Sarah M. Ryals IT 365

Throughout this semester, I have learned about various forms of technology that can be extremely beneficial in my future classroom. By learning about so many types of educational technology, we also were able to see how they would work in a classroom environment. We were also able to determine whether or not certain programs and technology would be beneficial in our own classrooms, or if it could possibly cause trouble for certain students. This class was very informative for me as a future teacher, and I believe that the assignments that we had involving the creation of rubrics, quizzes, and worksheets were probably some of my favorite throughout the semester. I also really enjoyed making the teacher web site because I got to be creative with it. All in all, I know that I will look back on this class years from now and realize how much it has impacted my journey towards becoming a teacher, and I can’t wait to have the opportunity to implement some of the things that I have learned int...

This week's assignment consists of a research paper and a presentation. For our paper, we have to research the accommodations available on a certain operating system (I chose MacOS, as that's what I personally use) for those who are disabled in the following ways: visually, hearing, physically, cognitively, and language impaired. So far, I have pretty much finished my paper, so the next step would be to work on my presentation that covers the things that I learned about the operating system and its accommodations.

This week, we had to complete our Turnitin assignment. The assignment consisted of two parts: the first was a plagiarized paper, with all of the content taken from the sources that our instructor gave us, and the second was a unique paper that we wrote from our own words. The first paper had to have 90% plagiarism, and our unique paper had to have less than 25% plagiarism when checked with the Turnitin software. My unique paper had 0% plagiarism, which I suppose is just great. The goal of this assignment was to see how easy it is to use this software, which could help when a teacher has to grade a multitude of papers. I have actually used this software before when I was enrolled in community college, and I have always thought it was a brilliant idea to save teachers time in checking if something is plagiarized. I think that this is something that I will definitely use when I'm a teacher, as I'm leaning towards being an english teacher in high school some day.

This week we had to complete our Read a Book assignment. I'm sorry if I'm loud in parts of this because I get carried away sometimes and forget that others have to listen to my voice.

https://app.wizer.me/preview/1CBZM6 This week I completed my EdPuzzle video and Wizer worksheet assignment. I really enjoyed being able to use EdPuzzle to create an educational video that includes a little quiz throughout the video. The Wizer website was super fun and easy to use to create a worksheet that went along with my video. I can definitely see myself using both of these sites in the future when I'm a teacher.

Well, despite procrastinating finishing my teacher web site, I finally go it finished! I think I spent more time trying to create the individual banners for each page than I should have. It took me such a long time to figure out what class I wanted to use for my site, but I decided on art as it seems to be the main subject that my projects revolve around. I'm not even an artist--just slightly creative. But I tend to gravitate towards the subject still. Anyway, getting back to the point, I really enjoyed using Google Sites to create my teacher website: it was easy and fun to use. I've created websites before, so it was nice to refresh my memory. I know there are things about my site that could be improved: the footer is a bit blurry (I honestly gave up on trying to make it perfect). But the whole site accomplishes the main goal of the assignment, so I'm fairly pleased with it.

I thought I had posted this blog post last week, but I somehow forgot. Anyway, last week we continued working on our teacher web sites, and we also learned about SchoolNotes and AppleTree. These sites are essentially a way for teachers to connect to students and parents of students: teachers can post announcements for students. After visiting and learning about those sites, we reviewed for our upcoming quiz using Socrative and Kahoot! Both of these sites were a useful way to revise as they used quizzes; they were quite fun and memorable. I think that I’ll definitely use Kahoot! when I’m a teacher because I really liked the format of the site, and I found it quite fun to use.

Last week we began working on our Google Groups assignment: A discussion thread on google groups, a story written by everyone in our group on google docs, and a presentation that we are to make on our own with google slides. After working on the assignment last week, I have finally finished my presentation. It's very short, but I think it's quite cute. Among the main slides, I also included a couple of worksheets that could possibly go with the slide lesson.

Well, I didn't exactly have a free weekend like I had originally believed, so I just completed my web tools assignment. Using RubiStar was extremely easy, and making a word search worksheet on Education.com was really fun; it was my favorite part of the assignment, which is why I included a photo of it. Making a quiz was a bit more complicated for me to think of questions to ask; I probably didn't do that well, but, hey, at least I completed it, and that's what matters the most, I guess.

Tonight we began working on our Web Tools assignment. I finished the rubric on RubiStar and puzzle on Discovery Education that we were supposed to make, but I haven't quite completed the quiz on Easy Test Maker that I'm making. I'll finish it over the weekend, hopefully. I found it very interesting to learn about these websites and how I can use them in my future classroom. I'll make a final post including pictures of my project as soon as I'm finished with it.

Finally finished my concept map! I know it's not the best, but I'm fairly happy with it. It honestly took until I got home from class on Thursday to decide what I really wanted to base my theme on, and I decided on the solar system. It's just something that I truly find interesting, and I believed I would do my best work with a subject that I actually care about.

Tonight in class, we first learned about Poll Everywhere, a website used for polling. Our professor had questions on the poll in a quiz-like form that we answered using text messages. It's so nice to be able to take a little quiz by just texting our professor's Poll Everywhere number. We also began learning how to create concept maps. I don't even recall ever seeing concept maps when I was in school, but they're such a neat method to use when teaching a lesson. I have the basics done, but I've barely made a dent in making my concept map what I really envision; thankfully I have a free weekend to make it perfect.

This week we created an educational video using Adobe Spark. Using information from our textbook, each individual in my group created their own slides from assigned sections from our designated chapter: chapter 3. My group worked together really well, and I actually enjoyed creating the slides for the group project. I'm looking forward to creating more projects in this class, and I'm happy to be learning more and more about being able to use technology in the classroom.

Hello everyone! My name is Sarah Ryals, and I'm so excited for this semester. I've previously taken public speaking online, so I'm fairly comfortable with talking to a camera (Obviously very comfortable with talking about myself because I droned on for ages; sorry about that). I've always been quite comfortable working with computers, so I think this class will be fun and intriguing. I'm completely new to blogger so please bare with me as I learn how to use it correctly.