week 13

    Teachers are constantly designers.  Designers have to layout plans to follow so that the result is the best outcome,  teachers have to do just that.  Teachers have to design their lessons around the type of students that they have and around how the students learn. So every time they teach a lesson it is completely different.  Even the way that the teacher lays out the room arrangement affects how well the students are learning and so the teacher learns to design and adapt a room for the type of classroom setting.
    Scratch is a very important and useful program for in the classroom, mainly a programming classroom.  Scratch helps new students that have never programmed before the basics of programming and how it works.  This program takes graphics and by clicking and dragging the user can create a very simple program.  Now while this program cannot replace the normal way of programming it can help teach basic concepts, which is why it is so useful for programming classrooms.
    Digital storytelling is a new way to help allow students to be creative.  Digital storytelling requires that a student write a story, then after that is organized the student has to become digitally creative.  To be digitally creative the student must make a video to go along with their story, then using the appropriate software  edit the video using their imagination.  This form of story telling allows for the development of creativity in many new and different ways.  Since there are so many ways to edit something digitally there are nearly unlimited ways for something to be edited.  Thus promoting new and creative ideas.  I believe it would work in my classroom because I enjoy when the students are creative and I tend to do anything that will promote this.
    Visualization is very important to completely understanding math. Math and especially in the higher levels of math deal with very complex concepts that involve functions.  The functions get warped in such ways that many times its very hard to understand what is going on, but with visualization it helps the students completely understand what is going on during the problem.  There are many programs that help to visualize what would be going on is such problems probably the most popular being a graphing calculator. 
    I do not believe that someone can completely rely on learning from a television.  While this form of teaching can be very affective in some situations. Most types of learning need to be active and involved so that the student can fully understand by asking questions and get hands on experience rather then watching someone else accomplish something.  Many times while watching the tv the viewer can “zone out” and not really pay any attention to what they are looking at.  While learning something that the viewer finds completely interesting from a tv, may be a good use. Attempting to learn something that the student is not interested at all in can be very hard.  Where having a teacher could help the student in ways a video cant.

                    references 

Jonassens, D., Howland, J., Marra, R. M.,Grismond, D. (2008).  Meaningful
           learning with technology. Columbus: Pearson, Merrill Prentice Hall.

Voicethread

    Voicethread looks like it would be really convenient for the classroom, and  I really liked it.  Voicethread looked really convenient and user friendly.  I think that while someone is talking about whatever media happens to be up, that drawing can really help focus on whatever the speaker is talking about.  Allowing multiple speakers makes it nice for group activities, maybe even for a online class even.
    I would use it in my lesson plan if I had a online lesson that required the students to work together.  It would get everyone together to discuss no matter where they are at.  They could still do many of the activities that are on my lesson plan.  The drawing and quick acting activities would be the main activities that would work best.
    I would use this in a classroom when the students are having a busy time during the semester.  Students and especially high school students have really busy schedule with all of the extra curricular activities.  With Voicethread I could have the students get together online no matter where they are at.  I as the teacher could get on and help explain certain things that might help with their studies.

                                                                                 References

Group conversations around images, documents, and videos. (2007). Retrieved from              http://voicethread.com/#

week 11 chapter 3

    The three most important Principles to me are practice principal, discovery principal, and multimodal principal .  practice principal is important because it focuses on letting the students practice the task.  This is very important for mathematics, my teaching subject, because the only way to get better is to try different ways to solve problems and see what works best when.  discovery principal is also important because in math is continually building upon itself so math is naturally taking what you already know and looking into it much deeper. Which is what the discovery principal is about, taking prior knowledge and looking into it much deeper to have a better understanding of it. Lastly the multimodal principal , is important manly because its about learning using different signs. Now while this may not necessarily be directly useful for math, but it will help because not all speech is communicated directly though speech.  Having the students learn this way will help them to learn to read other signs of speech.
    There are many ways to create a simulation for a classroom, but one that would be most helpful for my classroom being a mathematics teacher, would to have the students create a business of some sort.  This will help for a math classroom because it would not only have the students handle money, but help them with problem solving skills that is essential for developing mathematic skills, and lastly have them thinking creatively while working together.  The students would have a limited amount of money to start with so they would have to come up with the necessities for there business and how much to buy. Then set prices to make money off the merchandise. Then they would have to create a marketing system to bring customers in to purchase from there business and where there business would be located at to bring in customers.  Essentially trying to create and maintain a business, and possibly working with other groups in the classroom to learn how the fiscal portion of how a business works.
    What I feel are the important principals are practice principal, discovery principal, and multimodal principal. Mainly because they have a major affect on helping in the subject that I want to teach, math.  A simulation that I would try to create would be having the students create a business and have them decided how to conduct their business for it to grow and become successful.

references  

Jonassens, D., Howland, J., Marra, R. M.,Grismond, D. (2008).  Meaningful

           learning with technology. Columbus: Pearson, Merrill Prentice Hall.