Samantha Cotton

       Hi friends! Welcome back to week 6 of my blog. I have attached my Vocaroo link below and I hope you all enjoy listening to my first ever podcast! The topic I chose to podcast about is all about fitness. I love working out and it has been a huge part of my life over the years. Podcasting is a series of audio files that users can download and listen to at their own convenience. I think podcasting is cool and can be used in my future classroom because young people are more likely to listen to episodes on a mobile device. Podcasting has never been a passion of mine, but after my first recording, I think it is a great technology tool that I can use in the future!      This week we read an article about connected learning framework and I not only enjoyed reading it, but I learned some things I never knew about. The principal that stood out the most to me is shared purpose. I found this principal interesting because it not only aligns with student podc...

Hi friends! Welcome back to Week 5 of my blog. During class this week we talked about ISTE Student Standard and Digital Citizenship and explored Google Sites! for our Digital Citizenship project, I chose to complete my project on Digital Privacy. According to the standards from ISTE, 1.2d reads “students manage their personal data to maintain digital privacy and security and are aware of data-collection technology used to track their navigation online.” This topic grabbed my attention because I think it is important that students know that they have complete control of their decisions and their privacy. Teaching elementary students how to navigate the internet safely, along with understanding the consequences that follow poor behavior, is very important as a digital citizen. I am looking forward to weaving digital citizenship into some of my future lesson plans! Dickenson and Snedeker talked about some very useful strategies in their article, and I do believe they are all important in ...

Hi friends! I hope everyone enjoyed their weekend. In class this week, we talked about virtual field trips. After reading the article by the Professional Learning Board, I believe all of the steps are important for the success of each and every student, but the lesson plan step stood out to me. I believe that teachers need to clearly understand the learning objectives prior to research, so him/her know what key points to look for when researching. I enjoy virtual field trips because it is something that each and every student can have access to in the classroom since we do not know their home life situations. For example, I played softball in Portland, Oregon and would love for my future students to take a virtual tour of the city I was able to explore and show them pictures from my trip after. I may even have them create their own pictures of what they noticed from the virtual tour. Personally, I enjoyed watching the Skype video. I think it was cool to see the students visit the botto...

    This week in Dr. Gierhart's class, we talked about evaluating a digital tool; Prodigy. I like the idea of Prodigy, but it would not be my first choice when teaching mathematics to my students. A con of using Prodigy is that students may not be as focused as they would be if they were to physically work out the problems, because some students are more hands on than others. A pro of using Prodigy is that students can develop more skills; such as communication and writing skills. I also learned how to annotate a video and an image file, it's pretty cool! This is a skill that I think will benefit every future teacher in the classroom.