Journal 7: Professional Learning Network

     This is the first time that I had used the networking concept for my professional career.  It has been a wonderful learning experience by being engaged in networking for my professional growth, and I’ve learned so much by networking professionally.  

     The affinity group that I joined is Classroom 2.0.  In this affinity group are teachers that incorporate technology used into their lessons and for everything else in their classroom.  In this affinity group what I’ve been learning professional is by participating in the Classroom 2.0 LIVE presentations on Saturday night.  Where teachers get to share what technology applications or programs they’re using in the classroom that is showing student success.  During the presentations the audiences can ask questions by sharing questions on the desktop, and the audiences can engaged with each other by using the chat feature on the desktop.  I watched a presentation with Linda Rood who teaches a second/third grade combo class and she shared how she uses the iPad applications of Kidblog, Edmodo, Spelling and Brain Pop to enhance students learning experiences and students meeting individual goals.  She showed the audience on how to create an iBook and videos, and showed examples of her students work using these programs.  During the two hour live presentations I was expose to different applications and features on the iPad that I wasn’t aware that can enhance student learning and have students meet individual learning goals.  On the desktop I was interacting with teachers bouncing ideas back and forth of how else can we the applications, or what projects and activities are students can do.  By being part of the affinity group my professional development is growing because I am collaborating, learning, and engaging with other teachers of how incorporating technology in the classroom is beneficial to the students.  Using the RSS feeds has made me expand on my professional knowledge.  Through Digg Stream I was to enhance my knowledge about the Common Core Standards on how the standards will be implementing in the classroom, and how to incorporate lessons the new standards.  I am preparing for my professionally by learning and studying the new Common Core Standards, so that when I do get hired full time as a teacher I am prepare of what the standards are and how to teach the standard to my future students.

     I’ve really enjoyed using blogs in this course to complete the assignments.  This is a great way for us to express our thoughts and experiences by writing about it for our different assignments.  Also using the blog for this course is a great way to stay connected with our classmates by reading what they wrote about, and we can comment on each other page with suggestions, or ideas to enhance their original ideas.  Some of my co-workers, family, and friends have found my blog and they told me they’ve enjoyed reading what I’ve learned in this course thus far, and how I’m using technology in the course as well.  Having a blog in the classroom would be great for students to improve on writing skills, exchanging ideas with each other students, and have students would have accountability to make sure that their blog is proofread, edited, and submitted by the due day.  With students having blogs it is important for students to have privacy and to protect their identity from outsiders.  Teachers need to set up blogs to where the teacher is the only that can see their blogs in order to protect the students from outsiders.  For my personal social networking I don’t use Twitter, but I can see how using Twitter would be beneficial for my professional networking and also to be used in the classroom.  A teacher can give out an assignment for the students to find an image or video of a particular topic and the students can hash tag the following image or video to the feed.  Using Twitter could have been more effective in this class if we would have followed our classmates and been given an assignment through Twitter to see the out coming of using Twitter for the assignment.

Journal 6: Reflection of the First 5 Week

     I’ve learned so many things about html and css over the past five weeks.  With each class session and doing the book exercises gave me more of an understanding about how html and css work and function. While doing the book exercises and lab work the one thing I truly learned was to be patient while typing in HTML Elements.  I learned that one small error in your HTML element can changed the whole formation of your html page. 

     For instance if you’re missing the close tabs </> of the html elements they will continue to run until an end mark is made.  In one of the book exercises I had typed in left margin: and then provide the coding and my page wasn’t indent it to the left.  After looking over my elements I realize that the reason why my page didn’t indent because I forgotten to put a dash which it should have been left-margin:.  The hardest and frustrating thing about html and css is when I would preview the page and code links were broken which caused images not to appear.  Which meant I would have to go back and save images under jpg or gif, take the picture out of the images folder and place it in a different location, or rewrite the location of the url for the images. This happened during book exercise in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.  To link up the exercises to our Cal Poly Account we had place all the exercises and save the work as index.html.  Well in Chapter 6 and 7 the home page was also place as an index.html which caused confusion for the links to go to other page, and for images not to appear on the screen.  I had to save Chapter 6 and 7 index page in a different name and go to the other pages linked to the exercise and change the html coding each of the pages.  My changing the html coding on each of the pages allowed my links to go to different pages, and for my images to appear on the page.  

     Another hard thing was to making sure that the html and css were coded exactly in order to have the right html page be displayed correctly.  It was so rewarding when I was able to figure out where my mistakes was and I knew how to fix my error.  It has been very rewarding seeing my process during the first five weeks up till now.  With spending time in the computer lab working on the book exercises and seeing the final html and css complete and done correctly made me feel accomplished and excited because I’m doing to these exercises successfully.  I can read or hear an html element or css element such as paragraph element, heading element, table row/column, italicize, indent, background, making sure each page starts with a !DOCTYPE html, have an open and close html and body for my page and etc. and know which elements to type into Dreamweaver without relying on notes to look up that information.  Everything that I’ve learned to this point has prepare me to start designing my webpage for the final project.

http://www.csupomona.edu/~cpeniche/ged512/book%20excerises/

http://www.csupomona.edu/~cpeniche/ged512/labs/labs.html  

Journal 5: Twitter

I’ve enjoyed using the social media such as Facebook and MySpace to stay connected with friends and family.  The fun part about these social networking sites is to creating a profile on to share with family and friends updates that are occurring with your life at this moment.  I like how on these social networking sites you can post pictures of events and posted them on your page, or even write an update by writing a status update to inform people what you’re doing.  When it comes to Twitter I don’t see the fun of having an accounting.  I think Twitter is just another way of texting messaging people, but you’re doing it on-line.  Recently, Twitter is now known as the social media sites that over uses hash tags.  For every post or even photo there has to be a hash tag next to each word to make that post or photo seems important.  With Twitter you constantly have to stay updated with tweets, and post tweets in order to stay active in the Twitter community.  I can see as why celebrities are constantly tweeting so they continue being in the spot life for their fans, and to stay current.

Having Twitter in the classroom would be beneficial in the classroom, but I believe that Twitter can be used in the middle/high schools and not in elementary schools.  At the elementary schools to stay connected with students I would have a class websites for students and parents to stay connected with me.  I also see that having Twitter in the classroom can also place stress on the teacher.  The teacher would have to be someone that is constantly checking the tweets of students on their phone or computer and would allow to have twenty-four hour access to students.  Also a teacher has to ensure that students are being protect from other harms that are on the Internet and have their accounts privates to others.