Final Blog Post for EDM310

EDM310 was a very different class than I expected. I was challenged, put on the spot, and learned how to think for myself. I am thankful for every minute spent on this class. I will admit however that it was stressful at times just simply for the vast amount of "stuff" to do during such a short semester. However, I am very confident that this class has made me a better student and hopefully will make me a better teacher.

I learned many useful things during this course such as the importance of blogging, how-to blog correctly, developing a PLN, how to create impacting presentations, podcasts, and videos. That was just naming a few things. I think drawing from the comments4teachers was probably the most useful thing to me. It was really encouraging and helpful to see the thoughts of other teachers and to kind of have a leg up by drawing on their experiences already. Also watching the videos and podcasts made by students was really inspiring to be the best teacher possible to enable my students to also reach their full potential.

There are a couple of things that I would tell other students thinking of taking EDM310. Be prepared to work, be prepared to learn, and be prepared to be impressed by other people. It is a very interesting and meaningful class that I personally think any teacher should be required to take. As we can see society is evolving everyday therefore the school system has to learn how to evolve as well in order to keep up and maintain the interest of the students.

Also I would recommend students to take the course during the spring or fall if at all possible just simply so they can enjoy the interaction with the students during the C4K projects.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to my EDM310 experience (instructors as well as students)!!!

C4K 2

Send Your Name To Mars was a post by Miss McGeady to her class on a project NASA was doing where they could submit their names to be taken to Mars.

This is the comment I left for her and her class:



By: Christina Motes on June 25, 2010 at 10:21 am

Hi Miss McGeady and Students!
My name is Christina Motes and I am a student at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, AL in the U.S. I am currently taking EDM310 with Dr. Strange and as part of our assignments we are reading other teachers’ blogs as well as students’ blogs. It has been a very interesting class and I am learning many new things about technology and Education.

I really enjoyed my visit to your page and I would love to send my name to Mars! Also I think visiting outer space would be a fun adventure and I would most like to see the rings of Saturn =)

~Christina Motes~

P.S. Feel free to visit my blog as well as our class blog.


And this is her reply comment:



By: Kathleen McGeady on June 25, 2010 at 11:10 am

@ Christina, thanks for checking out our blog. You should definitely send your name to Mars! If you haven’t already seen it, I write a blog for teachers too that you may be interested in http://primarytech.globalteacher.org.au/
Best wishes for your studies,
Kathleen McGeady

Final Group Project

Glogster Final Project

How To

just pray

I was very moved after watching this video produced by Alba Middle School students. It made things hit home even more to see how the oil spill is also effecting the younger generation emotionally. I also was very impressed with the skill and creativity put into the videos made by the Alba students. I will definitely be watching for more videos by these young students.

This is my comment I left for the students:

ChristinaMotes
1 day ago
Hi! My name is Christina Motes and I am also a resident of the gulf coast and am a student in Dr. Strange's EDM310 class. I really enjoyed your way of getting the meesage out and asking people to help! It was a very creative and unique way and you guys did a great job!! Keep up the good work!

Blog Post 13

Barry Gartman's Smartboard Project

Christina Motes said...
I really enjoyed your smartboard project. I think it was a great way to demonstrate some of the uses of the smartboard as well as some pretty great info on Mobile.
July 18, 2010 7:33 PM

Stephen Akins'PLN Update

Christina Motes said...
Thanks for the great post Stephen. It was really encouraging to see the results your getting by using Twitter. I must admit that it's been something of a struggle for me to get into using Twitter but I'm trying really hard.
July 18, 2010 7:37 PM

Leah Divincenzo's

Christina Motes said...
First of all I must say that I love Dory so I immediately love this post =)
But not only that the content of this post was also very helpful. My PLN is still growing as well and I also plan to keep that growing throughout my college and professional career.
July 18, 2010 7:45 PM

Blog Post 12

Well I have just read Mr. McClung's post What I Learned This Year about his second year of teaching. It was reallin interesting to look at how much Mr. McClung had taken in and the insight that he has in only two years of teaching. In the article he talks about things like adapting, finding your "school mom", don't have an ego, not losing sight of what's really important, and many other things. It really sounds like Mr. McClung has really learned a lot and is well on his way to be an amazing teacher.


In addition to the M-Cubed: ISTE Presentation Video I also watched M-Cubed2, M-Cubed1, and Print Fabricate. I think the "Print Fabricate" video was the most helpful since I was not familiar with fablab and it explained how it was used. The other videos showed students using fablab and making digital fabrication. I think that this could be helpful and a good learning tool when teaching students about surface area, volume, area, etc. I would definitely like to try this piece of technology out at some point in the future.

C4K4

My 4th C4K assignment was to watch a video posted on CinemaOwls YouTube channel for Kelowna's Secondary School Arts and Video Production Program. The video I was assigned was called Traced that was made by Grade 12 Video Production students. Justin and Anthony shot this trailer prior to the actual movie but they do plan on making this movie this summer. Here is the comment I left for them followed by the response I receieved.

Hi, My name is Christina Motes and I am a student at the University of South Alabama. I watched your trailer as part of an assignment for Dr. Strange's EDM310 Class.

I really enjoyed your trailer and would definitely watch the film if you decide to make it. It seemed pretty interesting. You guys did a great job. Congratulations.

~Christina Motes~

Thanks for your comment!
The student filmmakers plan on making the movie this summer.
With the movie trailer assignment many students will try to fast track the process by not clearly conceptualizing the whole story first. The strength of this piece is that these students had a very clear idea of what the feature film would be, and were then able to construct an outstanding and intriguing trailer to catch a potential audience's attention.

My PLN

Well first of all let me start this by saying that my PLN is definitely complete nor do I ever expect it to be. I think that a PLN evolves over time and can never stop growing. So far I've been using the sites that we have learned about in this class and going from there.

I chose to use symbaloo as you can see from the picture above to keep all my sites organized. In this I have links to twitter, facebook, delicious, my class blog, edm310 blog, youtube, etc. This was just a simple way to have everything at my fingertips one click away. I used delicious to bookmark sites, videos, and commentaries I found interesting such as Mr. McClung's World, The Fisch bowl, and many others. Also on twitter I was able to find Ms. Cassidy, Sir Ken Robinson, Karl Fisch, Discovery Education, and The US Dept. of Education and became followers of all of them and others.

Working on this project has definitely been eye opening to see all the possibilites of connections to be made all over the world that is simply a click away.

As I said this is something that I will constantly be updating and using.

Questionnaire Results

This is the interview I did with Beth Paris, a recent graduate of Union University with her degree in Early Childhood Development and Education.

In the interview Beth began by telling a little about herself and then goes on to explain her experiences with technology being used during her college experience. She explains that powerpoint and smartboard presentations was the majority of what was used and she wished more would have been used by the teachers.

I then asked Beth about her experience during her student teaching. She explained that she used a Promethean board a lot and was able to use interactive games in class. Also she said that the senior teacher used playstations to play educational games during small group times.

Next I asked Beth her plans for her future class and if she planned to use technology in her class room. She quickly responded that she would be using any technology that was available to her depending on the funding of the school. She mentioned that there is still a lot of technology that she feels she needs to make herself familiar with but that will be a learning experience during her teaching time and that she will definitely be learning and implementing it as much as possible.

Of course the last question I asked was did she think teachers should be technologically literate. She answered definitely yes that teachers should be utilizing any tool available therefore any technology readily available teachers should take the time to learn to use it and teach the students because technology is being used more and more everyday and we as teachers have to keep up.

Record your screencast online

Blog Post 11

I was absolutely floored while watching Ms. Cassidy's Class Video. The amount of knowledge these young children contained and not only knew about but could also implement and use in learning was astounding. It seems that every time I think I'm learning a lot in this class I find something like this video that makes me realize how much more I have to learn.

I also watched the skype video that Ms. Cassidy had with the EDM310 class from last semester.

Ms. Cassidy has taught her 1st grade students how to plan and create videos, maintain a blog, use wikis, and complete a majority of their homework using some sort of technology. I particularly liked that she even implemented their Nintedo DS' in class!!

I have struggled during this class with the question of how I will use all the things I have learned and be a technology literate teacher teaching math. As I've thought about it I've been slightly discouraged because I just wasn't coming up with many ideas how to mesh mathematics and technology (excluding calculators of course). After listening to Ms. Cassidy answer questions for other EDM310 students I am now encouraged. I'm starting to have ideas about posting assignments using Google Docs, having a class blog where I can post links to notes, homework changes, extra study times, and youtube videos that have been created just for math!

So thank you Ms. Cassidy, watching these videos have not only been informative but also uplifting.

Smartboard Presentation

Thanks to Katie Watson and Melissa Jones for helping with this presentation!!

C4K3

I was assigned to read Mr. McClung's World 19th blog post from the month of May.

In this post he was introducing his students to a new musical artist, Cory Branan. He also posted a song by Cory Branan called, The Tall Green Grass.

Here is my comment left on this particular blog post.

"Hi Mr. McClung,
My name is Christina Motes and I am part of Dr. Strange’s EDM310 class at the University of South Alabama. I was assigned to read this particular blog as part of an assignment.

I had never heard of Cory Branan before but I was pretty impressed with the sound clip you posted. I will definitely be going to look him up on iTunes.

Thanks for posting,
Christina Motes
My Blog
EDM310 Class Blog
Email Me"

Blog Post 10

I found watching the video Welcome to my PLE very helpful. This video was from a 7th grader giving a tour of her personal learning environment. Since I have been kind of stuck on what to do with my own PLN i found this video both interesting and useful. I have been just using my web browsers bookmarking or top sites and then searching for connections on twitter, but I noticed that the student was using Symbaloo. I went to that website and checked it out and I do think I will definitely be using this in addition to my delicious account.

I am proud to say that I have learned something from this 7th grade student and will be applying what I've learned for my assignments for this class.




Two Questions That Can Change Your Life by Daniel Pink was a very thought provoking video. In this video two questions were posed: 1. What's my sentence? and 2. Was I better today that yesterday? These two simple questions are very powerful. I can come up with so many sentences that I hope can be mine some day in the future as well as am always hopeful that I am always better today than I was yesterday.

My sentence : "I am trying to become the best teacher possible and impact the lives of every student that I teach."

Blog Post 9

In Morgan Bayda's post An Open Letter To Educators she talks about her experience as a student at a University. She also references a video made by Dan Brown also called An Open Letter To Educators.

In both Morgan Bayda's personal experiences as well as those expressed in Dan Brown's video it is said that the educational experience, or the university, hasn't changed in 100's of years but meanwhile society all around is in a constant changing state. Morgan shares that in her experience as a student she spends most of her class time trying not to fall asleep, listening to a professor recap readings that no one has actually done because they know their grade sits on how well they can recall facts on the two tests, a midterm, and a final exam. Dan Brown recalls similar experiences where he spends on average $100 per class on textbooks not actually used because information is more readily available on the internet, he's just studying facts from powerpoint presentations given by the teacher in order for the students to regurgitate those facts on a test and that is what they are graded on. Not on how well they can apply the material in real life but just simply how many facts can we recite correctly. He didn't feel like the university he was attending or any other was preparing him, or other students, for the real world.

In my own personal experiences it is very similar. Though I must mention that this is not the case in every single class. There are teachers out their that recognize the change in society around information and see that they have to change their teaching style in order to help their students. However, for the most part it is pretty much the same, go to class, listen to a lecture, take notes, memorize, test on what you have memorized. Usually there are no actual applications of the material we are learning or how to use it in our future careers.

As stated in Morgan's blog as well as Dan Brown's video, society is changing and the education institution should recognize the need to change as well.



ALEX stands for the Alabama Learning Exchange. It is a website designed for teachers, students, as well as parents. Upon reviewing the website I found many useful things. There is a workspace for teachers to build lesson plans from, a vast amount of shared lesson plans ready for teachers in virtually every subject, helpful web links for students and teachers, and numerous podcasts available for review.

It seems that teachers have a login id in order to use parts of the website like their personal workspace but students and parents don't need a login in order to browse the vast amount of information available. There is even a link to the Alabama Virtual Library.

I definitely will be bookmarking this website for the future since I plan on teaching in Alabama. I think it will be very helpful with finding information to help with my teaching as well as drawing from lesson plans already found successful by other teachers. I will also be recommending the website to my future students because of all the links to homework help available as well as any other educational material.


I also checked out the ACCESS overview page to make myself familiar with this as well. It is a distance learning program offered to all Alabama highschool students via an e-learning classroom. With Access students are able to achieve advanced diplomas and many other things. It was very interesting to read about and I definitely think it is something I want to take part of in the future.