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"Thing 31: Final Reflections and What's Next?"

1: What did you learn? The lesson 18 websites that dealt with assessment are the lessons that I put into action the most out of all of the lessons.  "Kahoot" and "Quizlet Live" are perfectly suited for a math class.  From lesson 8 I've incorporated some of the methods of curation into my planning.  I have not directly exposed my students to these methods as of yet.  I find that they allow me to focus my searches for materials more efficiently.  Personally I've been making good use of the "DuckDuckGo" search engine that I learned about in "Thing 10".  I enjoy the privacy that it offers.  I also started to use the emojis from the Bitmoji site.  I find them fun and entertaining. One challenge I initially faced was figuring out all of the sites I had to navigate to complete this professional development.  I had to use my gmail account and navigate the classroom.  I had to also use the email to access the link to all of the activities.  I

"Thing 18: Student Assessment and Feedback Tools"

For this activity I chose "Kahoot" and "Quizlet Live" for my review.  I chose these two because I knew that other teachers in my building use these websites and that they could assist me in their set up and give a little information about both.  The first one I tried was "Kahoot".  It was very easy to set up and to have students to log in also.  As it started my students were already familiar with the site so this made it much easier for me.  The teacher screen was kind of confusing at first because all I could see were colored squares.  I had to familiarize myself with the student screen to get a better understanding of how the activity worked.  The students really enjoyed this activity.  I also enjoyed that it reinforced the math topic we were currently working on.  The second website that I tried out was "Quizlet Live".  I chose the live version because I wanted it to be more of a competition.  Another teacher was nice enough to grant me acc

"Thing 10: Search Tools Ninja"

I completed activity 3 "Compare" in this lesson.  First I checked out the search engine called DuckDuckGo.  It just so happened that earlier in the day I was searching for medicine cabinets on line using the Google search engine.  So When I read this I felt that this would be the perfect topic to compare several search engines.  When I used Google I was displayed advertisements from some big retailers at the top of my list.  I used them to search for a desirable cabinet.  When I used DuckDuckGo I was surprised to see that it was pretty much very similar.  I was displayed the links for "Homedepot" and "Loews".  When I clicked the links they worked the same way. Sweet Search was interesting because it displayed ads for companies at the top but the other links were not similar.  I was displayed links that had "Medicine Cabinets" in the title.  Some examples are: "Clean out your medicine cabinet", "6 tips to help spring clean your me

"Thing 13: Augmented & Virtual Reality"

I read three articles for this lesson.  The first "10 reasons to use Virtual Reality in the Classroom" by Ashley McCann.  This explains the top 10 reasons why virtual reality technology should be used in the class.  It can be designed to enable experimental learning, social learning, workplace training, etc.  Also it can be used for just pure entertainment like video games, traveling anywhere (without leaving the class), or swimming with whales. These are my favorite reasons from the list. 3) Experience different careers first hand. 7) Allow create there own VR content.  9) Explore how VR can be integrated into every subject area and curriculum.  10) Promote curiosity and wonder. Another article I read was "Can virtual reality revolutionize education?" by Emma Kennedy.  This article goes into how students really enjoy VR lessons.  More than 6 million students in the U.S. have experienced VR lessons.  One of the main purposes of these lessons were to go on virtual

"Thing 8: Digital Curation Tools"

     I read three articles for this lesson.  The first was "To boost higher order thinking, try curation" by Jennifer Gonzalez.  I am happy that I chose this as my first article to read because it answered two important questions I had.  "What is curation?" and "What is the main purpose is the purpose or need for it?".  She goes into detail on the three major aspects of curation which are: Understand, Analyze,and Evaluate.  This article also contains some sample projects.      The second article was titled "Curation for digital learning".  the author talks about how there is a nation wide increase in technology in schools nation wide.  There are many more physical devices in our schools but not an increase content.  This is why he feels there is a need for curation.  He goes over the process of curation.  This was helpful because I did not know how to do it.  He also goes into the reasons why a person would do a curation.     The the third ar

"Thing 14: Bitmoji Fun"

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I reviewed a several articles while completing this assignment.  The topic of these articles  were mainly about how an educator can use Bitmojis as an teaching aid.  The article "Using Bitmoji in the Your Classroom" the author discusses how Bitmojis can be used to draw attention to key concepts.  Like in the place of an arrow.  Also as a way to give directions and/or elicit feedback from students.  The article "Bitmoji in the Classroom"  the author used Bitmojis to make her parent teacher contacts more entertaining.  This served as a good ice breaker with the parents of her students.  I liked that she used them to create class posters for items such as; motivational posters, rules and procedures, schedules, and behavior charts.  I like all of these ideas.  "Back To School With Bitmoji" was very informative because it gave me lots of examples of the applications and features of Bitmojis. I created an account on Bitmoji using my google account.  I did not

"Thing 7: Presentation Tools"

Doing my research for this learning activity, I reviewed four different presentation soft wares.  As I looked into to each site I discovered that most of these sites required for the user to set up an account before it can be used.  I found this to be quite inconvenient.  The site "Buncee" looked kind of complicated.  When I viewed one of the example presentations it did not show up properly oriented on the screen.  It just seemed a bit complicated for what it was offering.  The site "Beautiful A.I." had numerous templates.  The templates were a dominant feature of the software.  I felt that this tool was geared more towards businesses than the classroom.  I wouldn't personally use this tool for my purposes.  "Ludus" was a very high level software.  The graphics, animations, sound, etc, were far beyond that of the other soft wares  that I reviewed.  I don't rule out rule out ever using this but first I would need to take the time to learn how to a