Blog Post #14

Final Project #16

C4T#4

Kathy Cassidy
Primary Preoccupation has been developed by a grade one teacher, Kathy Cassidy. This week her classroom developed a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) day. This day was very successful and based on her children's enthusiasm, she knew that they would have to do it again. Mrs. Cassidy, mentioned that one half to two thirds of her class has a nintendo DS. I'll have to admit, I had know idea that this device supported educational apps. Four of my nieces and nephews own a nintendo ds. I ignorantly assumed that all you could do with it is play video games. Fifteen or so years ago the first handheld nintendo, was predominantly video games. I don't recall ever seeing an educational game for it. As hard as it is to admit, nintendo and other gaming brands, are trying to educate our children's future.
Mrs. Cassidy's students were each able to use their own DS, log into a private chatroom, and learn spelling or math lessons. Over all this experiment has been a success and tunes in to student's hobbies. This increases interest and, I would say, improves understanding of the concept.

One lucky teacher in Canada, Ms. Kathy Cassidy recently won a $20,000 spending spree from Best Buy! The contest was for her to purchase technology for the classroom. In doing so, she purchased iPads for every student in the class. Now, I don't no about you, but being 1:1 with any device, let alone an iPad, is a huge deal. This grade one teacher in Canada already had a few apps for the students to learn. One of them being Letter Reflex. This apps allows students having difficulties with the letters such as b's and d's or p's and q's another form of interactive practice. They also learned how to take pictures for a special project that they are doing with another class. Ms. Cassidy commented that her favorite comment from the day was "I guess we really like the iPads". I would say that is a definite understatement.

Blog Post #13

Twenty-four hours without technology might seem like an everyday issue but for others, well, they would rather have a stroke then put their iPhone down for fifteen minutes let alone twenty-four hours. I must admit that I was never able to go the full twenty-four hours without technology, as required for this assignment. However, the problems that I faced were work and school related. Being self-employed I couldn't let my phone sit idol. The instructions did allow phones for work purposes but I would rather have been able to commit 100% regardless. The second issue that I faced is that it is finals time. Keeping up with classes is a must have during the end of the semester. Other than these two slip ups, I did well. No radio, on the drive the school. No TV during down times. Perhaps I will try this assignment at a later date. I almost feel like it would be somewhat relaxing to be able to turn off every form of technology and focus on yourself and the others around you.
I was intrigued by this assignment, so I did a Google search on other peoples no technology projects. This was one article that I found relatively interesting and I wanted to share this with all of you. A college student did an Amish Project with no cell phone, email or social media for 90 days. His story really makes you think about all of the ways that we no longer communicate with people and how we only communicate with people.

Project #13

For project 15 and project 16 it was very important for us to say in contact with one another. We began by emailing, then we met at the lab to bounce ideas off one another. We had a difficult time coming up with, what we thought, would be the best topic for our project. Once we decided on a topic, often times we found flaws. So, we would switch to something else. We found that texting was the fastest method for an immediate response. It is quick and easy to send then the other person can respond whenever they have a chance. Instead of meeting at the lab, we used Skype for one of our conference sessions. It was a little tricky since we couldn't all look at the same computer screen but we made it work. Above all, I would say that we used a variety of communication methods in order to work together.

Final Report on PLN

My personal learning network is slowing increasing, although not too much has changed. I have begun to fill up my Symbaloo as well as my network of Twitter users. I spend a lot of time on Edmodo, I haven't been approved as a teacher yet, so I can't comment but I can still view what others have added to their pages. I also visit Pinterest on a regular basis, to get new ideas for projects and classroom activities. I also still remain in contact with a few educators that I know locally. So far I would say that my PLN is moving right along.

This is my Sentence Project 6