My Beliefs

       After reading and watching these videos, I feel even more now, that technology can only benefit a student's learning.  I know that using all these different tools and research can only help us to progress in our life and help us build our knowledge of the past, future and present.
      However, as a PE teacher, I feel that helping my students to stay active and participate in physical activity daily is more important to me than teaching them how to use technology.  I dont think that I will be using a lot of technology based lessons in my class. I want to be able to teach my students how to live a healthy life by having them do things, demonstrate their learning by doing physical activity.  I know that there are many tools on the internet that can help my students learn about healthy lifestyles like the Food Pyramid and other resources and I plan on using that type of technology in my classroom.  But as far as everyday use of technology in my class I dont see that as beneficial when I am wanting them to realize the importance of having physical activity be a part of their everyday life. 
        I think that having an opportunity to use technology in a PE classroom can benefit my students.  There are many uses of technology in sports and just an overall healthy lifestyle and I hope that as their future teacher I will be able to learn more about how to incorporate these technologies into my classroom so that I can effectively teach and engage all of my students.  I know that technology is what the students know and enjoy using and if I can teach using technology while having them be physically active, I feel like I will be able to teach to all of my students effectively and they will enjoy exercising.  That is my goal as a PE teacher, to have my students enjoy exercising and see the benefits of it.

Lessons Learned

           I found that these articles were very interesting.  I grew up with technology in my home and have seen it progress throughout the years. I knew what it was like not having a cell phone and having dial-up internet.  Technology these days is right there at the tip of your fingers.  Our students today are engrossed in it everyday, and as teachers we need to accept it and learn how to help our students use these tools for their benefit.
          I learned that are several ways to incorporate technology into lessons. As teachers we need to be willing to research new ways and ideas of using technology in our classroom because that is what are students know.  They know how to use technology and I think that if teachers know how to use technology in their classroom they can teach to the students and they will be able to effectively engage all their students. 
         From reading and watching these videos I learned that incorporating the use of technology into classrooms can not only benefit and enhance the learning of our students but it can benefit the future of our students with them knowing how to use different programs and applications and research tools.  If we are going to teach the students about technology it is only going to help them out in their future because techonology is only going to continue to progress.  If these students are learning how to use technology in their everyday lives it will benefit them in their future careers and it could help in developing a better community and economy especially if they are learning to communicate and cooperate well with others.

Strenghts and Weaknesses

Some of my strengths and weaknesses that I think I have when it comes to technology is that I know the basics and I understand how to use them in my everyday life and also in a classroom.  I was mostly scored as an aprentice because I am aware of the technology, the uses of it and I understand the need and importance of incorporating it not only in my personal life but also professional life and school life.
Some goals that I would like to accomplish as a future teacher teaching PE is learning how and what kind of tools that are out there that can help me teach cues of sports and the aspects of a balanced healthy lifestyle to my students.  I know that one of my weaknesses is using Microsoft Excel so a tutorial on that will help me in keeping my records of students grades and progess organized so that I can be a more effective teacher. Another goal that I would like to accomplish as a teacher is finding websites that I can provide to my students that are safe.  If I am going to be giving them assignments that involve them using the internet I will want them to know the dangers of the internet and what to avoid and how to find current and factual information. A tutorial I found that could help me with that is Recommended Search Strategy:   Analyze Your Topic & Search With Peripheral Vision  from UC Berkeley - Teaching Library Internet  Workshops. Using this tutorial and the information from it can help to find and search for website that have safe and useful information for my students to use. 

Powerpoint Blog

What? We are learning about powerpoint activities and presentations.  We are learning how to create powerpoint activities and how to be able to teach that to our students so that they will know how to do that themselves.

So What?As a teacher I don't think that I will be spending all this time creating this activity because I want my students to learn to be active and learn sports by doing.  As a student right now it is an assignment that is really overwhelming to me right now.  I have a hard time with thinking how this can apply to me as a PE teacher. I'm not really sure why we are doing this, maybe so that we can broaden our knowledge about technology so that we can teach it to our students. This information may be a little hard to apply to me today as a student and as a future PE teacher.  I think that it is useful to know just for kicks but I have a hard time thinking I will use this in my classroom. I think it is cool that there are all these types of resources and ways to create projects and ideas and putting them all together but I also think it takes a lot of my time which I don't have a whole lot of right now.  To my colleagues it is a way to collaborate with each other. 

Now What?
I don't really think this means much to me right now.  I am having a hard time with this class in trying to figure out ways to incorporate this into a physical education class.  Videos and visual aids can be helpful to some students but I think real learning can take place when they actually participate and demonstrate the actions themselves. We are doing this so we can learn how to bring technology into the classroom and broaden our resources. I think this can only help me by trying to figure out ways to teach differently and mix things up in my lesson plans but I don't think sitting at a computer is beneficial in teaching physical education. Technology is important and ever growing and it is important as teachers to be involved and to expand their ideas and a good way to do that is through technology and through other colleagues.

Digital Cameras and Picasa

What? This week we learned about Picasa and how to manipulate images using this program.  We also used these images and put them into a power point presentation and then we put these two things onto our classroom website.
So What?To me as a student right now it doesn't really mean much to me except a grade and it was time consuming.  The scavenger hunt was fun, and manipulating the pictures was fun and I think in the future I would use this program, but putting these onto a website was hard for me.  I understand that it could be helpful in the future in helping me to know how to import and link it to other websites. We are doing this to help us to get a feel for technology and learning how to be able to share ideas with other people and collaborate with others. In my other classes it probably wont help me at all.  Most of my classes don't deal with the technology but deal with physical activity. This technology is good to know but I don't think I will ever use it as much as I did in this class and I thought that it was a pain to link it to other websites. To my colleagues it is beneficial to know so that we can collaborate together and share ideas.

Now What? To my future students I think it will be a lot of work. I don't know if I would ever assign this much computer work to my PE class.? This helped me with my current schema just by showing me that they are tons of resources and good free programs out there that can enhance my lessons. I don't think this will change the type of teacher I will be in the future because I will be focusing more on making sure my students are being active and participating in exercise activities. I still am trying to figure out how I would assign projects that use these types of programs so that learn how to better use technology while learning how to be active and learning the basic concepts and cues of sports. This knowledge of programs may help in enhancing my lesson but a lot of my lessons are going to be direct instruction and the students wont be sitting down and watching power points. This information may help me be a better colleague because it will help me to find ways to keep in touch with other teachers and it will help me to try and find different ways to better teach my students and searching for advice from my fellow teachers. This may change the type of collaboration by us trying to help each other find other programs and ideas for our class and we could be able to share our ideas with each other without having to meet together and we can communicate through pictures and email and other forms of communication.

Internet Safety

What? We are learning about internet safety and how to make sure we are getting reliable information. We are reading about internet safety and how to find information that is correct, useful and accurate. We are also looking at websites and reading articles that can help us know what to look for when we are researching and looking up information on the internet.

So What?Knowing all this information will help me to make sure that my students are finding correct and accurate information on the internet.  It will also help me know whether are not my students are giving credit to those that need it when they are using their information.  We are doing this to further our knowledge on internet safety and how to protect our future students.  It can help me to be able to pick out correct information on the internet and it will help me to obey the rules and laws of the internet. This technology is important to me because it is important to know what to keep protected and how to stay safe while finding good information.  This should help me and my colleagues by both of us collaborating together to know whether or not our students are doing what they are supposed to while finding information on the internet and allowing us to keep ourselves and our students safe.

Now What? For my future students it will be important for them to know the ethics of the internet especially as they grow older and are having to do more research. As technology continues to grow they will need to know how to keep themselves protected. It won't really change much, I know that if I do give my students an assignment where they have to use the internet, I will need to make sure they know the rules of plagarism and that they make sure they know what to look for concerning correct information and how they can keep their information safe. It wont change my type of teaching but it will make me more aware of what is going on and what to look for when I may give an assignment where they have to use the internet.  Research projects on health and fitness is a good assignment that I may be able to use in my future classroom.  This will help me as a teacher become more aware of the internet rules and laws and making sure my students are safe.  

Service Learning Project

Service Learning Project

Lincoln Academy is a Charter school in Pleasant Grove, Utah.  We have been working with Mrs. Larsen in her health class.  The class is fairly small compared to other classes.  The number of students is 24, making it convenient for teaching purposes.  The class is not too big, nor too small.

Mrs. Larsen has been an excellent teacher to work with.  She has been helpful at providing ideas of what she would like for the classroom.  We all get along well and have never felt uncomfortable to ask her questions and get feedback on the digital story that we are working on.  
Our digital story was an introduction to her unit on drug use and abuse.  Mrs. Larsen loves our video.  She likes that we were able to show pictures of what a particular drug looks like and then what it does to a person.  She was glad that we created the video for her classroom use.   Mrs. Larsen was impressed with our work and thought it was very well done.  She expressed that it was a great piece of material for her classroom.
The lesson that we completed fit perfectly with what she was looking for.  It was a great introduction to her unit.  I think that she enjoyed that she was involved in the process of creating the video.  It enabled her to tailor the video to her needs and what she wanted.  Mrs. Larsen was able to gain new ideas for making learning exciting and received new materials that will capture her students’ attention.

The training session did not go so well.  She was not very interested in learning how to create such media herself.  She was able to see how media can be incorporated to enhance learning but felt like it was too much time and effort.  She appreciated the media and was interested in having media in the future but felt that it was not worth the extra time and effort.  We showed her some very simple ideas such as Photo Story, for quickly creating digital media for the classroom.  She was impressed with how simple it was but I don’t know that she will use it in the future.  Not because she doesn’t see the value, but because she feels the short amount of time is not worth it.

We felt that this experience was a little time consuming and it was hard to be able to get together with each other to collaborate and put the digital story together.  We liked the having Mrs. Larsen give us feedback on ideas that we have had on the project.  We enjoyed working with her and how observing how she may incorporate these technology-based lessons into her health class.

From this experience we were able to see other ways of teaching a lesson through technology.  Although we are both unsure of how we are going to use this information that we are learning in class in our future lessons, working with Mrs. Larsen has helped us with trying to see how technology can be used in the lesson, and with being creative in lesson planning and bringing different teaching styles into the classroom even though she wasn’t really interested in it herself.

We both had mixed feelings about this project.  Me as a PE teacher, I don’t find this information useful for my future lessons because we will be participating in physical activity pretty much every day.  Taylor thought that this project would be beneficial to her for her future lessons.  We did like working with another teacher to see how it could be used in an actual classroom setting, but we both are still a little unsure as to how often we will use technology lessons, like these digital stories in our classrooms.