Week 9 - Summary

ICT for Educators has been an interesting and engaging course where I have done things such as:

• Create my own blog
• Expanding my Personal Learning Network
• Produce a video
• Create my own website and digital portfolio
• Experiment with many different programs and websites

As I move forward in my teaching career there are a number of things I can take with me from this course. I feel it is important to implement the technology we know about into our classrooms as we learn more about it. Technology is already a big part of education and is going to become more significant in our future years as teachers. It is important to keep up with this technology because one day down the road everything in the classroom may revolve around it as much already does. A great way to keep up with technology and learn new exciting ideas on how to use it is attending professional development on it. Although I will never use every site and program we have talked about in this class there are definitely specific ones such as Weebly, Twitter, Blogspot, Ivideo, Google Docs and Smart Notebook which I am already using often and seeing the many benefits and opportunities off. I plan on using Smart Notebook and Smart Board Exchange in my upcoming student teaching placement. A quote to end of this summary is "What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing" by Richard Branson. This quote I feel sums up what we have done in this course by experimenting and actually using different programs and website we have learned about their positives and how to operate them. Although we may feel uncomfortable at the beginning about using a new application or form of technology the best way to get more comfortable and learn more about it is by doing and use the technology which we have at hand. Learning by doing is key when it comes to technology.

Thanks everyone for reading my blog through out the past couple of months and this course. Hopefully I have provided you with some of my ideas and the benefits about technology we have used in ICT for Educators. Good luck to all fellow BU Education Students in their upcoming teaching placements. Hope everyone has a great spring.

James Edwards

Week 8- Everfi Presentation

On Wednesday this week we received a very interesting presentation from Jennifer Dyck a EverFi representative.She introduced the company she works for and tolds us about how Everfi is the leading education technology company focused on teaching, assessing, badging, and certifying students in critical skill. We learned about the history of the company, investors, benefits for education, and the direction it is headed. I was a big fan of this presentation and the idea for some of these courses. The science and mathematics of hockey especially caught my interest.There are also future career opportunities in this for educators as well so just something else to think about. Thanks for stopping by and reading week 8 folks. One week left. Have a good one

Personal Learning Network

When we were introduced to this course one of the first things we learned about was a Personal Learning Network and how important it is to us as future teachers. By taking this course it has helped me expand my PLN and by doing this opened me up to many new and useful resources.

The first step I took in this class of expanding my PLN was creating this blog. In this blog I have been able to share thoughts and work I have done with teachers/classmates while also being able to see some of their work as well.

Another aspect of my PLN is Twitter. I have already been on Twitter for just over 4 years now and although I do not tweet a tonne I am on my way to 400 followers. I have always thought of Twitter as a excellent source of information and for me it has replaced reading the newspaper in the morning and saved much time surfing the web for information. I had never really thought about using it for education but I gave John Evans a follow after his presentation and he has been tweeting many great links for educational web technology which I have been able to check out. So already by just giving one person a follow I have expanded my PLE to many great ideas and programs. I can see Twitter having potential in the classroom as well for updating homework or classroom news but it is important to separate your professional teacher twitter from your personal ideas and thoughts.

Reading the Connected From The Start E-Book and having discussions as a class on the Ning forum has also opened me up to a lot of creative ways to use this technology in the classroom. Our discussions have also been able to point out a lot of potential positives and problems that we could encounter using these as well in our future classrooms.

 My digital portfolio which I have just finished putting the final touches on has much future use as well for potential career options and teaching interviews. It is a great way to show off some of your assets and give someone the chance to look at it if they want rather than throwing a bunch of paper in their face. I look forward to expanding my Digital Portfolio as I attend more professional development and pick up more experience student teaching. I also hope that by looking at other classmates E-Portfolios this week we can maybe pick up some pointers from one another.

Overall these are some of main things I have done to expand my PLN and start building these connections. This is just the beginning though and it is very beneficial for us to continue to open up our world and bring in and share ideas and to learn from others as well through the world wide web.

Week 7-Expanding My Portfolio

Week seven of ICT for Educators was a short week with Monday being a holiday. I was able to expand my online digital portfolio with the work periods that were given though. I added Professional Development, My Education, Skills, Student Teaching Evaluations, Sample Lessons and References Pages to my E Portfolio which is on Weebly. My website is very easy to navigate through and I feel does a good job reflecting me in a professional manner. The Sample Lessons and Reference Pages are left blank for now and I may add information to them at a later date after my second student teaching placement. For now I have a pretty solid digital portfolio with a ton of information about me and lots of  pictures as well. Be sure to check out my finished product.

www.jamesedwards90.weebly.com

Week 6 - Video Production

Hello folks. I spent pretty much all of week 6 in ICT for educators working on video production. Jarrod, Danny, and myself formed a group and came up with the idea of making a knock off of the mean tweets part of the Jimmy Kimmel show. We read humorous tweets which make fun of ourselves as teachers in this hilarious video called "Middle Years Mean Tweets". The recording was done on one of our Iphones and the video cutting and editing has been accomplished through the Imovie program we have decided to use. We just have to take care of the introduction, transitions, music, text and conclusion part of our video. Right now we are having issues with the text size for each tweet written but hoping to be able to deal with this. The video will be around three minutes in length and it should be finished in the next day or two. Hopefully I will be able to upload a copy of this video on my blog for anyone who wants to have a watch.Thanks for Reading week 6 and check back for the link to our finished product.

Animoto Video of my trip to Toronto

This week in ICT for Education we experimented with a program called Animoto. Animoto is a awesome program which helps you create a video slide show using photos, video, and music that you provide. I was able to create a quick 40 second video of my trip to Toronto this past summer. Click on the link below to check it out. Enjoy Folks

Toronto Vacay 2014

Digital Portfiolo Website

I have finally put the finishing touches on my very own website and I have now made it officially public. www.jamesedwards90.weebly.com is where you will find it at. I chose to make my site based around the idea of a Digital Portfolio. I feel this idea is very beneficial and will have much future use when graduating. Some of the main sectors that I have completed are about me, my philosophy, resume, teaching experience, and links to my blog and Symbaloo pages. Feel free to leave suggestions for my website on my blog if you have any. The site is a great start for my portfolio but feel it is important to keep adding more sections to it and make it as professional as possible. So while I am happy with my current site there is always room to improve and expand. Hopefully by the end of this course it will be nearly flawless.

Thanks for reading and remember to check out my webpage.

Making A Website

We visit many different websites people have created each and everyday to make connections. How hard is it to make a wesbsite of our own? Well we are going to find out. I have just today created the search domain for my very own first website on Weebly. A personal website can have many uses wether you want to use it for your classroom, personal interest or digital portfolio. I feel a class website could be a good place to present such information as course calendar, curriculum, expectations, and grades for students and their parents. These are just some starter ideas I have for my website. I look forward to trying to include some of these pages in my website in the next week and being able to share with you a finished product in the near future.

Thats all for now, thanks for reading.

Second Week

Hey folks welcome to my second blog. Today I am going to talk about a bookmarking tool which we learned about in our second week of class in Using ICT in education. The page is called Symbaloo. Symbaloo is a personal startup page which makes it easy to compile your favourite and most frequently visited sites all into one interface. I found this site very interesting not only as a potential classroom use but also for personal use as well. You are able to create different tabs and title them for what that page will be used for. One potential way I can see myself using this as a tool in the classroom are sharing websites with students and parents. Symbaloo can be especially useful in helping manage class time by quickly directing them to the proper site with one click of a button or setting up the options for sites they are aloud to play educational games on. Some other ways I can use this page as a teacher in the future are professional development, digital portfolios and curriculum outlines. If you haven't tried Symbaloo you should definitely take a look around as its one of the best book marking page setups I have seen to date. Well thats all for this blog catch you next week.

First Blog

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog. This is my first ever blog and although I have never blogged myself I have read many and am happy to have the opportunity to share my thoughts in this class. I am very excited to get this semester going and get back out student teaching in March. In the first week of ICT for Educators we talked about what we'll be doing throughout this course, experimented with a few new programs, and created our own blogs. This seems like a very interesting course that will help a lot in expanding our technological resources for teaching in the future.


We learned and experimented with the program Wordle. We created our own word clouds using words about technology and education. The program gives greater imaging to words that appear more frequently in the text you write. You can edit you word clouds with different fonts, colours, and layouts. I can see this program being useful in the classroom as a potential ice breaker activity or word bank for a game.


We also also signed up for Ning for the Faculty of Education. Ning is a site that allows people to create their communities and social networks around users specific interests with their own design, features and member data. This site could be useful as a future teacher for having class discussions, posting questions, assignments, photos, video, etc. so it is available for your students online. I hope learn to more about Ning throughout the semester.


We also experimented with Padlet as a class and answered some questions on it. Padlet is almost like a bulletin board online where teachers can post questions in which students can all respond on their own. It allows people to post their topics on a common topic easily. I think this could be very useful in say a social studies class in which you use open ended questions and ask students to repsond. People can post videos, images, documents text. It would obviously be important to go over acceptable use of behaviour before using a site like this in your classroom.



Overall it was a very interesting first week and was good to experience some new programs which I have never used before. So hopefully I didn't bore you too much with my first blog, stay tuned for next week.