Summary of attendance

I learned how to use the seesaw app in both my classroom, and as a mother when I have children who are learning different lessons. I think the seesaw app is a fantastic asset for a teacher to have. I learned that students can sign in with a QR code or with a text code. Signing into the app is really easy, so easy, in fact, that kindergarteners could use it. I also learned that teachers and parents are able to comment on a students work, I think this is such a great tool! I will use this in my science classes as a way for my students to turn in their homework. 

During the creative lecture, the teacher discussed how creativity among students is very important. It allows us to express ourselves. He also asked students what ways they use creativity win their daily lives. The presenter gave different people to follow who also post about creativity on social media. Lastly, the presenter gave different apps that students could download on their iPad to use for any creative ideas. One of these apps included paper 53 where we played around with the app and students were able to create whatever came to mind. I really enjoyed this face-to-face activity. 

I went to the speaker William Rankin. His whole presentation was on making education a memorable experience for our students. It was really cool to see how he presented all of this information and backed it up with clear and understandable examples. I learned a lot from this and cannot wait to apply it in my own classroom through project based learning. 

I learned how to better use Explain Everything and that there is an app called Tiny Tap. Both of these are great for lesson but can also be used by the students. These will make learning more fun for the students :)

For this workshop with Anne Beck, I created a history of OU timeline on Explain Everything. We learned how to group pictures with other pictures and text with other pictures as well. This was extremely useful and provided valuable information. 

Professional Development 1: Blogging with Scott Haselwood
For this session, we discussed how teachers could use blogging. We decided that blogging gives us the opportunity, as teachers to reflect on our practices, share ideas, give an audience for students, and collaborate with other teachers. Scott showed us many different ways we could make a blog through weebly, tumblr, wordpress and more. I think as a teacher, it would be really cool to have a blog that you shared with your parents and students. You could have pages for each different subject, as well as upcoming events, sign up sheets, and more. You could also have your students each have a blog where they uploaded their work for their parents to look at. There is so much you can do with a blog as a teacher, which is why I feel as though I got a lot out of this professional development. 
Professional Development 2: Explain Everything App
For this professional Development, I went to the explain everything session. Explain everything is an interactive whiteboard that allows students to talk over what they have created while interacting with the presentation that they created. I used this app many times in high school, so I was familiar with the tools. One thing that I learned, that I didn't know before, is that you can lock and group the different images or texts on the presentation. For the session we created a timeline of the history of OU. We inserted pictures, dates, and captions and locked them so that you could easily scroll through the timeline. We talked over our presentation and then uploaded it to Seesaw. I will use explain everything as a future teacher in place of giving my students a worksheet or asking them to do this on paper. I believe that they are much more motivated when they are given a device to use. 

I learned how to create a timeline in explain everything. This will be very useful in my future classroom. I would use this by having students do research projects and make timelines of their research and I would also use this as a visual to show them the content that we are learning. This app is very useful.

Before the workshop even started, Bill had established how casual and hilarious he is! I knew from the get-go that he would not only be an interesting but also engaging speaker. He began by speaking of his hometown, a small town in Texas. I thought it was strange at first but he ended up trying it all together by talking about how real estate is actually based on connection rather than location. People want to feel personally connected to something, it is human nature. He talked about how we have so much information on the tips of our hands and have no problem looking it up because we feel so connected. I had to leave the session early but I truly enjoyed that he was not afraid to challenge us to think critically and deeply! 

Code Documentary: For the first part of this PD we watched a documentary over coding in schools. The documentary focused on how at the beginning of computers there were a large number of women working with computers, and as time as gone that number has decreased. Another topic that the documentary focused on what's how we need to start incorporating computer-science in elementary school. Duing this can help better students knowledge of computers, how to code, and to eliminate stereotypes that are formed about computer-science. Students are faced with stereotypes of computer-science I high school that it is something a man should do. This is completely wrong, and there are so many opportunities through computer-science. After the video we had two speakers that talked to us about ways to incorporate younger students into computer-science activities and how involving students into computer-science starts with us, teachers.

Stand by Me: Startung off two towns, Abiliene Texas and Buffalo Gap. The speaker talked about how these towns were formed around railroads and trains, but real estate is built by connections not locations. The conversation then switched to how we remember things. We typically remember information that personally connects to us. This then brought up the conversation of semantic memory. Semantic memory can hold information in working memory for 2-3 seconds before it is forgotten. It takes up to 10 years of repetition for the information to stay. We can help make connections to information by turning the information into a song or story. A way to make information medangingful is to be created with a problem. We need to make sets of context for learning and transform information into experiences. These are things that we will carry with us and are more likely to stay. 

I went to a training offered by my work which taught us how to manage difficult behavior in children and then I went to a workshop which dealt with using the app Toontastic. I learned in the first workshop that students need to be given clear directions and they should be offered multiple options when they are having negative behavior. I can apply this to being a teacher when students are misbehaving. I can look back on this information and know the four different ways to help students and redirect the behavior to make it more positive. At the Toontastic workshop, I learned about a new app that helps students to be able to learn through making cartoons. There are many different ways that teachers would be able to have students use the app in an educational way. Teachers could use it to have students practice literacy skills in writing a story and then making an animation to go with the story they produce. Teachers could have students do things with math on the app where they draw everything themselves instead of using one of the pre-made designs. The teachers could have students draw a math problem, and then illustrate and talk through the video with audio recordings. This would help students who are maybe struggling with math to be able to take through their processes so as a teacher, you can help them figure out where they may be messing up.  I would hope to be able to incorporate this app into my future classroom to be able to teach things like math and science. 

I attended the Introduction to Tableau Workshop as part of my Innovation badge. At this workshop, I learned the basic skills associated with Tableau, a software used to present data and statistics. In the workshop we learnt how to present this data in various ways including a bar graph, pie chart and even in a map format. In all of these, we learnt how to change styles and colours and really just experiment with the app. I believe this is useful for me as a student as it has given me a new and innovative way to present data, which I can use in my classes. It could also be a useful way to present homework/study plans, to help me stay on top of Uni work. In addition to this, I think Tableau and my knowledge on how to use the app will be extremely useful for my teaching career. I believe this can be used in Math classes when children are learning about Data and Information Handling, as it will be a creative way for them to display data and allow them to learn how to display data in different ways. As the app is easy to understand, it will be easy for me to teach it to the children for them to use for themselves without many problems occurring. This may also be useful in Social Studies or Geography lessons as a way to appreciate statistics and allow for children, particularly in the upper elementary grades, to understand and learn more. Overall, I believe this workshop was extremely useful for me and taught me a lot on the importance of data visualisation, which will also be useful for my future classroom. 

I learned how to work iMovie on my iPad. I learned that I can edit videos quickly to make the sound louder which is really helpful for me in the future. I also learned how to use theatre feature which helps put my ideas together. I will use this feature in my classroom for students to create their own videos since it creates a guideline for them to follow.