Social Media and Gamification

Tonight in class, we started off by signing up for Edmodo accounts. Edmodo is a social media website for classrooms, teachers can create groups and have their students join the group. Having a whole class in the same group will help them be able to communicate, collaborate, assign work, and hand in assignments. We all joined our "Inct2610" group and will now be able to hand in our assignments for this week through our accounts. After, Emodo we moved onto Twitter. Twitter is another form of social media which allows people to communicate with one other; you can follow people and search topics you may be interested in to see what other people are saying about it. I have my own personal Twitter account and post my own tweets quite frequently back and forth with my friends. However, for class I made a new twitter account where I will post about our class activities and follow my classmates. If I were to choose between these two social media sites for my future classroom I would prefer to use Emodo because I feel as though it has more to offer! For example, on Emodo teachers are able to assign work and students are able to hand in their assignments as well as communicate on a single site while on Twitter you are strictly communicating and viewing other people's posts.

Durring the latter end of class we worked through completing some levels within the Tech Teacher Game. This really was a fun way to gain some more knowledge on the teaching profession and see where everyone ranked amongst the whole class!

Smart Notebook

Tonight in class we learned all the in's and out's of using the SmartBoard and Smart Notebook. I had a little bit of prior knowledge when it comes to using SmartBoard because we had them in almost all of the classrooms in my highschool. A majority of my teachers would put their lessons up on the SmartBoard and would allow my classmates and I to go up and solve problems or write things on the board. However, learning about how to make lessons on Smart Notebook was completely new to me. Learning everything we did tonight I feel as though my teachers in highschool did not take full advantage of the program. For example, I had no idea you could link pictures to websites on the internet or embed games into the slides of your presentation. Being able to include all of these things into one presentation could save so much time and effort while teaching in the classroom and leave the students more interested and time for any questions they may have. I really feel as though this lesson was extremely helpful and beneficial and I could definitely see myself using Smart Notebook in my future classroom. In my opinion, I feel as though SmartBoards are becoming more and more common within classrooms and I feel as though it would be beneficial for all teachers to learn about all the neat and helpful things the program can bring into a classroom setting. I know when I was young and in school I was always excited about going up and writing on the board; Smart Notebook creates a whole new spin on that excitement and will probably help to get more students involved and up working to solve things out on the board.

Prezi Post

Even though class was cancelled, my roommate and I went to the computer lab during our regular class time to get a head start on some of the work assigned for this week before spring break. Although I have never actually made a Prezi presentation myself, I always thought they were pretty cool when other people would present them in my classes. However, even though I still think their appearance is appealing I often found myself getting frustrated while working on the presentations assigned for class. Personally, I am a rather simplistic person and I think this is why I would favor PowerPoint over Prezi not only when making them myself but when learning from them as well. The Prezi process is rather complicated and very time consuming where as you can make just as attractive of a presentation using PowerPoint in a much shorter amount of time.
However, although I do not favor Prezi presentations, I feel as though my students would. Considering I would like to teach younger students I feel as though they would be more excited about following a moving, Prezi presentation then following slides on a PowerPoint. However, similar to what I stated before I feel as though high school or college students would prefer PowerPoint slides because the information they need is easier to follow.