I am now finally catching up on all of my school work.  It’s about time since school will be over at the end of this week.  I am working on finishing up another couple major projects (education classes love major projects)  and a last math assignment.  It’s great to finally put something up on here saying that school is starting to go well and I am actually staying on top of school because the last couple post have been about how much work I still had to do.  I hope everyone else is doing good in school.   Good luck!

Here is a podcast created for my final project for my ECMP 355 class.  To create this podcast I talked to three different distance education teachers to hear their stories about distance education.  The teachers that I talked to were: Randy McLeod, Delise Fathers and Shelly Stamm.  I met with all three teachers and asked them a series of questions about distance education.  All three teachers had lots to say and you could tell they loved teaching this way.  Delise and Randy both gave me access to their online classes and it was great to see the difference between a blackboard operating system and a moodle operating system. 

I took some screen shots to show the difference in the outlook. 

Here is a moodle homepage                                                    and here is a blackboard calander

Both programs offer a variety of features including a gradebook program.  Here is what the two different grading programs look like.  The one on the left is a program that is offered to the Pairie South School Division, and the program on the right is the gradebook in blackboard

Here is my podcast created by using the interviews from the three teachers.  Thanks again to all three teachers for doing an interview with me and sharing your knowledge on distance education.

click on this link to listen to my podcast

I just got home from a coffee forum talking about education in society, and today’s talk focused on technology.  The table that I sat at had a teacher of 10 year, an intern, and a vice-principal. It was really great to hear their views on lots of the topics that were brought up because it showed their unique views and thoughts. 

The forum was hosted by Patric Lewis, and MarcSpooner.  For speakers they had Dean Shareski and Alec Couros.  They started thing off by talking about technology in schools and what this is doing to us as a community.  Then, they opened the room up to discussion in small groups to talk about this.  In my group it was really neat to see what the teachers were thinking about technology.  One question that was brought up in my group was about how technology is doing great things in elementary schools, but high school is still lagging behind.  The high schools are still doing mostly paper and pen notes and lecture type learning.  When the elementary schools are bringing in talking to teachers and classrooms from around the world and creating their own textbooks.  As the youngest person at my table and the only one in secondary ed I really tried to defend us teachers but I can really see their point.  I know that as secondary teachers we are beginning to introduce technology, but it seems to be lots of elementary teachers that are advancing and trying new things. 

After small groups we moved back to the large group to include everyone in some of the discussions that were going on and to get the in sight from their experts that they had brought in.  The relation was pointed out the the network we are creating away from us with technology is similar to the network they used to create with pen pals and writing back and forth only more instant.  The group talked a lot about facebook, but although I can see many of the teachers views that facebook is addicting and not always accurate, I think that if we encourage our students to appreciate it as a network and use it for more of a social learning and a way to connect to their family, friends and other students then facebook doesn’t have to be all bad. 

At the end of the forum, my table got a little off topic and talked about not only using technology in all the classrooms, but creating a more student centred learning to have students pick a project concerning various subjects and working in groups to create this project (such as a french history play etc. ) and then using the teachers in their school and their technology as a reference for the experts.  I really like this idea and I was wondering what other people thought of it. 

There were many more topics that were brought up but this is a sum up of what was covered.  The next forum is going to be on education and the arts and it will be on January 26.  If you have free time I suggest going.  It was great to just hang out, have a drink and get to know some of the teachers that I will soon be working with and see what their views are on some of these topics! I would like to know what anyone thinks about some of the issues I put up here.  I realized just at my own table how many different view point there are on these issues.

I worked for a while today on my final project.  On Friday I finished interviewing the last of my three teachers.  So, today I spent a lot of time going over more than 2 hours worth of interview time on my computer and reducing it down to only 12 and a half minutes.  All three teachers had so much to say about distance ed and you can tell that they really enjoy what they are doing.  So, now I have 5 screen shots of their online classes, and 12 mins of audio, and I need to find out how to make that into a podcast to put up here on my blog so everyone can listen to information about distance ed!

I went to the youth ballet 25th anniversary performance last night as part of my EDAN 101 class.  I thought the dancers were amazing and you could tell that they have put a lot of time and effort into their work.  One of the dances “pomp” we were taught in my EDAN class by the choreographer Connie Moker Wernikowski.  It was really great to see how that dance worked with the rest.  I realy enjoyed the experiene!  Did anyone else get a chance to see the performances?

Today in my EMTH 300 class we were learning about Pascal’s triangle.  I had learnt a little about Pascal’s triangle in high school but I realized today that I missed some key points.  We were talking about how the triangle relates taking the nth power of (a+b)  I haven’t realized it before but if you follow
(a+b)^0=                1
(a+b)^1=        a       +      b
(a+b)^2=   a^2    +2ab    +  b^2
(a+b)^3=a^3+3a^2b+3ab^2+b^3
ect.
The coefficients follow Pascals triangle.  Apparently, this is something that lots of the people in my class already knew from high school, but for me it was something new. 

Has anyone else heard of how pascal’s triangle is used here, or other ways that it is used?

We were asked in my ECMP 355 to think about our future classrooms.  My first thought was wow, that’s true, in the near future I will be out in the real world working as a teacher and I can finally put all of this information to use!

When I think about my future classroom I feel like I’m looking into a crystal ball, I don’t know if what I see is what I will get.  The problem with looking at what my ideal class would look like is that I don’t know what I will be teaching and how everything will be put together.  

So, with that in mind, I am looking at what I would like to have as a future teaching in my classes.  Firstly, I would love to have access to computers and Internet access in my classroom.  I know most schools have this already, but there are a few still working on this.  The other thing I would really like is a smartboard.  I have collected so many great teaching resources for using with the smartboard this year in my classes and I think it could be a very valuable tool in my classroom.  It’s great to have for the visual and kinesthetic and I think that the tool to save notes and record the class would be great for any student who missed my class.   

I really hope that as a teacher I can work to connect my classroom to their homes.  I plan on creating a class website, hopefully blogs and I hope to use tools like google calander to keep my parents informed about what I am doing.  From my learning about distance education I learnt about central ischool where the parents can even look up what the class is doing, and what their child’s marks are.

I can’t wait to become a teacher and to start working towards creating a future classroom.  I know that as technology is always changing that some of the tools I have worked with this semester will already be outdated.  But, the main thing is that I hope as a teacher I can use technology in my classroom to enhance my students learning and help to connect them to other classes around the world.

I teach piano and last night one of my students ask me “why” the notes work how they do.  For this he was wondering why the a half note needs to be two beats and a quarter note is one, ect.  I realized how hard it much be to understand the idea of notes in music when you don’t already understand fractions.  Ex, for those who understand fractions, we know that a half is 2 times a quarter, so it seems only natural to hold it for 2 beats.  An eighth is half of a quarter, and that is why we start counting “ands” because you need to split the regular beat into two.  All of this is way over the heads of most of my students as they are in grade 1 and the concept of fractions and their relationship to each other is way over their heads.   What I would like to know if the whole idea that music can help you do better in school is partly because you already know a little bit about which equivalent fractions.

I started working on most of my final projects this week. For this class I met with two teachers and interviewed them on distance education so now I need to reduce everything into a shorter podcast. Both teachers had great information to share and you can tell they know lots about distance ed. For my other classes I have gotten a start on most of the projects, I just need some concentrated effort on them all to start getting them off my “to do” list

I created a podcast using Gabcast about the dancer side of me.  Take a look

Gabcast! ECMP 355 Podcast #0