Module Reflection #7

30 of The Most Popular Trends in Education

The resources under the new directions were really helpful. I could see myself bringing these technology resources into the classroom. I was pretty surprised to see growth mindset as the most popular trend in education. The first time I heard about this was in high school when my AP Psych teacher had us learn about 'GRIT'. I enjoyed reading the top resources of Maker Learning. With many people wanting to switch their classroom into Project-Based Learning, these resources (Card Game, Unique Ideas, Maker Movement) give teachers ideas of what to do. 

      

I have actually used multiple different audio recorders before. My church used to use Audacity to record sermons and so I got a taste of that. On QuickTime player, they also have an option to create new movie/audio/screen recording. During the pandemic, in my last credential class, my professor always sent us audio recordings through Vocaroo and it was easy to use. Lastly, I've been playing around with GarageBand on the Mac to make music and it is also a great audio recorder. I would say Audacity and GarageBand are similar because you can cut stuff out easily whereas, in QuickTime and Vocaroo, you would have to start the entire recording over if you messed up. My favorite teacher quote is also the same as the professors! "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." When I interviewed my older sister for a class, that was the quote she left me with. I recorded this assignment with QuickTime and my issue with that was having to convert it to mp3 since it was an m4a file before turning it in. 

The YouTube Closed Captioning assignment was really fun! It was a lot of work to pause and type and rewatch, but the end result was really rewarding. It was only a one-minute and 46-second video and it took me a while to complete. I cannot imagine those who close caption longer videos. I suppose there is Google's auto-transcription but to have to go back and fix Google's mistakes is hard work!

For my Screencast Assignment, I used QuickTime Player because I have used it before, and works really well for me. Since I messed up a couple of times, I was able to put the video through iMovie and cut out unwanted parts. The tricky thing is to line up the video correctly or else it would have awkward splicing. I had to splice three different areas of the video but I think I did a pretty good job at connecting it. 

Module Reflection #6

Starting off, I have never used Twitter. I have other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, and Quora. I was never interested in Twitter because I did not think people would want to follow me and hear my thoughts and opinions, and that is why I never got into it. After looking at the resources like this and this, I see how using social media in the classroom could be beneficial. Using Twitter for the first time during this class opened my eyes to see how easy the platform is to engage in. For my three posts, I did a regular post, a poll post, and a video post. I did not mean to post them all around the same time, but the assignment is due today. When I have my own classroom, I would definitely incorporate Twitter to make easy and fast polls for students and parents to easily vote for and showcase student writing or artworks. 

For my lesson plan presentation, I opted to use Google Slides because I am most familiar with it. Before Google Slides, I used to use Microsoft PowerPoint and Prezi. I feel like in high school, I used Prezi a ton because it was not linear, and it provided a different look to a general rectangle slide. If I was teaching online, I would opt for Nearpod or Peardeck, and if I was teaching history, I would totally use Storyboard That. All in all, making this PowerPoint was not bad... I just had to make sure I had enough and accurate information about my topic. 

Module Reflection #5

We're back with Computational Thinking! When we first went over it during Module #1, I was super excited to learn about this because it was new and interesting. Now in Module #5, we had to watch 3 videos and work on 3 assignments. In the 3 videos, I enjoyed the Google Earth example the most because that is something I use often, and to see the behind-the-scenes with computational thinking was really cool. 

I appreciated the resources for Computational Thinking and cannot wait to use them in my lesson plans. As a future reference for me, I am going to attach the links:

• Google - Exploring Computational Thinking
  
• Code - Unplugged Lessons
  
• Digital Technologies Hub - Lesson Plans
  

With the three Computational Thinking that we had to do, my favorite one was the third one, talking about Algorithm. It was fun to make up my own word and symbol algorithm to create a picture. The only other time that I have heard of the word 'algorithm' was with Youtube. I hear a lot of content creators mentioning commenting and liking their videos for the Youtube algorithm and I could see that by doing so, their videos would get more views and recommended to other people. While doing the first activity, we focused on abstraction and pattern matching. It was really simple and easy to understand. I wish we could go more in depth in it though. 

All in all, I could see how Computational Thinking could logically order and analyze data, create solutions using a series of order steps/algorithm, and has the ability to confidently deal with complex and open-ended problems.