Week Three

Making a survey in google docs was pretty easy for me. The process was pretty self explanatory and I liked that the program places all of your results into their own graphs. This made it easier to be able to read the results of the survey. This weeks assignment met a couple different ISTE standards. The first one being modeling digital age work and learning. Although this program makes it very easy to design a survey, by being able to create your own survey it still shows that you are familiar with the technology. Another standard that this assignment met was designing a digital age assessment. This type of evaluation would require the students to get online and be able to follow the hyperlink to the assigned evaluation. Using something such as this evaluation process through google docs would be an interesting and different way to go about giving an exam to a class. This would allow the students to have more of a take-home type of assessment. The only down fall to the idea of presenting exams in this way is that the teacher would be unable to monitor the students during the exam to prevent cheating. Another way this form could be used in the classroom is for simply taking surveys. If I wanted to find out what the students were most interested in I could put multiple topics up on a survey and see which topics the students would be most interested in learning about.

Week Two

This week we learned how to make our own wiki page. Although it was a little confusing at first this skill will come in very handy when we have our own classroom. Something that I don't really like about the wiki page is how hard it is to format the text. Every time I would try to save the changes it tended to go back to the way it was previously. Other than that this web page has multiple uses in the classroom. It will allow students to be more active with technology and also allow parents to stay updated on class procedures. Group projects are one of the main things I feel I would use a wiki page for. This way students will be able to share all of their work online and I will also be able to keep track of their group progress.
Another thing that we learned this week was how to make an interactive game using PowerPoint. It was a long tedious process but the end result came out very nice. This is a good way to make a fun study tool for the children to be able to refer back to even when they are at home. A good idea would be to post a game like this onto the class wiki page!
These two projects go along with the ISTE net standards for teachers because they model digital age work and learning. Being able to create your own web page and an interactive game shows that you have a great understanding of how these programs work. These projects also promote and model digital age citizenship. The use of the wiki page will require students and parents to become familiar with how to use a digital medium to be able to stay up to date with class material. The last standard that these projects follow is facilitating and inspiring student creativity. Students need to be very creative when working on either a wiki page of their own or creating something such as a PowerPoint. There are so many different tools within these programs that the students will be able to play around with and let their personalities show through their work.

Week One

In class during week one we learned how to make our own Google website. This will be very helpful in my future classroom for the students to be able to access materials that were missed due to an absence or to look up homework or projects that may be due. This website will also help the parents be more involved in their children's school work seeing as they will also have access to the same classroom website. The assignment follows the ISTE standards for teachers by promoting digital citizenship and responsibility. Having the parents be aware of the website will allow them to help their students navigate the different pages and become more aware of how the use the Internet.