My Survey

Today was so much fun! My second favorite day after the YETC. I know we're supposed to blog about spreadsheets and using them in google docs, but I first wanted to say that I think you can make school more interesting for students and bribe them when you bring treats. I don't believe it's something you should do all the time, but your students will love it when you do. It's especially great for you when you tie it into a lesson or something educational for your students.
With that said, spreadsheets are a great way to gather and organize information. I know there are so many different things you can do with them and I wish I had a whole list. To go along with spreadsheets we learned how to create a survey in google docs. I thought this was so neat! Especially how we learned to post them on our blog. Check mine out down below. When you answer my questions it will send the information into a spreadsheet on my google docs. I can use this to create surveys for parents. It makes it in a really simple easy format, and I can post it to a classroom blog for easy access. I can't believe how many different things you can do with technology. I wish I could remember it all!

Feb. 19, 2010

We learned a lot of neat ideas about word processing and google docs. As an early childhood education major though I still don't know quite how I would use this. I would be more concerned about my students learning how to correctly write letters than be able to type. As a teacher, I have to be creative to think of ways to be able to use some of this technology. I had a lot of fun using the Firefox screen reader plugin. I'm not quite sure how I could use it in a lesson, but if I took more time reading the manual and figuring out how to use the tool I think it would be great to use for students to type letters and have the screen reader say the letters to them.

Copyright and Fair Use

Copyright is a picky issue. I felt like I learned a lot after exploring the websites and different instructional videos. I had never heard of fair use and didn't know that as a teacher I would have the right to use materials for an educational purpose under the constitution. I was one of those people that believed in the myth that copyright was to protect the authors and composers' work. I didn't know that it is intended for the promotion of science which is knowledge and understanding. I felt like I had a good understanding and grasp on the concept until I went through the case studies. When I went through those I was confused again because now people always try to pass off use of material as fair use. Even after learning about the four factors the supreme court uses I am still somewhat confused about when you can and can't use something. As a teacher, I can use material for an instructional purpose without having to pay for it. I loved learning this. There is so much that I didn't know about copyright. I'm going to try and make sure that when I use material as fair use that it follows the four factors, so I am using it legally.

YETC

Wow! I'm sure many of you were all excited about the resources we learned about today. My favorite was the spelling city website. Spelling was something I always struggled with as a student. Because of that I am constantly searching for new ways to teach spelling. Many of the games that are available for students on the site are activities that my mentor teacher does with her students on paper and pencil. I'm excited to use this website with students in my own classroom. I really like the zotero resource as well. I set up an account and hope to be able to learn how to use it on my up coming research paper. I got a taste today with how much more I really can do with technology.

I am having difficulties. I had my post all typed up and it just somehow disappeared. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Does anyone know if there is an undo button? Anyways here goes my second attempt at this post. I do not really want to type it all again because I think it’s always better the first time. UEN is a wonderful resource. I’ve already used it a plethora of times coming up with ideas for LP1. My favorite resource is the core. I know I will be using this all the time in the future. I have the core bookmarked. It’s nice to have access to the core in a format that is easy to navigate. The lesson plans that are available are a wonderful aspect of UEN. The lesson plan creation tool is also another nice feature. I’ll use it for LP1 and probably hundreds of other lessons in the future. I know that UEN is full of resources for me to still discover.