Sites and making a website.

https://sites.google.com/site/thewaysofenglish/

Making a website was really fun and challenging!! I really enjoyed the ability to look around the site and see the format that they had as the example and it really gave me some good ideas on how I could make my own site for my students. I did struggle to figure out how to upload hyperlinks and pictures but after some time I eventually figured it out. The site makes it really nice to just type in the site or image URL and it takes it from there. I really enjoyed the versatility that the site allows in the style of the format you can choose. The format style that I chose was the horizontal tab option. I felt like this was easier to navigate for most students or new viewers of the site. The horizontal tab gives a good impression of what the site has too offer and quick links to any interests within the site. Being in the digital age and having students access the internet a lot,  we should not expect them to have a huge attention span. This is why I favor this particular link configuration, it is quick and easy to navigate.

I really liked the revision notes. At first I did not know what to think of it or how it could be useful for me, but I realized that it was good to take a look at those because it let me know where and what I was trying to do. If I ever want to go back and wonder why did I do that or go back because I forgot I can. The revision history is a really great tool to have for organizing and revisiting lost ideas.

Drawings

Using the Drawings from google is some what similar to paint from Microsoft with some small variations. I did not see where you could insert an image into paint.  I also found the interface was harder to navigate with windows paint. I had actually never used drawings before, but found it very easy to use. There was not anything that I was confused on how to use or where to find what I was looking for. I did try to put together the tanagram square which I did find a little difficult in how to manipulate the shapes in the way I needed to get the square to come out correctly.  The lessons teaching how to use google drawings were informative and showed some things, I did not know how to do.

I took a look at the middle school lesson plan and found the lesson plan to be very well done. I really enjoyed the video, because at first glance learning about tanagram might be boring or unexciting, but the story really brings it to life and helps the students understand what is going on. It is important for the students to grasp what this particular lesson is trying to convey and this particular lesson I believe does well to captivate the students leading into the work.

Chapter 8 we find graham discussing drawings and how this program can be used to instruct students in the Common Core standards.
Graphic organizers
Common Core wants to set standards that help students achieve and are prepared for the future and that might just mean college. With drawings you can organize your thoughts which is very important when writing. Being able to organize your thoughts or ideas to later write a paper for H.S and college is an imperative skill to have. Google drawings will also help classes move toward a paperless classroom. With using google drawings to organize, students and teachers can seamlessly share their thoughts and ideas online for the teacher to look at quickly between students and make corrections if needed is very efficient.

Math Concepts
We all know that Math is a subject that is important to learn for all ages and can be applied in various ways throughout our world. One way that Google drawings can help both achieve the Common Core standards and helps students manipulate and understand various shapes is by using Google drawings. A geometry class can simply set up a number of different shapes and allow the students to move them all around and change the degrees and describe to the teacher what is going on or what degree they are changing it too.

Flow Charts
Creating flowcharts in science and math is a great way to take the information of processes and make it graphically appealing. This is a great differentiation tool for students. Have students use Google Drawings to take a complex set of steps and make a flowchart. For example, students studying the scientific method could create a custom graphic organizer outlining the steps. There is no doubt that Common Core standards describe that understanding charts and graphs is an important part of students growth in presenting information.


Graham, Michael J. (2013-04-23). Google Apps Meets Common Core (p. 132). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.

Self Grading Quiz

Certainly as future teachers we do not have to be told how much time you have to consume creating lesson plans and grading papers. Having the ability to create a self-grading quiz or test is something that should be used in every teachers arsenal if they have the option to do so. This tool will allow teachers to save a lot of time and effort, so that they can concentrate and focus on the lecture portion or other important parts of the lesson. If you really think about a quiz or test, it really is not that important of a part of your class, sure it's important for grades, or evaluations, but in reality it's your ability to transfer the information that you teach that allows them to do well on the test. Taking a test and how you teach your lesson is not always directly related, but what if a teacher had an extra hour to prepare for their lecture? What if teachers had more time to create or research games for their class instead of using that time grading quizzes?  Below you will see my practice quiz, which I encourage you to check out. Certainly the one drawback for some teachers is the willingness or ability to use multiple choice answers or the type of questions they can ask. I encourage everyone to use google forms. Google forms has about seven different types of questions you can ask among them, multiple choice,short answer, text etc. Google forms also allows you to give hints to the question if needed to assist students on those harder questions.

Using google forms also allows for you to evaluate student performance based off different styles of presenting your lessons.  Every student learns differently, but what google forms allows you to do is quickly evaluate students knowledge of the information and relate it back to how you taught your lesson. You can compare students results to the different approaches you take and be able to evaluate which approaches best works for your class. Additionally, with using google forms you can send quiz results directly to parents if they want to know how there kids are performing on a weekly bases. We all know that kids all try and hide there grades from time to time and this might be a good way to keep some parents in the loop. I would warn also though that parents knowing every grade or quiz score might impede the student from their ability to do better without parent involvement. Every child has to overcome a poor score on their own and learn to work harder, with added pressure because parents might know every grade might impede the student. Close evaluation must be taken with each student and how they react.

Below is a great HOW TO video of google forms.


Google Forms is also not a very difficult program to use, it does take a little bit to figure out where the embed code is and to figure out the layout of questions and background you might like. After the first 15 minutes of getting comfortable with where everything is it became very easy to create my own forms and self-grading quizzes.

In chapter 7 of graham.

4. Present information, findings, and supporting evidence such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

5. Make strategic use of digital media and visual displays of data to express information and enhance understanding of presentations.

Graham, Michael J. (2013-04-23). Google Apps Meets Common Core (p. 117). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.

Above you will see the Common Core requirements found in chapter 7 forms. Common Core wants to make sure that students have a strong understanding of not only presenting information but the ability to organize the information they collect. Google forms can allow a student to conduct a survey and send it to people via email or gather the information from those who look at it online. Through gathering this information in the survey the student can then organize the answers and give a strong answer to the topic of their survey. This allows students to prepare for higher education which requires students to look at a variety of different opinions and information and come to their own conclusion with solid evidence.
Another way that google forms can be used is through the use of a questionnaire or survey from a school faculty member. There are many times when parents opinions and information about something is important, google forms would allow you to do this and post it on the schools Facebook, or other social media site to gather that important information. Of course this survey or questionnaire can also be sent via email to parents as well.
Google Forms allows teachers to capture and evaluate data efficiently. Teachers are now more than every being looked at from the bases of how their students perform. Because of this new evaluation style, it is important for teachers to stay on top of their students progress and performance. Graham points out how google forms can be a very effective way to do this efficiently.

GoogleSheets

Today's assignment I had the pleasure of making a grade book spreadsheet! I found this to be very fun... mostly.. I loved being able to put in the grades and watch the page come a live.  The google spread sheet is very similar to excel. I had used the google spreadsheet only a few times. There were not many differences, but one I did notice was that Excel has a lot more choices for templates that I found more desirable as a future teacher. Certainly I found some pretty good ones for google spreadsheets, but I wanted to implement a grade book that had three separate spread sheets. One for attendance, one for a compilation of points earned and  points earned per week. One thing that I realized was that I would have to formulate my own template for a weekly assignment list. This was my major struggle and eventually I came to a solution but could not implement it fully. I learned a lot by using and making my grade book and cannot wait to give it another try again. Below you will find the link to my grade book.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NJP0vQWf4xyNX5fhggRbVyzaIlddICa3lvqWnzaEjOU/edit#gid=4

Graham Chapter 6

 Taking a look into chapter six we again find how google sheets is great for the common core standards. Common Core leads teachers helps them guide students to understand the process of Mathematics Common Core standards wants to make sure that the students do not just capture the knowledge, but that they can successfully understand how to implement it. Google spreadsheets is a great tool to implement and test this knowledge common core wants students to have.. Being able to see number sense and type in the formula allows students to get a good taste and understanding of how their numbers, how Mathematics can apply to life. Certainly there is a formula we use in google, but the formulas are not posted anywhere, it allows the students to really be creative and explore all the possibilities of numbers and sequences.

Google Presentations

There is not a huge difference in Google Presentations and Microsoft PowerPoint, but the few differences there are might make people want to look into using Google presentations more often.

Google Presentations

Pros:
Allows users to collaborate on the document online.
Can access the document from any source.
Auto saves
Easy to use.

Cons:
Need an Internet Connection
Few designs/limited template creativity.


Microsoft PowerPoint

Pros:

Does not need the Internet
Ability to take notes on the slides
A lot of slide options

Cons:

Cost money
Not easily accessible by coworkers, friends, teachers etc.
Need PowerPoint to open the slide presentation.





In Grahams chapter 5 we find that google presentations offers the user the ability to make presentations using images, drawings and other graphics that correlate to the guidelines of common core, Common core guidelines for students presentations are "express and listen carefully to ideas, integrate information from oral, visual, quantitative, and media sources, evaluate what they hear, use media and visual displays strategically to help achieve communicative purposes, and adapt speech to context and task.”

Not only does google presentations allow students to create beautiful presentation to captivate their audience, it allows them to share those presentations with students, teachers and anyone else. The simplicity of sharing their work online is a huge advantage. During college I always used Microsoft PowerPoint and I cannot remember the amount of annoyances of emailing things to myself to work on it in a computer lab. Google presentations allows you to  have access anywhere. On way I can see how this can be useful is that students can grade their peers without anonymously. You could easily make an assignment where you have to go online and grade the different presentations on content among helping each other as well.

Teachers will find that the simplicity and flexibility of google presentations might be something they favor over Microsoft power point because google presentations is compatible with importing PowerPoint slides into the google program. Google presentations can be implemented into any computer, so if your school is Mac supporters, no problem! If they love Microsoft, no problem!

One issue that teachers and students must be careful of is that when sharing information to make sure that the team is aware of the changes and do not walk into a presentation and the order or material be different.

Over all I like what google presentations has to offer, even though I was a heavy PowerPoint user. Even with the lack of template creativity among some other things, it really is not a factor when the object under the common core requirements is to make sure students can accurate make a PowerPoint presentation. Google Presentations allows you to do that.



Graham, Michael J. (2013-04-23). Google Apps Meets Common Core (p. 72). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.

I am most familiar with Microsoft word and that is because I mostly use windows operating system. I have also used google docs however.

One of the major advantages that Word has is its versatility.
Word has the ability to give you a lot of editing, font and other applications within its program.
Google Docs does not have as many editing options.  Word also carries many professional editing abilities.

Word does not have the ability to be used anywhere like google docs. There has been many situations where I have needed to write something out and did not have access to a computer and google docs helped me. This is the biggest advantage of google docs, its ability to not be restricted by the device, but can be accessed anywhere.

Google docs cannot really attach or upload images, but does posses collaborative editing, the ability for multiple people to work on one document.


pg 43 of Graham talks about the necessity for students to start using digital tools to creatively write. Having access to google docs is easier for younger students in this critical component in common core Anchor Standard 6 because it allows students to get a taste of creative writing within technology without the burden of a keyboard.