This week we got the opportunity to explore three different websites that help organize your life. was excited about this assignment because I love to organize things, just look at my planner!
The first website was Google drive, which most people at least know that it exists. While I have had a google powered email since my freshman year in college, I still learned a lot of new features about my google drive. I think Google docs are especially helpful for teachers for their collaborative nature. You can essentially make any type of document, presentation, and spreadsheet, and there is also the feature of being able to collaborate and share on it. Collaborating with colleagues is made easy by the accessibility and intuitive nature of Google docs.
We also looked at an application/website called Evernote. This tool mainly serves to organize your individual life into notebooks, with a variety of notes within each notebook. The function that I liked most about this application is that you can put to-do lists in each notebook. This way you can organize what you have to do by each class or however you choose to arrange your notebooks. Coming from an ultra organized person, this feature brings me a lot of happiness because now I can even organize my to-do lists by class!
Last but not least, we explored how to use Blendspace. This website helps teachers make lesson plans in five minutes by giving templates that teachers can drag and drop online resources into. You can get resources from a variety of places including YouTube, Google, and your very own Google drive :) Also, another important feature of this website is that you can share your lesson plan with others, and look at lesson plans that other teachers have already made.
I had to teach others how to use Blendspace, and I continued to learn about this website as I was telling others how to use it. I think it is really helpful to explain and be able to summarize about a topic in order to become fluent in it. I thought that I knew a lot about Blendspace before I taught about it, but I learned so much more about it based on people's questions. People asked questions about the website that I hadn't even thought to explore. This is something interesting to keep in mind in terms of teaching in a classroom, in that we are continuously going to learn about our content area. The questions of our students are going to force us (in a good way) to continually be doing research in our own field.
Great post and summary of all three resources! I learned quite a bit from the presentations I attended and am glad we had the opportunity to learn in this way from our peers. I've used Google services quite a bit, but learned new tips I wasn't aware of such as the ability to upload Microsoft Office products for pretty seamless integration. Very nice. As for my presentation, I too had Blendspace. I'm very happy I was assigned this tool and have learned quite a bit not only from this assignment, but from using it afterward for other assignments. I love how interactive it is and think it's an extremely useful resource for the classroom. After seeing the students we've been able to teach this summer perk up and center on the content more when it's video/digital. All three of these are so much more than I had available to me in high school!
ReplyDeleteAnna, I was also assigned Blendspace and from what you write it sounds like we had very similar experiences teaching it to our classmates! I had never even heard of the app before, let alone used it, so I spent a lot of time playing around and exploring the multitude of teaching possibilities it offers in order to be able to inform Jeremy and Derek about how it can be used in the classroom. In addition to playing around with it myself, I also watched several YouTube tutorials. However, when it came time to share my findings with my classmates, despite how prepared I felt, there were a number of questions asked that completely stumped me. As you said, I hadn't even though to explore several of the questions they brought up, most of which they asked from the perspective of a student. This was an eye-opening experience for me. Their questions forced me to problem solve and do some on the fly exploring, and in the process I learned a lot more than I could have ever possibly taught myself. You are so right that the questions students ask us are going to force us to learn more than we ever would on our own or even in our own classes. Our students will continue to push us to challenge ourselves in our fields.
ReplyDeleteAnna,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your post. Like yourself (and Matt and Sam), I also had Blendspace, though unlike you, I had zero knowledge of even its existence before this assignment. I appreciated your comment regarding how you learned more about the site from the questions people asked you. I am continually amazed and the power of questions to illuminate and expand one's knowledge and introduction to varying perspectives.
Blendspace (now) and Google Drive are familiar to me, but I am less familiar with Evernote. Of the three technologies, which do you think you will use the most? In class? On the go?
Anna, I liked your comment about how, despite having a Google account for some years, you learned from another's presentation on Google Drive. I had a very similar experience. A fellow classmate showed me how to link my calendar to google, which I should have known, but had never taken the time to figure out. I started using Google Drive only this past year when I was required to create a Google Site for a History of the Book course. I was super encouraged in working with my 8th grade Scarlett students, that many of them are already experts at using Google Drive. They know how to store information and share documents, and it is something that they seem to have become used to. Like, how could I suggest that they don't know how to share a document? I think that Google Drive is an especially useful source for students, and am pleased to find out that it is already being implemented in middle school.
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