Technology Integration Spreads at Falls North Junior High!

I was so pleased to have one of my Financial Life Skills students ask how to access the Comic Creator web page by Read-Write-Think of Thinkfinity. This ninth grader was so hooked on how the site worked for our consumer complaint activity that she demonstrated it for her social studies teacher. Now, this teacher utilizes this highly-creative site for a dictator assignment. This situation certainly indicates how engaged students become when we integrate technology into our curriculum! In addition, higher-order thinking skills are better utilized with activities of this nature.

Check out Comic Creator at this link.

The Final Week of CEdu 525: Using the Internet and Web as a Curricular Resource

Upon completion of our last week of CEdu 525, I find myself brimming with ideas for our Business Education classes at Falls North Junior High. All four courses that I teach are highly conducive to relevant online curriculum use. I am looking forward to applying the Website Evaluation assignment from Session 2 to my Business Venture course. I dearly want to hook my students on accounting and believe that many of the ten evaluated Web sites, particularly Thinkfinity lesson plans and links, will accomplish that. Weaving these online resources with class discussions and real-life business examples (including those from my family's hardware store and my students' family's businesses) will bring accounting, normally a very dry topic, to life! I am also eagerly anticipating incorporating my newly-created Marketing Scavenger Hunt as an introduction to our Marketing unit. My eighth and ninth graders love the challenge of these educational tools and learn so much in a more engaging method. Finally, I will add cyberbullying to the list of topics we cover in the Internet safety unit for 8th grade Computer Applications. I did not realize the seriousness and prevalence of this problem.

Elements of Week 4 that I found helpful include the following:

• Quizlab was fun to try out. We use QUIA (a paid subscription) in the Falls and it was interesting to compare the pros and cons of both. QUIA appears more powerful but I am sure that QuizLab would be a stronger alternative in its paid version. I am converting most of our quizzes and tests to online assessment tools. Students seem to enjoy these more than paper/pencil documents because they provide instant feedback that I add as part of the answering process.
  
• WebQuests are fun to investigate. I found several that I may try as a precursor to our Business Venture business plan project. One involved a chocolate dessert cafe start-up proposal (perfect for my constantly-hungry teens!). Another dealt with monopoly issues for Microsoft, a perfect tie-in with our Competition and Business Types unit.
• The Creative Commons information was helpful to know. I did not realize that there is a legitimately "grey area" that serves as a helpful alternative to the previously "black and white" area of educational copyright issues. There is no doubt that technology has pushed educators to reevaluate traditional copyright law.

All in all, I found great value in CEdu 525 because it provided us with so many online resources that we can take back to our classrooms for the benefit of our students' learning.

North Jr. High Financial Life Skills Exit Survey

At the end of the last semester, I used QUIA to create an online exit survey for my 8th and 9th grade Financial Life Skills students. Quia, a subscription site for creating online activities, quizzes, and class pages, allows their surveys to be exported into Excel. I could not figure out how to allow the survey results to be viewed in my blog until Louie suggested importing the Excel spreadsheet into Google Docs and inserting that link into this blog.
It worked and here are the results! Exit Survey
I was pleased with how I could discover what my students learned, liked, and disliked in FLS. My department will use this information to continue making improvements in the curriculum and making our activities and units more engaging.

Internet Safety and Social Networks Reflection

Our Facebook experiences were most enlightening to me. I now understand how our students can become so "hooked" on social networks. I always thought it was rather strange and unproductive behavior and could not understand why teens these days do not communicate via phone. After experimenting with Facebook and discovering how creative you can be, I now understand the allure. By combining graphics, links, messaging, networks, videos, and other applications, I can see why our students rarely use a phone. This should alert teachers to the fact that a lecture will typically not engage our students. Adding technology and constructivist activities to our lesson plans is a must! By the way, I was interested to discover that 5 of my classmates (out of about 400) from my Brookfield East graduating class of 1979 are on Facebook. That is 5 more than I would have expected 10 days ago. Now, I am surprised that more are not on Facebook.

Learning about social networks also has made my wife and I think about how we can use these in our professions. As a teacher and a preacher, how can Facebook and MySpace be utilized to better connect with teens and help them learn? We will be sharing ideas with other teachers and ministers in the near future.

Other elements of Week 3 in Cedu525 that caught my attention were the following:

• The usefulness of BrainPop . I will inquire if my district has considered this site. The Social Studies area had several interesting economics/personal finance sections that could be applied to my Financial Life Skills curriculum.
  
• The seriousness of cyberbullying. As a parent, softball coach, teacher, and mentor, I need to be aware of how vicious this can become and how it can dramatically affect a teen's emotional well-being and academic and social growth. I am now better prepared to appropriately respond to instances of cyberbullying.
• The importance of minimizing information given online. The videos last Tuesday drove home how easy it is for a teen to unknowingly give pieces of personal information that could lead them into serious trouble. I will share this with my 8th grade Computer Applications students!
  

Experimenting with my Blog!

Before I post my weekly reflection, I thought I would try something new in this section. I chose to embed a video, as Louie demonstrated last Tuesday. I selected a "Field Of Dreams" YouTube clip for several reasons. First, I love the movie because of the way it brings happiness to the banned Black Sox. Second, Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, Burt Lancaster, and James Earl Jones are fantastic. Third, I have visited the film site in Dyersville, Iowa, and can almost feel the presence of the ghost players walking out of the tall corn. Finally, this clip hits upon the importance of hearing the call to our profession, as Doc "Moonlight" Graham does in this scene. Here is the video:



After 20 fascinating and fun years in retailing, I made my career change and have never regretted it. I believe I am "making a difference" with my students, just as Doc Graham made a difference in saving the little girl.

Check out this picture from the summer of 2006 when our summer fastpitch team visited the movie site. Fortunately, 38 and 17 did reappear!

Student Survey Results

My 8th and 9th grade Financial Life Skills participated in the online exit survey that I mentioned last week. The process and results were fascinating. 57 students took the survey (built on QUIA, a paid subscription), providing our department with valuable feedback for making the course better. I closely observed my students as they worked online and was impressed with their seriousness and engagement.

Overall, students enjoyed coming to class (77% felt positive or very positive) and 80% felt that the pace of the course was just right. The Budget unit was most popular and the Checkbooks unit was least. I could view and print the results as QUIA compiled and calculated the responses. Just like online quiz grading, I saved time in reading and analyzing.

The feedback that I valued the most for our grad program were the following free responses:

• "I liked coming in and doing stuff on the computers"
• "going to the lab"
• "keep the online quizzes"
• "Stock Market Simulation and the online tests
• "we learn a lot because of the other teaching methods like powerpoints"
• "I liked the credit unit the least because we were never in the lab"

These comments certainly indicate that students were more engaged and enjoyed learning more with technology-based activities. I will strive to continue creating more of these lessons.

Week 2: So Many Classroom Applications-So Little Classroom Time!

Our second week of CEDu 525 presented me with so many lesson ideas that I am challenged to find the classroom time to apply them all. My peer at Falls North Junior High also took this Stritch graduate program several years ago. Now that I review her lesson planning, I recognize that she introduces one new application in every unit in our Financial Life Skills (FLS) and Computer Applications (CAps) courses. This pacing allows for important reflection and adjustments. I will be sure to do this with my Business Venture (BV)course during the second semester.

In BV , I am seeking to provide more engaging, technology-based lessons for my students, particularly in marketing, human resources, and accounting. As I have observed in FLS, they love to learn through scavenger hunts, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, webquests, online cloze and anticipation guides, and Web-based review games, quizzes, and surveys. The Customer Complaint Cartoon was a huge hit, as evidenced by the high quality work, and tremendous enthusiasm. The cartoons were a joy to grade and more accurately reflect how consumers present problems (conversations over letters) with products and services in the retail marketplace. I will continue to create new Web-based lessons for FLS and BV.

Several things that we did in class last Tuesday were most helpful to me. They are as follows:

• Reading a classmate's blog was useful as it became evident that we all have similar reactions and reflections. In addition, it is important to learn how teachers in other academic areas and age levels apply what we are gaining from CEDu 525.
  
• I enjoyed observing other scavenger hunts because I saw new methods of using search tools, both within a particular website and on the Web.
  
• The Thinkfinity lesson plan sharing was interesting as I learned how Katie applied a lesson plan to her West Allis German students. I must look beyond only EconEdLink for lesson plans. Other Thinkfinity resources are excellent, as demonstrated by the success of the Cartoon Creator from ReadWriteThink in my FLS classes.
• On Wednesday morning during my first prep, I asked several students visiting from study hall to check out a few search engines other than Google. I was impressed with the many search options out there and want my CAps students to investigate a metasearch. To my dismay, Ask, AskJr, and Dogpile were all blocked. I immediately called our building tech person and she jumped on it with our central office. We both know Dogpile and Ask had been available and are curious to discover why they have been blocked. This also reinforced that a teacher must always check website links just before students do. I have found numerous blocked or dead links this fall and have fixed them before students began their work.
  
• I will check out some of the other creative websites such as Toondo. These may even be better than Cartoon Creator in the areas of number of panels and saving capabilities.
  
• The educational sites we explored will prove useful in the near future. In particular, I will come back to Blue Web'n for business education website resources as I develop my technology-based BV lessons.
  
• The online quiz sites were interesting for me to compare to QUIA, the subscription service we use in the Falls. Some of the week 2 links were more entertaining than educational. However, Quizlet (a free site!!) provided an engaging method in which to learn vocabulary. I can envision using this for difficult new terms in accounting.
• BrainPop has great potential for my business classes. I am confident that my students would love it. I will explore it in my extra time during final exams this week. The social studies section has several business/personal finance options.
  

In conclusion, I must say that I love Son of Citation for its ability to create APA citations, unlike EasyBib. I cannot imagine how much time I would have saved citing sources in past schooling and research. Facebook was fascinating and allowed me to see how people can get hooked on social networks as they eagerly anticipate who they find and then communicate with. I even found that 5 of my Brookfield East classmates from 1979 are on Facebook. It is truly amazing how much we learn every week in this Stritch grad program (and have fun doing it!).

Week 1--CEDU525--Using the Internet and Web as a Curricular Resource

I enjoyed Week 1 of our new class because it provided many new curriculum resources for my 8th and 9th graders at Falls North. I am making every attempt to integrate technology into all of our Financial Life Skills and Business Venture (intro to bus. course) units. Having the time to check out Thinkfinity in greater depth was most helpful in that I have not used this resource in over a year and was amazed at the many new lessons. Not only did EconEdLink contain many new lesson plans, but other Thinkfinity partners such as ReadWriteThink had lessons and learning tools that I will use. ReadWriteThink has a search engine with limits that include my grade level and economics. In addition, its Cartoon Creator went over exceptionally well with my Financial Life Skills students. Previously, these students wrote a consumer complaint letter in Word. In an effort to provide greater differentiation, I gave my students the choice of creating a verbal complaint scenario in Cartoon Creator or writing the letter. Amazingly, 54 of my 56 students chose the cartoon. My principal, Barb Tays, was observing my lesson that day and she is a strong advocate of providing options to our students. By doing so, we can offer activities that best match our students' various learning styles.

The survey that we did in class made me think to create an exit survey for my FLS students next Friday. That will be our last day in the computer lab for this semester and all of us North FLS teachers value student feedback in order to make the course more engaging. I have used QUIA for quizzes and activities and will use its survey creator for the first time. I am interested to see the survey statistical results in addition to the written comments from my students. QUIA is a subscription site that our district pays for. Students love the activities and have indicated that they prefer on-line quizzes over paper.

Here is the link to the survey:

http://www.quia.com/sv/152434.html

Feel free to try it. I will delete any responses next Friday morning before my students take the survey.

Finally, I enjoyed the Internet Scavenger Hunt. The competitive element appeals to many students and learning through technology is much more engaging than overheads, lectures, etc. I have used scavenger hunts in our FLS banking, credit, insurance, tax, and consumer units. I will be adding them to my BV units. Marketing will be the first one as it lends itself to searches regarding promotions, advertising, slogans, logos, and retailing. 8th and 9th graders love these topics and will become hooked on marketing through Internet searches.