C4T #3

For my third C4T this semester, I was assigned Steven Anderson's blog, Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom His blog was particularly interesting to me because it concentrates on technology in the classroom, and I can relate through Dr. Strange's class. Steven Anderson is the Director of Instructional Technology for the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in Winston-Salem, NC. He also regularly visits schools and districts around the country talking about the use of Social Media in the classroom. Another interesting fact to me was that he is responsible for helping create #edchat on twitter. I was introduced to #edchat and #ntchat on twitter a few weeks ago by Dr. Will Deyamport, III, Ed.D. and found it VERY neat. #edchat is a weekly education discussion on Twitter that boasts over 500 weekly participants.

Post #1
The first blog post I visited on Steven's blog was from June 14, 2013, titled, 5 Leadership Questions To Finish(And Start) The School Year With. Steven Anderson had spent some time recently talking with administrators in his district, discussing technology in the classroom and their vision for where they wanted to go and how they play a key role in the development of technology practices. He came up with a list of questions, and these are by far not the only to consider, to answer when getting a feel of where technology integration will take place. The questions he considers are followed:
1. To what extent do you compare and align your school technology plan with other plans such as your school improvement plan?
2. To what extent do you promote participation of your school’s stakeholders in the technology planning process of your school or district?
3. To what extent did you disseminate or model best practices in learning and teaching with technology to faculty and staff?
4. To what extent do you include the effective use of technology as a criterion for assessing the performance of faculty?
5. To what extent do you participate in professional development activities meant to improve and expand your use of technology?

In my comment to Steven, I briefly introduced myself and gave my thoughts on a few of his questions. My comment:

"Steven,

My name is Melissa Canterbury and I am a student in EDM310 at the University of South Alabama. Dr. Strange has assigned us to visit other educator's blogs and to leave comments. I will be posting a summary in a couple of weeks of my visit and would love for you to leave feedback on my blog.

These questions that you have provided have been very helpful. As you may know by now, Dr. Strange's class is about preparing his students for technology in their future classroom. These are important questions to consider when evaluating and improving our technology integration. Question #5 stood out to me because I feel that is it crucial for educators to do their "homework" and educate themselves further than the traditional PD. We are just like the students here, we expect our students to spend time outside of the classroom so we should be doing more ourselves!

That question also stood out to me because of your comment about Twitter. I've always saw Twitter as a way of keeping in touch with my friends in high school and to let the world know every. single thing I was doing! However, this class has opened my eyes to another side of Twitter. I have met a few educators through this assignment and they started following me and introducing me to more educators and resources. I recently got invited to #ntchat and I am so excited to explore it!

Thank you for sharing, I really enjoyed reading your blog!

Melissa Canterbury"

Post #2
The second post I commented on titled, Google Tools To Check Out was very informative to me. Other than the tools used by countless people all over the world such as Hangouts, Docs, Mail, and Search, Steven Anderson discusses a handful of Google tools beneficial in the classroom.
The first was Google Custom Search Engine- one of Steven Anderson's favorite tools. This tool allows people to do a simple search such as "dolphins" and returns with million upon millions of results! You can customize it to the sites you want to include and also allows you to control whether you are searching the entire domain or a small portion. One way for teachers to use this tool in the classroom as Steven suggests, is to start the search engine for the students and then allowing the students to add on throughout the course of the unit or school year.
The next tool was Google Keep. This is not only new to me, but to Google tool lineup as well. This tool allows you to keep notes, lists, pictures, etc. and gives you access from anywhere. It doesn't give you the option to share or make public yet, however there is no doubt it is coming. To me, it reminded me of the Padlet we used in Dr. Strange's class.
Google Mars- WAY NEAT! Have you ever wanted to visit Mars but never got the time? Google allows you to explore the planet with all it's glory! A neat way to have incorporate this in the classroom with a science project!
Next Steven introduces Public Data- This tool provides data that Steven says in relevant to making a point or a great visualization. Very beneficial for science teachers!
URL Shortner- Great way to shorten those long, hard to type, and ugly URL's. Just type in the URL and Google provides you with a shorter version. You can also track the number of clicks your URL gets, and even get a QR code to scan with you mobile device.
The last one I find the most beneficial to me, was Google For Teachers. Resources, personal stories, lesson plans, tools and solutions, programs, events, the list goes on! I will definitely be adding this to my Symbaloo page!

My comment to the Google Tools was:

Steven,

WOW! I loved each and everyone of these tools. Thank you so much for sharing! I have never even heard of these before. My favorite would have to be Google For Teachers because I spent some time exploring it more. I think it is most beneficial to me because I am just starting my teaching journey and it has so many resources to help me started!

I did however check out Flubaroo as mentioned in one of the comments! I am in LOVE. I will definitely be adding that to my Symbaloo page to make grading easier.

Thank you so much again for sharing.

Also, I published a summary of the two blog posts of yours that I visited, I would love for you to read it and leave feedback!

Melissa Canterbury