Mountaineer Circles

For the purpose of this reading response I chose to reflect on whether I've experienced negative stereotyping because I'm a West Virginian, as well as if I've stereotyped others based on their geographical origins.

It seems that when telling a non-West Virginian of your heritage, there are most often one of three responses.  "Oh, I have relatives in Roanoke!" (geographical amnesia), disdain, or they'll be excited because their uncle's friend's brother lives 15 minutes from wherever you live in WV. Have you ever noticed that people from West Virginia seem to be EVERYWHERE? Once on a FSU trip to Rome, we managed to run into a group of students (including the ex-girlfriend of one of the people on my trip) from WVU in the Sistine Chapel.

To go back to the "disdain" for a minute, I'll never forget one high school singing trip to a competition in Williamsburg. After asking where we were from, one of the employees from the competition was overheard  making comments about how we'd probably sing like hicks (what does a hick sound like, anyway?), while other attendees expressed surprise that we were wearing shoes. We went on to receive distinguished marks and have the judges comment on our good diction, but in that moment it had gone from a friendly competition to knowing that we had something to prove.

I think that most of the insults toward West Virginia are cliche at this point--  we apparently never wear shoes, all chew "tobacc-y", drink moonshine and sit around with banjos-- and that's just at the wedding ceremony to our cousins! I'd love to see more creative responses. Even though West Virginians react poorly to stereotypes reasoned by "outsiders", there is an unspoken rule that says that it's ok for Mountaineers to categorize each other. Particularly impacted by this concept are individuals living in Southern WV, as mentioned in Terra Incognito. Stereotyping other West Virginians is something we all do without even thinking of it. While it seems fine and dandy to refer to someone as a "redneck", one can't help but wonder if we, in continuing to place ourselves in boxes, perpetuate the issue.

Educational philosophy/Voki

For today's class we wrote our Educational Philosophy if we didn't have it with us, and used a Voki avatar to convey the second aspect of the questions we were asked. We were asked to keep our Educational Philosophy short- 100 words for each question, and focus on why we want to pursue our chosen subject area and how we intend to research after we attain that goal.


Get a Voki now!

We had a lot of options when designing our Voki. First we had to determine the physical appearance, and whether to make it look like ourselves or make something up (there was even a Digimon option!). More importantly, however were the options to add sound. You could upload a message in your own voice by phone or computer microphone, or even just copy and paste text (which is what I did). I'm not entirely sure what we'd use this for in the future, other for fun, or possibly to help students who are visually impaired navigate a class website.

Either way, it emphasizes NETS standard 2, substandard a, which states that teachers should "design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity." 

GoogleDoc Forms

In today's class period, we learned all about forms for GoogleDocs and how to create quizzes and surveys that use this technique. For mine I used the same topic as my Dewey Decimal Webquest so that the form could be used as an assessment to see whether students picked up on basic Dewey facts throughout the unit. I embedded my form below, though it can also be found through GoogleDocs.


In practicing this skill we practice NETS standard 2, substandard a, which says that teachers should: "design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity."

WebQuest

For our last real project of the semester we finished our webquest. For my webquest I emphasized the Dewey Decimal System and sent the students through Dewey’s life. We used GoogleSitess to put it together. This wasn't my first webquest, but I enjoyed the template they provided.

This could ultimately fall under NETS standard 2, substandard c, which states that teachers should "customize and personalize learning activities to address students' diverse learning styles, working strategies, and abilities using digital tools and resources."

Prezi Practice

During today's class period we discovered the joys of Issuu (a web based pdf viewer- predominately for magazines) and Prezi, which is a pretty cool little gizmo that lets you create presentations that can feature a variety of different aspects of multimedia. We did a practice run with a few elements, as seen below. Nothing too fancy, but I can definitely see using this for future presentations!

This Prezi presentation could meet any number of NETS standards, but particularly hits standard 3, substandard a, which states that teachers should "demonstrate fluency in technology systems and the transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations." The use of Prezi to present something to students would definitely be more interesting to them than something as old school as the Powerpoint.

Practice on Prezi

WebQuest about WebQuests

For this class period, we did a “WebQuest about WebQuests” and ranked them in accordance to which one is the most thorough and which is not as complete of a WebQuest.

I ranked mine in accordance from worst to best.

1. Waves & Sound

2. Saving the Gorillas

3. Foreign Country Presentation

4. World of Shakespeare

5. Anti-Earthquake Designer

The Anti-Earthquake Designer is the most thorough because it has complete instructions and job descriptions, as well as pictures of what will happen, while the Waves and Sounds WebQuest is very vague.

I believe this would fall under NETS standard 5, substandard c, which states that teachers should "evaluate and reflect on current research and professional practice on a regular basis to make effective use of existing and emerging digital tools and resources in support of student learning." This is true in the case of this activity, because we had to evaluate creations by other professionals in order to establish the caliber of WebQuest that we want to complete.


We followed the activity up by using a visual ranking tool provided by Intel, in order to compare the results of different groups. We broke down into 6 groups and compared and contrasted our answers.

What is Jeopardy for 500, Alex?

In today's class we learned a shortcut to creating Jeopardy games to use in our classrooms. While using powerpoint is well & good, it's also very time consuming. We used JeopardyLabs to practice the creation of Jeopardy games. You don't need to have a paying membership to make a game-- there's a free online version (you'll access yours by password, but the quiz is then public domain). You can go back to edit the version, as long as you remember your password.

Dr. Pierce also sent us a link to a Jeopardy Powerpoint template, created by JMU. This template has the basic set up to start creating powerpoint Jeopardy games. We did have to create our own animations for our answers, but this would definitely save time but still allow for the flexibility of Powerpoint vs. Jeopardy Labs. We practiced using Dirpy to download YouTube videos and mp3s to stick in our Powerpoints.

Today's lesson supported NETS Standard 3, Substandard a, which states that teachers need to "demonstrate fluency in technology systems and the transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations." With that being said, using Powerpoint for Jeopardy would definitely be more convenient (and more durable) than the old school method of creating Jeopardy games with velcro, notecards & a laminating machine. The Powerpoint could also be sent to parents or posted on Edline so that the students could continue to go over the material with which they were having problems.