Master's Degree, Here I Come

Hypermedia

cheryldem — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 03:03:42 +0000

So here I am nearing the end of my technology journey as far as schooling is concerned. I will begin the capstone project in a few weeks and will graduate in December. As I sit here typing, I am still amazed with how much I still don’t know even though I have gained so much through the classes in this program. The technology world is so vast!

This term we are working with HyperStudio and unfortunately, the application doesn’t seem to like my computer and whenever I try working on a “stack” I end up getting an error message and am not able to save anything I have worked on. So far, I have tried to do the same project 5 times and haven’t been able to complete nor save the projects.

Right now I am trying to come up with an idea for an example of a student project. Hopefully I will come up with something soon.

Scoring PowerPoints

cheryldem — Tue, 26 May 2009 00:43:53 +0000

Today I read an article for class (“Scoring PowerPoints” by Jamie McKenzie. It talked a lot about having students make presentations that have meaning. I chuckled when it talked about students using transitions that flash and twirl just for the fun of in when in reality, those transitions actually take away from the presentation rather than add to it.

I enjoyed the review that last part of the article provided. I don’t use PowerPoint very often for presentations, but it is nice to be reminded of things like maintain eye contact, use transitions that fit, don’t read slides, and keep it simple.

Me as a technology leader????

cheryldem — Mon, 04 May 2009 05:04:14 +0000

At this point in my Master’s Degree journey, I am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel so to speak. I am taking two classes this term and in the Fall will take my final class, capstone project and graduate in December! I have learned so much along this journey, but still struggle with how to take what I have learned and use it in my kindergarten classroom to enhance student learning.

In class, we were given an assignment to reflect on being considered a technology leader at our school sites. The prospect is a little scary to me because people seem to think that you know everything, and the truth is that the area of technology in education is so vast, I feel like I have just begun to learn to tap in to all that is out there.

Our school is currently undergoing modernization, and I am looking forward to a classroom equipped with more electrical sockets, a projector and an interactive board. When I think about technology needs at our site, I immediately think about the three groups of teachers on our campus. There are the people who are excited about the changes being made and the endless possibilities, the people who are resistant to using the new equipment, and the people who are interested, but have no clue what can be done with it all.

At this point, I guess the first place to begin will be showing people how turn on, hook up and use the projectors as well as showing people the benefits of the interactive boards. I hope there will be time for teachers to come and observe while classes are in sessions; I feel this may give resistant teachers more of a vision by seeing how kids are reacting and interacting in this new learning environment.

If I were to provide professional development, I feel I would be more effective in small groups. I already enjoy listening as teachers share in the teaching lounge then sharing with teachers later ways in which the use of technology can aid in student progress. I would love to see more teachers make and use interactive PowerPoints in their classrooms, and see the students benefit from reviewing and learning digitally. Right now, we are in the beginning stages of it all and it will be interesting to see what my roll will be as we begin to meet the needs of students using more technology.

EDU 522 Initial Post

cheryldem — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 05:29:11 +0000

On Thursday, my new class, EDU 522 Information in the 21st Century started. The class is about the multiple intelligences. I don’t quite know what to make of this class since my classmates from last semester assure me that the class is going to be tough, that I won’t like it as much as some of the other classes in the program I have taken so far, that I will be confused, and that I can call them if I need any help. So I sit here, after starting the first homework assignment, and I must admit, I am stuck and can’t figure out how to fill in the rest of the grid to describe how my mom would learn best according to her intelligence. Should be an interesting semester.

EDU 515 Reflection

cheryldem — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 06:28:56 +0000

Well, here I am at the end of my fourth class. It seems the time so far in this Master’s program has flown by; I have already learned so much. I wonder what I will be like, how much my teaching will change by January 2010 when I complete this degree.

I learned a lot in this class about blogging; I learned that I don’t like it too (it’s too much like journalling, and I have never been able to keep up with that consistently for very long). We didn’t do much with wikis, even though we were supposed to (our professor couldn’t figure out how to get it to work in airset so we could edit) and I am a little disappointed. I kind of understand what they are because of Wikipedia, but I think experiencing it for my self and actually being involved with creating one would have enabled me to understand the process a lot better.

I did my first research paper in about twenty years. Having the internet at my disposal made this project a lot easier. I enjoyed learning about the evolution of the iPod (my new favorite classroom toy since the parents of the kids in my class gave me one for my birthday). I enjoyed the walk down memory lane as I researched the predecessors of the iPod remembering my own Sony walkman, boom box, and CD players. I learned a lot about where the vision for the iPod came from and how Apple developed it. I watched the 2001 Keynote address that Steve Jobs gave when he introduced the first iPod. He had such vision and predicted that the iPod would be the most popular mP3 player on the market. The man is a genius!

My favorite part of the class was learning about and doing the podcasts. I made two audio and one video podcast for this class, and since I already am familiar with and use podcasts in my kindergarten class, I began thinking of ways I could have the children help make podcasts in our classroom. This past week, the children were learning about plants, and I gave the children the digital camera and sent them out with an adult with the task of taking a picture of a plant they liked on our campus. It was interesting to see what the children chose to take pictures of. Later that day, they thought about the plant they took a picture of and wrote about it in their journal. Next week, I plan to record the children as they read what they wrote in their journal about “their” plant. I will record in GarageBand and use the photos the children took to complete the podcast. I will post the finished podcast on the website where I post the children’s photos for the parents to enjoy.

One final piece of information I have received and will continue to use in my classroom is video streaming. It is amazing to have all these videos, songs, and photos at my fingertips. During our plants unit, I found a video of “Jack and the Beanstalk” that I showed to the children. I am looking forward to seeing what I can find to enhance the curriculum this month as we begin our study of animals.

EDU 515 Evolving Educational Technologies

cheryldem — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 06:07:09 +0000

I started the new semester and had to write a blog (that is one of the things the class is about) about what I was expecting to learn this semester. I didn’t quite know what to write since the title of the class really didn’t tell me about anything specific we would be doing in the class. Here is what I wrote in ariset (the blog we are using for the class) that first night:

Considering I’m not quite sure what this class is all about, I guess I could say that I want to learn more about Garage Band, Podcasting, and Wikis. I have played with Garage Band some on my computer, but have never really spent enough time with it to get a finished product. Since it was mentioned that Mac users would use Garage Band, I guess now would be a good time to learn more. Podcasting… because I’ve never done it and don’t know how. I don’t even have any idea of how podcasting could/would be used in a kindergarten class. Lastly wikis… because I have no idea what this is. I’ve heard of Wikipedia, so I’m guessing that is a wiki, but other than that, I’m clueless.

EDU 512 Productivity Software

cheryldem — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 05:53:51 +0000

Before this class began, I found myself dreading it just a bit because the title for the class didn’t seem too exciting. I had had so much fun the previous term in the digital imaging class, and this class sounded too much like a lot of work and not a whole lot of fun. To my surprise, there were some fun assignments, and the class was interesting afterall.

In this class, I learned a lot about spreadsheets and mail merge using Microsoft Excel and Word. I had taken the class with a friend, and she was able to see how she would be able to use it in her classroom right away. I had a little more difficulty finding ways to use Excel in the classroom. It wasn’t until after the class had ended that I found out that our school had received some grant money and that we would be able to buy some well-needed PE equipment for our kindergarten through third grade classes to share. I sat down with the teachers who had attended the meeting and wrote down a list of wants/needs. After I got home, I was able to use Excel to make a chart of what items we wanted to order, the catalogs that carried the items, the item numbers, and the costs for the items in each catalog. Later, once it had been approved by the principal, I created another Excel document to give to the school secretary that had all the items with photos (in case she wanted to look them up in the catalogs before ordering) the prices, and the grand total. Using what I had learned in EDU 512 made this an easy project, and people at my school were impressed with what I had learned.

Another thing I learned in this class and found useful was how to set tabs and insert page and section breaks into a document. I send home a weekly newsletter, and since I teach kindergarten, I want those newsletters to be cute. I have in the past spent some time looking for newsletter templates online, but there haven’t been any that I really have like. Now that I know how to insert breaks, I can make newsletters that have different sections with columns in the middle to bottom of the page but not at the top. Learning to set tabs was useful as well. I remember having that “Aha moment” in class when the professor showed us how to do it. Now when I make documents with lines for the children’s answers, the lines will all be the same length!

In this class, I had to compare two applications that had similar purpose. I chose to compare Microsoft PowerPoint to Apple Keynote. There were many ways in which the applications were the same. They are both good presentation software, but in the end, I found just one more reason why I like Apple Computers.

EDU 517 Digital Imaging

cheryldem — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 04:45:55 +0000

In the Fall of 2007, I took my second class in the Educational Technology Master’s Program at APU. I started this class very excited about what I would learn. I have a digital camera at home and last school year, I wrote and received a grant so I could purchase a digital camera for my classroom. I was excited to learn more about digital photography and how I could use these skills in my kindergarten classroom. I didn’t know what to expect as the class started and found the time I spent learning to use Adobe Photoshop to be both interesting and challenging. In this class, I learned how to post photos to Flickr, make three dimensional photos, combine photos to make a panorama shot, and make a poster for my classroom.

Two of my favorite projects were creating an imaginary person and “photoshopping” myself into a stock photo. For the previous assignment, I chose photos of five of my kindergarten students I had taken the first day of kindergarten and took elements from each child to make one imaginary person. It was fun showing the finished product to my kindergarten students. The latter project was a favorite because it involved creativity. I had to look at a series of stock photos and find one that I would add my self to the photo. The challenge was making the photo look real. I chose two polynesian men at the edge of a pit where they had prepared a pig. I put my camera on the tripod, put on my hawaiian-print shirt, took my picture and inserted it between the two men. I didn’t end up with a photo that looked completely real, but I had fun with the project.

One of the major projects in the class was restoring a photo. I dug through some old family photos and found a picture-postcard of my grandfather who had passed away before I was born. The postcard had gotten ripped in half just above my grandpa’s eyebrows. When I found the card, the top half was missing. I thought restoring this photo would be difficult, but not impossible. Since the family resemblance is so strong on my mother’s side of the family, I decided to take a picture I had of my brother and “photoshop” the top of my brother’s head onto my grandfather’s photo. Combining the two photos was the easy part of the assignment. Once this was done, I had to get the added part of the photo to match the colors of the original photo. I also had to use the clone and eraser tools to get the skin tone of the forehead to match that of the rest of my grandfather’s face. The end result was a great photo. When I showed it to my mom, to my surprise, she commented that it didn’t really look like her father. I was disappointed, but was still proud of the work I had done to restore the photo. A few days later when my mom and I were talking, she mentioned that the reason the photo didn’t look like her dad was because she had never known him at that age. You see, in the photo, my grandfather is about thirty years old. He was in his mid fifties when my mother was born. The dad my mom remembers was between the ages of sixty and seventy-five! One day while my mom and I were visiting my aunt who has Alzheimer’s Disease, I turned on my computer to show the photo to my aunt. When she saw the photo she said, “That’s my daddy!” It was then that I knew I had done a good job. I later printed the photo, had it framed and gave it to my aunt for her birthday.

The most challenging part of this class was the weekly assignment of taking and posting photos. Sometimes I would find great things to take pictures of. Some weeks, I had no idea what to take pictures of and would find myself wandering around my yard and neighborhood in search of inspiration. I found some very unusual flowers around the corner; I hope to one day find out what they are called.

My EDU 511 Program Reflection

cheryldem — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 04:59:37 +0000

As I near the end of my first Master’s Degree class, I find that everything is a bit of a blur. Eight weeks have passed by so quickly. I was not sure what to expect as I began this journey, and I must say that, although I have learned to do some new things, I’m still not clear on what this journey will entail.

Before this class began, most of my technological skills consisted of email, typing parent communication and worksheets for kids in Microsoft Word, making movies in iMovie, storing and editing photos in iPhoto, downloading tunes to my iPod, doing an occasional Power Point Presentation for my kindergarten class, and playing a CD and/or DVD every now and then.

In just eight short weeks, I have learned how to create a web site for my classroom and keep it current, started my own blog, had online chats, responded to posts by other classmates, sent several emails to professors, registered and paid for classes online, and become familiar with the ins and outs of the APU website.

I’ve run into some obstacles along the way, like not being able to do any of the Adobe Assignments because even though it is a universal application, the free download doesn’t work on a Mac. With help and some additional software, I was able to solve the problem. Since I struggle at times with dyslexia, and never have been a very good reader, I had trouble reading the downloaded text book pages on the computer screen. I did not want to waste paper and/or ink, so I refused to print them out. Within a few days of playing around with the system preferences on my computer, I discovered I could use universal access, choose a voice I liked, and simply read along while “Vicki”, my new computer voiced friend, did all the reading for me.

Because I am so social, I discovered that I don’t like taking classes online. I was glad I did not have to drive to Murietta, but missed getting to know classmates face to face. I also feel as though I have missed out on important information because I was not there for all the conversations that took place in class.

One thing I found through beginning this whole process is just how much I don’t know about technology. I learned what Bluetooth is and can’t wait until Fall when I will purchase my new laptop and printer with Bluetooth capability. I learned Google is not the only search engine out there and found that Vivisimo is my favorite. I have had many opportunities to share what I have learned with friends who teach, and they now have expressed an interest in starting a Master’s Degree program as well.

I know this has just been the beginning and realize things will get a lot harder as new challenges arise, but I look forward to learning more as I tackle my next class in the Fall.

Hello world!

cheryldem — Tue, 01 May 2007 05:32:39 +0000

Well, this is it! My first blog. I never thought I would be interested in these kinds of things, but since I got my laptop a year ago, I have become addicted. I also never thought I would start and/or finish a Master’s program. Since I teach kindergarten, I never thought the information I would gain in a Master’s program would benefit me much as a kindergarten teacher, and that’s a lot of time and money to spend on something I may not use in my everyday life. I was thrilled when I learned about the Masters in Educational Technology and Learning!

I just started my second week of class, and I have already done so many things I never would have otherwise. I have learned about Bluetooth (did you know it was named after Denmark King Harald Bluetooth?), started doing assignments online, responded to posts by other classmates I have never met, and now, my own blog!

While enrolled in the program, I hope to learn lots more about how to make my computer work for me as I become a better teacher. I also look forward to learning more about digital cameras, camcorders, and software to develop interesting/engaging lessons for my kindergarten classroom. I look forward growing closer to God as I am challenged to do things I have never done before. I want to glorify Him with my work at APU. I also want to graduate with honors. I look forward to hearing my name called at the end of all this, walking across the stage, and receiving my diploma. It will be my first college graduation…I never participated in my undergrad graduation because it was just a reception and I figured why bother.

I don’t know why this whole process inspires and excites me; I have never really been excited about school before (except for teaching kindergarten). I pray that through it all (as it gets tougher), I will continue to give each assignment my best. Afterall, it’s all for Him, my creator, and doing what He has created me to do, to the best of my ability, is my spiritual act of worship. I pray that people see Him living in me.