Soon-to-be Teacher! I will have my degree from the University of Regina in April, 2016. I am originally fom Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. I blog about teacher resources, news and other fun things!
Throughout ECMP 355 I spent time following my classmates journey’s as they blogged about education related topics and their learning projects. Though I did not document all of my contributions to their learning, I was able to back track and find several examples of me commenting on their blogs. I was also able to find examples of me responding to their comments on my blog posts. Using Google Plus was tremendously helpful when it came to finding my classmates blogs. It was there that I could see all blog posts from my classmates ordered from newest to oldest. Here is a link to a google doc that shows several examples of me commenting on blog posts.
I used WordPress quite frequently to connect with my peers. If you are reading this, you are in a great spot to check them out! Scroll down and read some of my posts. Below you will see links to my blog posts and essentially the title/brief description of what each post is about, underneath the link.
I have decided to split my class contributions posts into three categories, Twitter, Blog Posts and Commenting on Blogs. These are the three ways I connected with people and shared my thoughts and views.
Twitter was my main source of contributing. I follow some great people (some from this class!) and I find Twitter to be an easy way to share and read ideas and stories.
@puetzeagle is my Twitter account. Make sure you take a moment to follow me.
Here is a link to a google doc that will show a screen shot of all my tweets that are related to ECMP:
Jesse, Sarah, Larissa, Rebecca, and I completed our final ECMP 355 project together. We changed the lyrics to ‘We Will Rock You/We are the Champions’ and also completed an ‘Inside Out’ (the movie) version of what we each knew about Twitter, WordPress, Google Plus, and Feedly both before and after taking this class.
This project was time consuming but so worth it! Thankfully some of our group members (not me) are familiar with video editing so that helped make our finished product clean and enjoyable (at least I thought it was enjoyable.) There are so many ways to make learning fun. This final project was a great example of that. We laughed, brainstormed, and video taped for about six hours in one day and within that we were able to come up with so many ideas. Here is our video:
From a personal view, I really enjoyed ECMP 355. I have always felt behind when it comes to technology in the classroom and after taking this class, I feel more comfortable in doing so. As you can see (if you watch our video) I did not use any of the four aforementioned pieces of technology for school use, and I had not even heard of Google Plus or Feedly. I had only used Twitter as a personal account where I mainly tweeted about friends and sports. I briefly used WordPress for a previous University class.
I see many benefits to knowing and using these pieces of technology in the school. I am leaning towards trying out class blogs as a starting experiment with my first class. I would like to get into Twitter but right now my main use of Twitter is to read stories and find resources. I am still not positive how I want to use it in the classroom. Feedly is where I was able to connect with different bloggers who I constantly see posting. It is a great place to go for resources, I should have used it more. Google Plus was really great for coming together as a community. I can see it being useful for students for when they are at home and have questions.
I am satisfied by all that I have learned in ECMP 355. I will continue to blog and tweet in my journey to becoming the best possible teacher I can. We were exposed to so many great programs to use in a classroom, and I will look to incorporate some of those to create a fun engaging learning environment.
While watching my all time favorite movie today, ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,’ I came across a scene that TOTALLY fits how I feel about unplugging from technology. Now.. Obviously technology is a great tool and I love using it in so many ways. Especially as a teacher. But I want this post to focus on the moments where we should allow ourselves to feel connected… and enjoy exactly what they are worth.
My all time favorite moments exist only in my memory, not on my phone, computer, Instagram or Facebook. I am so fine with that. There are so many amazing moments that I have been able to experience and thinking “AH I NEED MY PHONE!” is seldom the first thought that comes to my mind.
I think of the moment my daughter Peyton was born… There is no picture that could justify how amazing that moment was for me. I do not remember that day from the perspective of the one picture that was taken of me with her (I don’t even recall who took it) but I remember it from my perspective looking down at this beautiful baby girl. I mean what beats looking at something so spectacular with your eyes, opposed to a screen. That will forever go down as the coolest thing I have ever experienced.
Or there was the time I won the 100 meter sprint in my school district in grade 11. Thinking back to all the hard work I put into track and field training and to have it pay off was an unreal experience. There is no photo of that moment but that feeling I had will never go away. I can recall every bit of shock and happiness of that day and who I first went to when the race was over (my Mom – she might have cried a little.)
I could go on and on about moments that are so perfect while no evidence exists but I also don’t want to bore a reader. Watch this clip of the movie ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ and see an example of unplugging. This is a great movie so maybe you should actually just watch the whole thing… and than text me after so we can chat about it for a few weeks.
“French Phrases for Dummies” is the book I used in my journey to learning French. Most of my learning came from here. I was also lucky enough to discuss French words and phrases with people who speak French. I interned at a school where two third’s of the teacher’s taught french immersion. I had opportunities to ask them questions whenever I needed. This book translates words in a way where you see the French word/phrase, the pronunciation and the English word/phrase. This was important because if I did not have the pronunciation, I would not have understood how to say most of the words. Here is an example of how the book shows a word:
French Pronounciation English
Janvier zhan-vyay January
Notice how the French word ends with an ‘r’ but the pronunciation does not.
This book covers subjects such as: small talk, numbers, days, months, food, leisure, transportation, dealing with emergencies and more! I would suggest it to anyone wanting to learn French.
This has been a tricky journey but I want to continue it in years to come! It is so helpful to know another language, especially considering we live in a bilingual country.
For starters, I was shocked when I heard Carol Todd would be joining our class. I remember hearing and briefly learning about the Amanda Todd story when it first came out. It was one of a series of events that got me intrigued in the area of bullying. Amanda’s story is one that has many parts to it, bullying only one of them. It was around this time that I took an interest to the area and explored it with students on several occasions while interning at a school.
I was in awe about Carol coming online with us because I thought, ‘wow, what a powerful Woman. This must be tough for her to speak about.’ I did not know what to expect. Little did I know she speaks about the uses of social media quite often. She uses Amanda’s story to spread awareness on the matter. She was an amazing speaker! She talked fluently, and informative the entire time. I have an enormous amount of respect for this Woman. I now follow her on Twitter where I hope to learn even more from her. I did not realize she was so involved in these discussions and that she is also a teacher. She seems to have done a great job using a story that would have been so devastating, one that she could have let bring her down, into one that can be used to help prevent other children from getting into a similar situation that Amanda found herself in.
There are sick people in this world. The internet (specifically social media) has shown us that we cannot trust people. Our children need to know about these stories, and know about people like Carol so that they know what things – good and bad – can happen when they are on the web.
Side note: Carol talks about unplugging from technology. Obviously there is SO many amazing ways to use technology. We have learned so many of them through ECMP355. There must also be times where we ‘unplug’ and enjoy moments for what they are, and find things to do that allow ourselves to go outside, and enjoy each other’s company. I thought it was quite rude that during Carol’s chat, certain people in ECMP 355 decided they would focus in on discussing past blog posts. What a strange thing to discuss while we had someone so amazing speaking to us for a short period of time. I find it ironic considering we have talked about unplugging and Carol was discussing it at that time. This would have been a good moment to ‘unplug’ from the chat box, and sit back and listen to what Carol was discussing.
I want to share my first coding project because it is one of the worst things I have ever seen! The worst thing is that it took my about an hour to do. I am starting to get the feel for the process, but wow is it challenging! So fun though! You will notice that the sound is very strange… It is indeed me making nonsense noises. I plan to create a better video but I thought I would share this piece of work first! Enjoy… But not really. It’s not enjoyable.
Watching the horrific Fifth Estate episode on Amanda Todd made me feel sick. Coming from a Father of a five year old girl, I cannot imagine the struggles that the family and Amanda dealt with everyday. Knowing there are men online blackmailing MY DAUGHTER with naked pictures would drive me absolutely crazy. I cannot help but feel complete anger towards this matter because these men (and maybe women to) that blackmail young girls with naked pictures have no place in this world. It is disgusting. These types of videos should be shared with kids all over. Surely it would help young people make better decisions when it comes to going online.
As teacher, I hope to address these issues in a strict matter. I do not yet know where the ‘line’ is so that I do not cross it in regards to talking about the issue of online profiling and consequences, but I will be sure to find out because this is an issue that needs to be prevented from happening.
As the fifth estate video mentioned, these predators online often seek power because they lack it outside of the internet world. DO NOT give them that power. They should be addressing these social issues in different ways. Obviously, they need help.
I can’t begin to understand how my family and I would react or handle the situation that the Todd family was faced with. It must have been, and still is so difficult. Kids are so vulnerable and Amanda’s death could have been prevented. I hope people take this video as seriously as I did (maybe taking away less anger though, I am overwhelmed by how upset this video made me) so that we can work towards making sure we do not experience this sort of tragedy.
Cole Puetz 