This page is made by someone that I follow on Twitter that I have integrated into my PLN network. It gives you countless people and things to follow and information to find. It is extremely helpful! Whenever I have a question, I can either go to this page or contact him on Twitter directly. You can find almost anything on this page, from bloggers to Twitter followers. You can contact him through the website, find other people to get in contact with, find YouTube videos, learn about #CEM (Connected Educator Month), answer many questions in the FAQ section, how to learn about becoming a connected educator, and so much more! There are blogs, articles, chats, and almost anything else you can think of to further your educational career.

Twitter

I have enjoyed this class thus far because of the guidance that I am receiving through social media networking. I have already found multiple articles on Twitter that I have incorporated into my other classes, and some that I have found very helpful with the teaching notebook that I am creating. I am going to use this notebook to write down any extra tips that I have learned from class to make me a better teacher when I become one. One article that I found told me about 5 great apps that I can use as a teacher to keep in close contact with parents at all times only problem that I have run into with Twitter is finding the time to use it, as I work two jobs and am taking five classes.

The most important part that I took from the following video from YouTube is that you must remember that a PLN is a two way process. You need to remember to bring your own questions and ideas to the table in order to create a PLN that will be successful.

Find me on Twitter so we can explore the process together! :)

@porterm33

10 Reasons it's a Great Time to be in Education

As many people are trying to get me to change my major from education, I found this article to be extremely helpful and encouraging. Rarely do you hear positive views and feelings about teachers and the profession, so this was a breath of fresh air to read.

10 Reasons it's a great time to be in education

The first reason tells us that schools and students will rise to the occasion of the job market competition. This will give schools a better chance of hiring the most qualified and dedicated teachers because there is such a huge pool of applicants to choose from. Education will always be a top priority in society. It will be the face of many conversations, shows, etc. because we need it and it will always be around. It will also always be debatable because of the many issues we face with education. Technology is allowing schools and teachers to come further than they have ever been able to before. This will help aspiring teachers to be marketable and ready to conquer their lessons in the classroom. The shift to cooperation and collaboration has helped classrooms develop more as a whole. No longer are many classrooms a teacher lecturing for the entire session, but now students are working with teachers to develop their understanding of the material and create a better classroom environment.

College education programs are doing better at preparing teachers to educate students. There are more rigorous classes and laws passed to create more well-rounded professional teachers. Local businesses are also collaborating with schools and opening their doors for employment. This will allow students to develop responsibility skills in a work setting ahead of graduating. Money is no longer the determination for success. Before, poverty stricken districts did not think that they would be able to keep up with surrounding communities, but money does not matter anymore. It is the quality of what we are teaching our students that matters, and the ability to utilize resources that are given to teachers.

Schools are slowly becoming more important to the community. For a while, the community and schools have been separated. Now, there is a connection between the two. This is important for our students' development and for support throughout the communities. With this support and new technological advances, students and teachers are able to go further. Every day we learn something new, and teachers are able to show students hundreds of new things every day. We are there to teach our students, but dedicated and true teachers are there to impact the lives of their students.

iPad apps!

First off, I participated in #edtechchat Monday night, which was overwhelming! I constantly had to keep updating my page and had at least 30 new posts every time! On the other hand, I was able to interact with the author of our textbook, @snbeach! I also found a great article on prioritizing when it comes to creating your PLN.

Snapguide looks pretty cool and I am going to download it on my phone. From what I got from the website, it looks like  you can find pretty much any guide on how to do things here. The Nearpod Demo on Youtube was awesome. It allows students to answer questions and work interactively off of iPads, and the teacher receives the results of the students' answers. This is a quicker way to run your classroom, and students will be more excited to use iPads rather than the traditional pen and paper.

I love watching Khan Academy lectures, so I am really excited about this ShowMe app. I think that, as teachers, we will be able to use each other's ideas to better our lessons through this. Sometimes it is hard to teach certain subjects for one person, but is simple for another to teach. This is when you can go on ShowMe and see how other educators taught the lesson. Meanwhile, you can share your lessons with other teachers. This different perspective will implement learning.

Educreations is another neat app that is an interactive whiteboard with audio. You can add sound, text, and pictures to your creation and share it with others. I like that one teacher in the article said that she can use this to see her students' process of solving a problem to see where they did or did not go wrong. Educreations was used in this classroom and was very successful. Sometimes we forget how easily young students catch on to technological ideas, and these kids are proof!

Ask3 was my favorite thing so far! So many students have a hard time asking the teacher for help because they feel stupid, and through this app, students can ask each other questions first. Too often, students give up because they do not want to ask the teacher for help or admit they are struggling. If they see other students using the app for help, people will catch on and it will be a better experience overall. It is especially useful in subjects such as foreign languages and math because it is near impossible to explain through a text message when you have a question.

Augmented Reality seems like a great way to get students excited, engaged, and involved in class activities. It is bringing something to life, and it is a growing sensation. In our classrooms, we will need to be using this type of education pretty often by the time we become teachers. If not, our students are going to be bored, disengaged, and uninterested in what we are teaching.

In 10 Things Your Students Should Know About Their Digital Footprints, the first point was amazing. Obviously, we all know that employers and colleges look at our social media pages. But the fact that the one daughter's mother called the school trying to get her daughter in by making the other girl look bad was hilarious. Parents are crazy and I feel so bad for the daughter that did not get in because it was her mother that made the mistake. Anyway, the first daughter should not have put up such pictures for the chance of not being accepted. I liked the fifth point to make separate personal accounts because that has worked well for me in this class. I joke around a lot, and some things I say may come off the wrong way. Having a professional Twitter account like we do in this class allows me to keep things completely separate and professional on this account. Not that I post obscene things on my personal Twitter, but many friends seem to tag me in tweets about jokes I make, and I do not want anyone to take it the wrong way. Bottom line, digital footprints are everlasting. There is nothing that you can post that cannot be brought up in some way, somewhere, in the future.

I thought that these videos were cool because it explains how we are still finding the rules of internet etiquette because our parents and grandparents did not have to worry about these things until the same time that their children did. I also thought that it was crazy that there is an actual rubric for digital citizenship. That just shows how important it truly is. If you don't have anything good to say online, don't say it at all. Obviously, this should be the motto we follow all day no matter where we are, but we can at least start with something that will be there forever: the Internet.

In the end, we just need to remember that social media can be extremely beneficial in our lives. We can use it to communicate with people and to keep in touch with old friends, to find family members that you haven't seen in a while, to keep up with news topics, to create a personal learning network, to find jobs, and for countless other reasons. But we need to remember to keep our digital footprint clean, as this can change social media's beneficial attributes into detrimental situations.

We also need to stop being so addicted to Facebook......

Skype and Google Hangout

"When students are able to learn from an expert in a field, it takes their learning to a new level". This quote from a 5th grade teacher really struck me because we see it every day in schools, yet rarely find ways to make it happen. Students are most excited about school when they have something that they know is going to be fun ahead. Not only do students love technology, but they love visitors! Anything that is inconsistent to their day will make an impact, and Skyping with authors of the books they read is such an awesome idea! I think it's really great that authors are willing to participate in this, and reading the stories and thank-yous from teachers makes you really happy.

The video about Skyping was really cool because I did not realize how often Skype was actually used in classrooms now. My favorite part was the class that read a book to a class in Spain, and those students read the same book back in their language. The video was really interesting because it gave you step-by-step instructions on how to engage in a Skype call with other people with your classrooms. Sometimes people forget that you have to prepare ahead of time and that you should have a reflection time afterwards, and these are some of the most important parts. Giving students something to do during the video is also a great idea because it is easy for students to become distracted when they are not engaged in something.














Google Hangout is great for collaboration and can be used with sharing Google Docs, having a customer feedback discussion, and virtual whiteboard brainstorming. I like everything that Google has to offer because it is free, simple, and all connected. Rather than attaching a document from Word and sending it in an email, you can share a Google Doc with someone right over the Internet and they will have access to it.

This article explains how to use the tools on Google Hangout, and my favorite one will always be sharing the screen with the other person. It is insane how far technology has come, and to be able to see someone else's screen as they are doing something is so cool. Earlier today, I had a problem signing into my Comcast account to pay my bill for my apartment. I started an online chat with a customer service representative, and then they called me to do it over the phone so that they could control my screen from their server. They fixed my problem and the bill is paid on time!

Google Helpouts seems like an awesome idea, and I'm excited for it to take off. With certain things, I have to see what is actually happening rather than just reading about what to do. With Helpouts, I will be able to ask someone over a Hangout for help, and get advice and information right away.

All of this new information about Skype and Google Hangouts are going to be extremely beneficial when I am finally in the classroom. These are great ways to keep my students engaged and interested in topics, and can also be used as a "treat" if the students are behaving. When I was in school, our "treat" would be 5 minutes to play Oregon Trail...It is so crazy that students are now using iPads in the classroom and speaking to people all over the world in seconds.

40 ways to use Google apps in the classroom

This slideshow explains good ways to use Google apps in the classroom. I thought this was cool because it is mainly what we have been using in our class, and I like it so far. I especially like how you can share things with other people without having to make a copy or email it. Instead, you can just use Google Drive to share your work with others.

This article gives 40 ways to use Google apps, but I am going to pick my top 5 favorites.

1. Create a shared lesson plan repository. With this, like we have for our class, you can share information with your students.
2. Improve the writing process. Students can work collaboratively from Google apps anywhere. This allows students to peer review other students' work and get ideas for their own work, as well as create stories together at the same time.
3. Coordinate sign ups. This can be used for parents coming in to speak, for parties, for volunteer opportunities, for conferences, and basically everything in between.
4. Create amazing presentations. This is like PowerPoint, but is free! Students can easily create presentations on Slides through Google Apps.
5. Google Forms. This allows you to take surveys, assess students' learning, and get opinions from your class.

Google is free and helpful in so many ways, and I think that we, as teachers, are lucky to have it and will be using it very often when we start our careers.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1OhZuPRWgT-eit2-c4yEER4epRC3IumbOcTH2saONMeg/present#slide=id.g323f8ef1_2_199

This article is about using social media in the classroom. As we are getting to the point to where social media is prevalent almost everywhere in the entire world, we may need to rely on this to contact our students at times.

Twitter can be used for a classroom collaboration. Students and parents can follow the class account, and it can be used to let them know information and get right to the point, since there is a limited amount of characters per tweet. As a teacher, you can tweet links to classroom activities, articles to be read, and general classroom information. Facebook can be used by creating a private group just for your class and their parents. Facebook allows you to do what Twitter can, but it is used more to post pictures and give more information because you have more room. Even better, you can link your class' Twitter and Facebook accounts together to kill two birds with one stone.

Google Plus allows students to collaborate with other people in their field of interest. This is best used in older grades when students have a better idea of what they want to be. Here, then can ask questions, participate in discussions, and have a better idea of what the people in their field of study do and are interested in. Linkedin is also more useful for the older grades, as it gets your students out there in the real world. Here, students can look for jobs, internships, volunteer opportunities, and upload their resume and work experience. SchoolTube is the site to use to flip your classroom. You create short videos that explain the assignments and lessons. You can collaborate with other teachers on here for good ideas on how to flip your classroom accurately, and for easy ways to help students understand lessons. Students can watch these videos from anywhere because they are online.

Edmoto allows you to set up information, lessons, and assignments while collaborating with your students. As the article says, it is a mix between Facebook and Blackboard. Animoto engages viewers in the videos you create. It makes your videos more interesting and exciting. Jing lets you record what you are doing on your computer or laptop. This is especially helpful in explaining new assignments or procedures for visual learners.

Always be sure that your students know about privacy settings, and that parents are on board with the use of social media.

http://gettingsmart.com/2011/12/developing-a-social-media-strategy-for-your-classroom/

Evernote

For another class, I had to download Evernote. It is the coolest thing ever. You no longer have to worry about remembering important things for class, important events, or anything that you write in here! It is an archive of all of your thoughts, ideas, projects, and whatever else you want to put in there. You can add pictures, record things, make a calendar, upload assignments, archive websites, access websites when you're not connected to the internet, jot reminders down to look back to later, and so much more! My first post was about my brother's Polish Water Ice franchise, which just proves that you can write or upload ANYTHING onto here. You can also create different folders for each topic. My plan is to make a folder for each of my classes and for both of my jobs so that I can upload assignments, due dates, notes, and reminders, and have it all in one place. They also have an app that you can download, which is even easier and more convenient to use. As a teacher, this will help me organize my lesson plans when the time comes, and I will be able to save cool ideas that I see and want to look into more later. You can also search for specific topics, such as math lesson plans for third graders, and Evernote will then guide your search towards these topics from then on. If you take a picture of something with text on it, and then search your pictures for a specific word that was on that poster or board, it will find the picture for you and highlight it. I am really excited to get started with Evernote, and I think that all future teachers should give it a shot!



Notice the elephant in the logo- This is because it is said that elephants never forget anything!

Life on the Screen

My favorite part of this article was when Lucas pointed out that visual learning and interactive learning through technology is just as important as learning from tests and reading from books. In fact, there are studies that prove the complete opposite. As Lucas says, there are a lot of schools who are in denial of this fact, and are afraid to separate from their ways that they have been using since the beginning of formal education. I also liked how he said that we should include art in music in English class. Rather than having these subjects be separate from the typical math, science, social studies, and English, we should incorporate them into these main classes. They are considered just as essential to a students learning as are the other classes. It was easy to picture the circle that was being described as to integrate all subjects together. Arts and music emotionally effect a person, as math is more logical and precise. However, one is not more important than the other. We need to teach all of these subjects in order to enrich our students' lives. Lucas also says that "One of my concerns is that we're advancing intellectually very fast, but we're not advancing emotionally as quickly". I see this all the time in the schools I work in, and I feel that he is right when he says that art and music help students explore their emotional sides. It does not make sense that these are the first things cut when school budgets are cut.