like to. I have an account and one boards are for my future classroom and many other categories that have to do with my family and my future. I think that the organization on Pinterest will help with the organization in the classroom. The teacher could use the boards on Pinterest as a way to organize their classroom. They could have different stations in the classroom and the items at those centers never left those centers unless the teacher did it or the student had permission. They could also use Pinterest to help with lesson plans, they may see something that inspires a lesson, or they see a picture that wold help them get their point across in their lesson. Pinterest could also be used by the students to organize information for presentations and for projects the students may be assigned.