Web Accessability

Steve gave a presentation on web accessability in our class today. He presented a pda for the blind and demonstrated various means for disabled people to use their computers. He left the wizard suit at home though.

Week 6

The first international Teacher’s Classroom Blog I came across is located in Dublin, Ireland: Miss Dalton's Junior Infant Class Blog. The class is composed entirely of four and five year old students, so it’s likely that they’re not doing a lot of contributing to it, but I thought it was an interesting example of the use of Blogs even with such a young age group.

Here’s a pic from their blog in an article about their participation in the Food Dudes! Project, aimed at getting children to eat more healthily:




The Second site is a blog for use by Spanish Teachers in Spain. It can be found here: Teaching Spanish in Spain!
This blog contains lots of links to teachers’ blogs, student diaries, class trips, teaching trips, all having to do with teaching Spanish. I like this one a lot since I’m bilingual, and would love to teach in Barcelona or Grenada one day.

Here’s a pic of Salamanca, Spain from the site:

Week 5

The first site I found is Cool Cat Teacher
On this Blog, the teacher has many different projects for his classes, including a class wiki project. There is also some fascinating information about Microsoft surface enabled desks which become whiteboards. This is one innovation I’m really excited about! How cool would it be to have a classroom full of these instead of traditional desks or tables, desks that are computers!

The second site I came across is Mr. C's Class Blog
This one is a pretty standard Classroom Blog, similar to the one I am writing for now. He has links to each of his students’ personal class blogs and a variety of topics and assignments. These are sure to be commonplace by the time I’m actually teaching. I’m still more excited about Cool Cat’s page, so if you haven’t seen it yet, go check it out.

Here’s a picture from Mr. C’s latest blog about the upcoming Boat Regatta (kind of like the Cub Scout pinewood derby with boats).

Did You Know?

Did You Know?

This is a sobering video to watch. It’s amazing how much technology has changed in my lifetime, and how much it will continue to change. For example, Since I work a minimum of 45 hours a week and take 12 hours of classes, I have to be innovative with my study time. In order to watch the video “Did You Know” I downloaded it and transferred it to my phone. Then I watched it on my phone in the office at my work. I’m writing this blog on the office computer and I’ll save it to my thumb drive and take it home with me to upload to this blog.

I still have my ATARI 2600 system from childhood. Today’s video game systems are so complex, it’s hard to believe we’ve gone from Pong and Pac-Man to Online gaming worlds like World of Warcraft in just 30 years. Obviously, entertainment is not the only field that has changed so rapidly. Everything today is affected by computers and the meshing of technologies, including education. I’m eager to see what advances will be made in the short four years it will take to get my degree. By the time I’m actually teaching in a classroom, systems like ACCESS will be used all over the state to help students and teachers keep abreast of our changing world.

ACCESS

Alabama Connecting Classrooms, Educators & Students Statewide or ACCESS is a great new addition to High School Curriculums statewide. Through it, students will have access to classes their individual schools cannot afford to offer. Through the use of Teleconferencing, students and teachers will be able to communicate directly just as if they were in the same classroom. The changes to our education system that this can help bring about will be a step in the right direction to merge traditional teaching with today’s rapidly developing technology.

When I was stationed in Maryland, I attended a Spanish refresher course on the NSA campus that was taught by one of my former teachers from the Joint Language Institute in Monterey, California using similar technology, and it was amazing to me then as this is now, that he Could be thousands of miles away teaching a class of 8 students as if he were in the room with us. I’m excited to see that the Public School system in this state is taking such a bold step forward.

ALEX

The Alabama Learning Exchange (ALEX) is an online resource that allows teachers to post and share their lesson plans with each other. It can also be used to help teachers to keeps their own lesson plans organized. With this resource, educators can compare their own resources with those of other teachers and glean new ideas which they might not otherwise be aware of.

This looks like an incredibly useful tool, and is in keeping with the new openness provided by blogs and the internet in general. A teacher in rural areas of the state can see how their own lesson plans and curriculums compare to teachers in more urban environments, and can choose to add to their own curriculum a greater diversity of ideas. They can also share their own lesson plans with others and create a new kind of educational community.

I’m looking forward to exploring this site in greater detail. I definitely think ALEX will be in invaluable tool for me when I begin teaching, and as my career progresses, it will allow me to continue to grow and learn on my own. I hope other states implement this kind of resource exchange.

Week 1

I was born and raised in Nashville (that's a uniquely southern way of saying "I grew up in..." after all, you raise livestock as well as children. It's always struck me as odd that the phrase seems natural to say), so it's home to me. I've lived all over enough to know that one place is pretty much the same as the other, it's what you do while you're there that makes it good or bad (in my experience anyway). I wanted to be a rock star when I was a kid, and the irony of dreaming that dream in Nashville didn't hit me until I was 25. All of my closest friends are there, still doing music in one way or another, so it's revitalizing to be there and be part of that.

At 25, I was tired of working in restaurants and trying to do the impossible, so I asked myself what I really wanted to do. For some reason, Secret Agent sounded cool, so I called the CIA. Their requirements? Bachelor's degree with military or police backgrounds preferred. I didn't have a degree, and I didn't want to be a cop, but the military would pay for school and give me a leg up, so in 2000, I joined the Marine Corps. Nobody could believe it, least of all me. I never played sports or had any real interest in politics other than disagreeing with my parents up to that point.

I had a blast in Boot Camp, and thought it was the greatest thing ever at the time, but I got disillusioned pretty quickly afterward. I lived in California, Texas, and Maryland. I got married and divorced. I got to be an agent at the NSA, both as a Marine and afterward as a contractor for Lockheed-Martin. It wasn't quite as exciting as I'd imagined, and I didn't agree with a lot of what we were doing. After I got divorced, I decided there was no real reason for me to stay in the DC area doing a job I wasn't crazy about, so I left. I work for a corporate bookstore now, and I hate the hours, but it has some pretty good fringe benefits for someone who likes to read.

Nashville's still home though, and I feel like I've been trying to get back there ever since I left. I want to be in a band again, record and play shows, and write. I recently got it into my head that I should be using my recent experience to learn how to open my own comic book shop. I'd enjoy having my own place without a corporate boss, and still have time to pursue my other interests.