Summary of attendance

Learned how to implement code curriculum using Swift Playgrounds. Dr. Cullen showed us "everyone can code" books. The comprehensive lesson plans have an intro, activity, practice, reflection, story activity, coding analysis, journal, and more. There is a rubric for instructors to score the students. Finally after the students learn all of these things they are asked how they see them in an app. I really like how all of my techy students will have Swift Playgrounds as a tool to excel at!

This online webinar was eye opening to me. Throughout the webinar they talked about the implication of implicit bias. Implicit bias is when there are stereotypes against groups of people that are in our heads even though we don't want them to be. Most times its the attitudes or even voices that we hear in our heads that irritate us. They gave us different experiences that teachers have encountered within their classrooms to help us understand how easy it is to be bias and stereotypical. They first showed us a picture of three students in a imaginary classroom. They then gave us three different scenarios, the first was which one of the three students was a new immigrant student? The second one was which one of the three students would cause trouble in class? The third one was which one of the three students would know more about rap music? It's astonishing to see how easy it is for the teachers and even classmates to be bias or labeled so quickly. An example they used in the webinar was a teacher asking a student to tutor another classmate because they heard that specific race were all intelligent. This is very bias and very stereotypical because everyone is different and unique in their own way. Overall, the main goal of the entire webinar was for teachers and future teachers to understand the importance of equal education no matter the students race, age, gender, etc. Sometimes to be the best teacher we can be, we have to confront things within ourselves that we aren't comfortable about.   

This was a webinar over how to integrate books with technology into teaching. Dr. Cullen showed examples from her personal library that we might find useful for our own classroom. Most of the books were over digital citizenship and how to teach children about using technology properly. I found these books extremely helpful and I will use them in my future classroom. I learned how to teach children about technology through literature. 

For my workshop experience I attended an online webinar hosted by Dr. Cullen discussing books about technology. In this webinar books ranging from good to bad were explained. An example of a poor technology book was a book about Barbie being a programmer, but needing boys to “really make the game” because she was only making the art for the game. Books like the Barbie one discourage girls and maybe other from thinking they can be programmer, something I would not want in my classroom. The webinar also talk about out of date books such as Arthur’s Computer Adventure, a book reverent when I was young. Probably the biggest take away I had from this webinar would have to be how to pick out a good technology book. Historical books about Ada Lovelace came up, a woman who I had never heard of before but now greatly admire. I learned that books about technology should be updated and tech the latest technology, teach good manners online, inspire kids to try coding, and encourage some time away from technology.

I attended the PD session "Create. Smash. Share." led by Anne Beck at 11:00 on 18 November. The theme of this seminar was using creative apps together and then sharing that creation. We used Seesaw to share our finished products. First, Ms. Beck showed us how to create an image out of shapes using the app Assembly. We then used the app Chatterpix to create a video from that image. Then, we made characters out of Play Dough. We created a stop motion video from them with Koma Koma. We edited this video and added sound in iMovie. Finally, we shared all of our finished products on Seesaw.

It's great to see how apps can work together -- taking a picture or making a video in one app and then editing it in another. As a future teacher, I'm glad to have competency in lots of apps so that I can choose the ones that are best for what I need to accomplish in the classroom. I especially like Seesaw's capacity to share student work with their families.

I participated in 2017 Global Education Conference, I woke up early in the morning to to take part in a webinar about teaching and explaining world religions in schools. The webinar discussed way to promote students figuring out what faith or life style fits how they feel or what they want. It also discussed how to introduce new faiths in a appropriate manner in class. I learned a lot and it was cool because with educators there were also secondary students. Got to get various perspectives and engage with people from all over. 

I learned how to be a global leader and integrate the arts and culture into our classroom environment. As a teacher I can use this integrate the understanding of arts and culture into my classroom. I will have students from diverse backgrounds in my class and being able to integrate their culture and lives into curriculum is something that I see as important. 

In this webinar, I learned about different resources I can use in my classroom so that my students/class are collaborating with others around the world. The speaker talked about Belouga, Skype, different Google communities, and many more. One cool resource he mentioned was Global Read Aloud. This would be great to use in my future classroom because you can tune in, to a classroom in a different country, and listen to their read aloud for the day. That would just be so fun to do and for my students to listen in to a classroom somewhere else in the world. Belouga would also be really great to use because students are already on social medias, and this is a type of social media but for learning. Students create their own profile, upload their work, and then connect with other students around the world. Students can get paired up with other students, and the teachers can constantly be monitoring. Students can discuss and learn from someone else in a different class. Skype would be really cool to learn because then students can talk virtually face to face with other classrooms. This webinar gave me a lot of helpful resources to use in my future classroom. 

I attended Jennifer Klein's "Digging Beneath the Fs for Deeper Global Learning." In this workshop, Jennifer talked about how only 10% of the things that make up a person is above the surface. To really understand a person you have to look at the deeper 90% that is below the surface. Some examples of this that she gave is food, flags, and fashion. She gave the example that most of the time when teachers are looking at food from a particular region, they only have students cook the food and then eat it. She went in to explain that instead, food should be looked at as a whole. Why does this food grow in this country? What benefits does it have to their health? Questions that have students going in deeper than just knowing what kind of foods a certain country eats. For flags, she talked about how the flags can show what values a country has. She gave an example of having kids make their own flag for their own country to represent the values that they believe the country has. Looking at other country's flags, why does it use orange, green, and white? For fashion, she made points to try and figure out where the fashion pieces come from. I think the overarching point of this workshop is to try and ask those deeper questions so that students really get to experience the people in the culture and country instead of just knowing facts about the country. She gave lots of different approaches to how to go about doing this. Such as, sending a teddy bear to another country and having it go home with each student and take pictures. That way students are able to see the actual environment and what the people experience each day. This conference helps shift my future teaching of one from "What can my class do?" to "How can I collaborate with other classrooms in hopes of making this lesson a parallel lesson with learning about other countries?"

This presentation was originally supposed to be about using digital technology to enhance instruction of world languages, but the scheduled speaker never showed up to present. 
Instead, another speaker came on and talked about the blog she has used with her students in her class. It was really neat to hear about how she has used it in different ways and with different age groups. 
I thought it was a great way to introduce digital citizenship with students. Some of the blog posts are by teachers, but most of the posts and responses are from the students. Each week has a different topic and the students can get on and respond to questions and different activities on the blog. They get to create their own avatar and name that will show up when they post. They also get to learn about using Creative Commons and using the appropriate citation to use the pictures and other media that they might want to include. They talk a lot in their classes about how each thing they post online will always be there, and they really have to plan out what they will say before they post it. 

In this seminar there was one presenter. She presented on the difference in views of history in different countries. She used American, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese textbooks in comparison to show how this worked. America had an undertone of patriotic nationalism while Japan's was dry and emotionless. She used the textbooks recounting of WWII in each textbook for comparison. The presenter revealed that history around the world is being told with many different perspectives. She argued that as teachers we needed to realize and incorporate different perspectives in our classrooms. Therefore, we could get closer to the truth.