Reflection Week 10

This week was by far my favorite. I don't know if it was due to researching on the upcoming new technology tools or how to stay relevant with change and reminisce the past. Whatever the case was, it was very interesting. While reading my peers blogs, I noticed that we are all on the same page. Matthew mentions how we need to choose a tool that will best fit in our objective. I think teachers and non - educators get caught up in the "new" technology and forget that some of these tools are not useful to use in a classroom. I know people who will trade in their phone when a new one has been made. Now, for me I still have the old iPhone, but am having extreme problems with it. So soon I will trade and buy a new one or change to a phone that's not an apple product. What I have found with my phone and my husbands is once the warranty expires our battery dies super fast and our blue tooth has quit working. The reason I mention this, is with technology everything breaks or stops working at sometime. It's important to stay relevant with the new tool, but know when to upgrade and buy new. Iphones are always updating their phones and marketing new ones. Students could get caught up in the marketing scan, but if they're educated they can save a lot of money. It's important to choose which tool is going to be worthwhile to use for the certain activity or back to teaching, lesson you have planned. It's also important to know how to fix the tool you are working with. My document camera and promethean board continuously has glitches. When you're teaching a lesson, you can't be reading the guide on "how to fix it." To stay relevant, you need to know the tool inside and out. Ali mentioned it's important to have team support. Creating a course has many different sections. It's important to work as a team and have everyone create a certain part. It's like the sport swimming, you race individually, but earn points to help your team. The team with the most points wins the meet. This can be looked on as the same when working as a team when creating an online course. This week, we have decided to not make our own online courses. Mia and I were creating a course that 6th grade teachers could use when teaching about Matthew Henson and Robert Peary. During our class meeting, we have decided that with survivalcraft, the teachers registered are relying on us to present a successful training for them. With all of the other activities we have planned, there wasn't enough time, so we decided to use our training as the online course we're creating. We are going to work as a team. I have the role of creating online tutorial videos for the teacher tools. A challenge is to make the videos 5 minutes or less long. This means, I need to create many tutorial videos for each tool. From our last survey, we received one response and the teacher said they would prefer online videos rather than a face to face meeting. During this week we also discussed how the Lord of the Flies scenarios were probably not school appropriate. I did some research and found some articles that I shared with the group. Turkey is actually thinking of banning Minecraft and Microsoft  is fighting for them not too. It all has to do with survival mode. LOTF scenarios are about the students killing and surviving. I'm worried that if students do this in school, our whole project will be banned in the schools participating. We decided as a group to change the scenarios and make it where the students build the World War setting and work as a team to survive. I hope the scenarios work and there is no negative press from this.
We are meeting early this week to discuss our online training course. We have a lot of work to do, but with team work I'm sure we will create a very successful and informative training for the teachers.