My Electronic Portfolio on Weebly

This latest assignment is an electronic portfolio for my future use. It's done on weebly.com.. It's useful for me as an educator to show a portfolio of myself and my accomplishments in a professional manner. I do plan to update this website in the future as my credentials grow. I liked the fact that this website was very user friendly. It was not difficult to add stuff on, edit, and publish. This saves so much time and money, and also saves me from asking and learning how to make my own website on my own. Check it out here!

Elluminating my presentation

Using Technology As A Remedial Resource To Improve

View more presentations from waltmendez.

For today's class, we each presented our power points on our selected topics on elluminate.com. My selected topic was using technology as a remedial resource for improving student learning. Overall, I thought that my presentation went well. The only problem was that it was difficult to predict the quality of the internet speed that everyone else had that might have affected how they viewed my presentation. If I had the chance to do it again, I would make sure that everyone had the opportunity to get to a place that had good internet speed. I learned from talking to other classmates that they were actually only able to hear my presentation, because they were at a place where the internet speed was slow. Luckily for them, there was someone with an aircard that had faster internet speed, and they were able to follow along from there. The most exciting thing that I learned actually came from Victoria Tudela's presentation on podcasting. I was not really familiar with podcasting until her presentation. I'm certain I will look into that aspect when I explore different mediums for integrating technology.

elluminate.com

Today's class was very interesting. It was my first time exploring the online conferencing of elluminate.com. We had a guest speaker from Spokane, Washington, Bree Reynolds. She gave the class lots of good tips and resources that we could look into to integrate technology in our clsasrooms. Elluminate is a good alternative to learning because is provides a fun and interactive setting to a conference that we could use in our classrooms. Of course, this would be more suited for the upper elementary, middle, and high school students. Nonetheless, it's a great tool that we could use to conference with people outside the classroom. The only probnlem that I had when using elluminate, was sometimes the audio lagged. It was also very difficult to share video's. When Bree was sharing the youtube video for us to watch about using the wii-mote to make your own low-budget smartboard, the video lagged so much that all I could really do was listen. Other than that, I enjoyed the experience and I look forward to sharing this with my colleagues at work.

slideshare

I picked the topic of the "6 C's of Motivation" mainly because I was interested to find out what the “6 C’s” was all about. I learned that the use of technology, although it can be quite expensive, can be very helpful in motivating your students to learn. I like the fact that slideshare allows our personally created power points to be stored and viewed on this website. Slideshare is easy to use, and it’s free; making it a plus for teachers. I would use slideshare in the future for my students to make my power points available for them to view even while they are at home. That’s a start. Maybe, afterwards, when my students are more familiarized with the software, they may be able to share their power points that they’ve created and upload them on slideshare.

collaborative software

In today's class, Sept. 30, 2009, we journeyed into the land of collaborative software. We explored both "google docs" and "zoho.com" in search for collaborative software that we could potentially use in our future classrooms. In school, we go through DOL (Daily Oral Language) as a daily routine to have our students practice their grammar and Language Arts skills. The collaborative software (found in zoho.com) allows the teacher and students to use the computer and internet to do their DOL. They could possibly even do collaborative works on a website and get the same advantage of being able to share and view each others works. In doing so, students and teacher are able to see, edit, and give immediate feedback as they work on a particular task.
This would be very useful to students because this is the application of living in the age of technology. Students are being exposed to tools that we as teachers have barely explored ourselves. Having this convenience in the classrooms could be helpful for those students who may have visual difficulties. Using this software can eliminate the distance factor that might be affecting their participation in assignments such as DOL. It may also be helpful for students who have problems with writing manually. Typing becomes another path that students might be more willing to take. In addition, having students share their ideas and answers allows others in the class to see a model. By having a model, other students are seeing examples of how to do a particular assignment, and students will hopefully take that as a lesson learned rather than being too shy and embarrassed to where learning becomes hindered. The exposure to such technology is the greatest benefit for the students. By the time students graduate from high-school, they will have probably become experts in technology and all the different types of tools that are out there.
I like the DOL assignment that Mr. Jenkins showed in class. That is a very practical use of the software that I can see myself using in the future. In my assignment I would create two sentences that each student must correct and re-type. Before correcting,they must include their names at the beginning of the sentence. After correcting the sentences, students must compose their own sentence (relating to the topic). Each student must then correct one other student's composition to complete the assignment.

Webquest

1) This past week, we had an assignment to make a webquest. A webquest is similar to a lesson plan on the internet, where students can view their assignment, see the required criteria, find resources, and exercise computer skills all in one project. In our project for this class, we chose the topic of our interest and created out own webquest project for our future students.

2) The software that I used for this particular assignment was zunal.com. I liked this software because it was user-friendly. I was able to create my webquest project with ease and I think others would find it just as easy to use. On a scale of 1-10, I give it a 9.

3) I would use my webquest in my classroom when I create projects for my students in the subjects of science and social studies. I found that using this software really allows my students to get hands-on experience with using technology to both research and present.

4) Like I stated earlier, my students would benefit by getting hands-on experience with using technology for researching and presenting their assignments. It would also cover the standards and objectives in the content subject areas.

5)I really liked the assignment, because I got to create an assignment that I could pull off the web when I become a teacher. It was fairly easy to use, and that makes it another plus. The only dislike I had does not directly relate to using the zunal software, but rather the research needed when creating the lessons. Having to go through different websites to check for relevance and searching for resources for my students to use was the hardest part. It gets tough to sort through all the junk floating around online.

6) Here is a link to check out my webquest project. Enjoy!

time-lines

1. Today we went over some cool tools that we could use in our classrooms. Mr. Jenkins instructed us to go to a couple of websites where we could create our own time-line.

2. I would introduce this to my students by showing them a time-line that I made, then I would ask them to create their own timelines as an assignment and practice. I would definitely use this tool for history projects or topics that could use a timeline as a graphic organizer.

3. I used the teachnology.com program and I thought that it was very easy to use, but it was more for the simple time-lines. I'll give it a 6.5 for simplicity.
I also used the xtimeline.com program and I thought that it turned out pretty cool with some graphics. This program is a little bit more complicated to work with for first-time users, but it's made for the more detailed time-lines. I give it a 8 for making it look really cool.