Week 5

Welcome back! Week five has come and gone quickly, but there was still time for learning to occur! Using technology in the classroom is starting to make more and more sense to me. I think this occurred after I finished creating my classroom website (which was my first attempt at making my own website, ever!), I'm really impressed with weebly and what newbies like me (and perhaps you?) can create. If your interested, you can click here to view my classroom website. Although I do not have my own classroom yet, in the future I plan to communicate with parents/guardians and students through a web based platform. I also plan to keep my website fresh and updated because to me there is nothing worse than visiting websites with broken links or reading a bio that is five years old-or discovering an email address you found on someone's contact information to be out of use. So here, my technological pledge is simple, I promise to take the time to keep my online tools updated, fresh and user friendly!

Now, to get back on track, let me review all of the neat things I learned this week in ICT...One of the things that stood out to me is that we talked about powerpoint, and watched a video of a comedian discussing powerpoint and how poorly it can be used. In his stand up, he explains all the factors that makes powerpoints "suck". One of the no-nos he refers to is if you use times new roman font, you are boring. I of coarse took immediate offence to this, as I developed a preference of this particular font in my undergrad (okay, maybe I wasn't allowed to use any other font, but now its my go to). I think to change things up for Week 5,  I will type the remainder of this blog in Courier font (which shows creativity), as he suggests in his video. This already feels weird. 

Anyways, in ICT we continued our discussion about digital storytelling and edited digital images. Photo editing is something that is not really new to me, as I'am an avid user of Facebook and Instagram - editing photos is like breathing. However, hashtags are something I am still getting use to #nofilter. Some of the editing websites our class used were Ipiccy and Picmonkey.  If you have an Iphone, I suggest downloading Camera + which is my app of choice to edit photos. 

This week in Connected From the Start (Ebook that I am reading for ICT), I read Chapter 4 and was really interested in what Kathy Cassidy had to say about using blogs in her early years classroom. I was really concerned with privacy and finding the time to blog, as I know in my first teaching placement I found myself to be very busy. It was great to discover that Kathy discusses how she did not need more time to do blogs, but spent her time creating and monitoring blogs over other means of displaying student work. Before reading I was curious how privacy worked with early years students using the internet. In her eBook Kathy cleared up my concerns, one of the effective ways you can ensure student privacy is to not match student names with photos of the student.

I am really enjoying reading about blogs in Kathy's book, as I find the information to be relevant and extremely helpful. Every time I feel as if I may have a question, it is immediately answered. I don't mean to sound like a salesperson for this book, but it is really interactive with its exemplary videos of students doing what is being said in the text!Now,back to my font.