The Multi Tools of My Generation

This generation is a privileged generation, for it has every resources needed to learn and have fun at the same time. At one point of time, people hungered for education in order to protect them from their human rights, political rights, and so forth. At one point of time in history, education was a need, which people fought for and died because of it. Slaved men and women were not allowed to be literate, and the mere sign of them acquiring knowledge was a threat to their masters because education will eventually give a man a way to freedom, whether in rebelling, protesting, or finding some way to escape. Today, education is something that we encourage our young to have. A privileged generation whose majority of students does not want to be taught is now having different technology used by teachers and provided by our government to trigger motivations to learn and be taught. This generation, or my generation, needs something to ignite our interest in learning, and therefore, many technologies and tools do not only upgrade our teaching as future educators, but also in hope to captivate our children's attention. In the past, educators have been blamed for not succeeding in teaching our children. When the home fails, they expect schools to pick up the problem in raising our children, but when school fails, the media (television, radio, etc.) has always caught their attention and influenced our children either positively or negatively. Because media has succeeded in influencing our children, education has managed to adopt technology and media tools like Firefox, Google Suites, Moodle, Delicious List, MS Powerpoint, MS Word, Windows Movie Maker, Digital Camera, and so forth to teach our children effectively. My personal ratings on these tools will be ranging from excellent to good to fair to poor.

The Firefox is a web browser that is safe and secured from outside advertisements, or pop-ups, that try to sneak its way to defect your computer. I may say this web browser is a hundred fold safer than Internet Explorer, another web browser. Unlike Internet Explorer, Firefox screens websites, and alerts you if you are entering an unsecured area. This lets you browse the world safe of any Spyware, or threat, against you and your computer. I rate it as an excellent tool for web browsing.

Google Suites is another tool that can be used effectively
for educational purposes. It includes an email, Google pages, blog, and so forth that lets you record daily entries or important information and messages that may be useful in the future. The Google pages lets others see your ideas and may comment on them. It's like a universal communication, where you are open to the entire world's opinion and comment on what you think. Google pages and blogs maybe helpful in a way that others can add on to your brainstormed ideas, and also give room for corrections. Google suites allow us to be creative and use technologies, such as inputing pictures in slides or blogs for others to see who you are, and also for reference purposes. Google is known for its search engine. It is one of the most popular search engines out there. I can find the world through Google Images, learn the world through Google Web, get updated through Google News, and so forth. I rate Google suites as an excellent tool due to its many useful features.

The Moodle is a great online interaction between students and their teacher/professor. It is great with keeping students reminded and clear with what is due. It is convenient because you can access it at home and any place in touch with the Internet. Within the Moodle are many tools such as online chat, student profile, and upload tools that can be used to turn in assignment online. I'm sure all the jungle creatures are shouting for joy because Moodle saves their home (trees) from being cut down. You can go on vacation and still be in time to turn in assingments because you always have that "upload" button there to save you from being physically present to turn in assignments. I personally would rate it fair because although it may be an excellent way of interacting between the class and the professor/teacher, it can have technical difficulties, which may delay lessons. Sometimes uploading can be a difficulty, and this cause frustrations and wasted time.

The Delicious List is another great tool to save your mind from the misery of having to memorize the URL address for your thousand favorite sites. You don't have to remember "www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=18383995585042?:/" because the Delicious List keeps it for you. You can always log in to your Delicious List anywhere and pull up the exact site of what you desire instead of searching and researching for the site's address using a Search Engine every time you log on the Internet. I will have to rate this tool excellent because of its easy performance of a grab-and-go links to what your looking for.

Windows Movie Maker is a tool that can edit movie clips and create a desired movie that you wish to have. This can be helpful when wanting to cut clips from different sources to demonstrate a lesson. This tool include video clips, digital pictures, sounds, and animations of slide transitions, and so forth, which allow you to express your creativity and professionalism into your film making. You can be your own film director. ( Click here for a link to a Youtube site for a tutorial on Windows Movie Maker) I would rate this tool excellent.

Microsoft Word is a Microsoft Office tool useful in creating texts that presents a professional look. It takes a student's hand written paper and gives you a neat and readable paper. It corrects spellings and sometimes help identify fragmented sentences. It helps with student's sentence structures a lot. A negative affect that it might have is students tend to depend on Microsoft Word for their spelling that they become handicapped with writing a paper on their own without misspelling words, and therefore, I am rating it good.

Microsoft Powerpoint is another Microsoft Office tool that is used to present a topic or a lesson. It is useful for a presenter by listing brief points summarizing an idea. It guides a presenter by keeping one focused and not trail away. It enables the presenter to include pictures, music, and video clips that help with the presentation. I have to say that this tool is worthy of an excellent rating.

A Digital Camera is a camera that enables one to upload pictures into a computer. It also has a feature of a video camera that may record a short clip enough to create an entire film on a Windows Movie Maker. It is very helpful with school projects. It adds pictures and clips to your texts on your Powerpoint Presentation, Google Page, Blog, and so forth, and makes learning and presenting fun and exciting. This is definitely rated as an excellent technology.

All these technologies and media tools are examples of today's educational resources used to change this generation's and rising generations' idea of learning from boredom to adventure and excitement. These not only change the students' perspective on learning, but also help educators and future educators present a more vivid, creative, and quality-enriched lesson plan.

Standards and Guides Keep Us Focused

During the making of my first lesson plan, I realized that lesson plans are going to be the daily routine of a teacher. This reminded me of how boring it is going to be to have to do that every single day. As I started on my second lesson plan on multimedia, I realized how exciting it became when I got to create my own way of how my students will learn and incorporating more technology meant more fun, ideas, and creativity to my field of teaching. Because education has advanced in a rather fast paced manner, educators must have guides and standards like the ASSURE lesson plan and NCATE standards to keep one from getting off track from the targeted goal.

The world strives for convenience in everything we do, and technology has given us that opportunity. It has given us the opportunity to give our children a better education by making teaching so much easier. Technology has provided visuals to the visual learners, audio to the audio learners, first hand experience to the kinesthetic learners, and special features to those who have special needs. It has given America’s children the chance to be educated no matter who they are and what they are capable or incapable of doing. Technology has caused lesson plans to bloom with success.

The ASSURE lesson plan has been a wonderful guide to making a lesson plan. It has eased the dreadful idea of creating a lesson plan every day for an entire academic year. I am very glad to see that there is a model of a lesson plan that can help keep me focused on my targeted task. After I finished my multimedia lesson plan, I got the feeling of excitement that cannot wait to see the lesson plan performed. This lesson plan has shown me examples of many things that I can do to incorporate technology into teaching.

The NCATE standards have also been playing a role of a reminder of what my goal is. As a teacher in this generation of technology, I have to remind myself of the upgrade of knowledge and technology, for I tend to see education today as the same as what it was to me as a middle or high school student. The fast growth of computers and higher knowledge in the lives of today’s children is amazingly afar off than it was during my elementary, middle, or high school years. Therefore, NCATE’s standards of incorporating technology in teaching is something new, and the standard guide keeps me in track with the generation of intelligent children.

I, therefore, conclude that teaching is something that can never be static because knowledge is always evolving. New ways of teaching come into play, and without a guide, such as the ASSURE lesson plan, and a goal, such as NCATE standards, we may easily drift into what we feel like teaching that may not necessarily be helpful to our learning children. Students who take what they learn in class and apply them outside are great fruits and rewards of every day, hour, minute, and second of time spent doing lesson plans.

Accommodations Bring Equality

As an educator, I will be expecting students with special needs to waltz through my doors seeking a teacher to accommodate him or her. In this case, lesson plans will be made to accommodate all learners no matter what the physical conditions are.

Before this class, I wasn't expecting to teach any children with disabilities, but I realized that in the real world, I will be facing students who will need more attention than others, and therefore, I will have to structure my lesson plan to include everyone's participation.

As for the Baseball Copyright Game, I imagined having students with disabilities, such as one who cannot walk, one who is deaf, and another who is blind. The game will allow every learner to participate, and this is something that is different than what is recorded in the history of education, when students with special needs were separated from other students, and sometimes had no chance in being educated or had no school that would accommodate their needs.

1. Wheelchair
Student in wheelchair will be able to participate with no difficulty. He or she can wheel himself around the bases.
2. Blind
The blind can participate with an assistance of their teammates as they are led around the bases.
3. Deaf
The deaf can also participate. The deaf should already have an assistant who interprets through sign language when he/she registered for the class. Special accommodations are provided by the school for people with special needs, and therefore, through the sign language interpretation, there would be no difficulty in playing the game.

Introductory Remarks

Hi! My name is May. Welcome to my blog. The following blogs will be in reference to my ED451 class, which is Audio Visual. This class' goal is to equip future educators with advanced technologies and progressive lesson plans that will help teach future classrooms with an incorporated technology lesson plan. Living in a fast pace generation where new technologies keep evolving in a rather fast speed, educators are handed great responsibilities. For now there's no excuses that a physically challenged student can't do what physically-able students can do because we have the technology and the resources to teach students equally. Every student can participate in any activity today. Therefore, this class helps direct future teachers into enlightenment on how to incorporate technology and special needs to today's lesson plan. The following blogs are reactions to the assessments that this class has engaged into.