TPACK

• What are the major themes or ideas in your content discipline?
  As an elementary special education teacher, I focus on language arts and math content. I also assist my students with social studies and science work within their regular classrooms. My themes and content change slightly from year to year as the grade level of my caseload changes.

• Does your content discipline rely on specific processes for developing the key themes or ideas?
  Students at the elementary level are building skills throughout the year and across all grade levels. Students must have an ability to decode unknown words, to use context clues, and to read with expression in order to read fluently. Their ability to read fluently and comprehend also impacts all other subject areas. Students who struggle in reading may also find social studies or science difficult because of the amount of higher level vocabulary and more complex content in non-fiction texts. Students also must have a basic mastery of addition and subtraction facts and general number sense in order to progress in mathematics.

• How much of what you know is dependent of the way you learned your subject?
  It is related but not in the way you might think. I struggled academically in school. I did not have teachers who were engaging in their lessons or committed to the success of each child in the class. I was written off in many of the classes I entered long before I had gotten my first 9 weeks report card. There was no emphasis on differentiated instruction then. I felt like school wasn't a place where I could succeed. Luckily I met someone who believed in me and who taught me things I had missed along the way in school. I am now committed to doing the opposite of what the majority of my teachers did. I want all of my students to feel as if they can succeed at anything if they are willing to put in the hard work. I want all my students to feel like it's okay to ask a question, that school is an exciting and accepting place, and that everyone has their own strengths to build upon.
  

• Do you think in terms of your content by the chapters in a textbook or do you think in terms of your content as an integrated whole?
  I think of my content as an integrated whole. I want my students to see content through a real world lens. They should see how the content I'm teaching fits into their everyday lives and why it's important. I think students have a better grasp of information and it will remain with them longer, if it's not taught in isolation. Using a variety of examples in a variety of ways, can help students gain a true understanding of the skill/knowledge being taught.
  

• Does your knowledge of this discipline represent an integration of the concepts and processes that connect them?
  Yes, integration of concepts and processes is key. Learning how different things, different people, different skills, different subject matter is connected is how people solidify learning. The synapses created through those connections helps to store the information and gives it relevance.
  

Story Elements

This is my new PowerPoint. It took me awhile to find all of the pictures and to re-imagine how I think of PowerPoints. I actually like this style better than the ones I have been doing for years. it was hard to fill up over 40 slides. Maybe I picked a bad topic or I am still a novice at this particular genre of slideshows. But here is my revised attempt at the PowerPoint assignment. I hope you will enjoy.

Story Elements

View more presentations from ian h.

Voki

Hello all. As I was adding sites to my Delicious page, I found a site called Voki. It allows you to create your own talking avatar. You can create one of yourself, make a new character, or use a VIP like the one I created below. I warn you-it is fun and you may waste some time here. I think it's cool that you can get it to say whatever you want. You can personalize it for your class.

Desktop Graphic

Here's my long delayed desktop graphic. I used Paint to create my image. Like many other people have posted, Paint has been on every computer I think I've ever turned on. Although I never found it particularly useful. It is widely available, and it does allow you to do basic graphic stuff. I made my picture a web of Abraham Lincoln. We're studying biographies and presidents right now. (I think the white smudges were added because of my longing for snow and a big mountain..Come on winter!) I took the clipart of Abraham Lincoln from Discovery's clipart page and pasted onto paint. I filled in Abe's hat and his coat with the paint can feature on Paint. Anyway, I know it's not the greatest picture ever made. But it is mine, and it's really not so bad.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint is a commonly used teaching tool at all levels of education. I'm always surprised when teachers don't know how to create a simple PowerPoint. In this day and age knowing how to create a PowerPoint is an essential skill. It's a good way to organize information and to present it. I have created PowerPoints for Back to School Nights with parents, for college classes, and for use in my classroom. It's pretty easy to use and it helps familiarize students with technology they will likely encounter for years.

I created a PowerPoint on wombats because one of the grade levels I work with studies Australia. I tried to use kid friendly language and to add lots of pictures to convey what wombats really look like. I also added a video at the end to show how wombats dig holes very quickly. This presentation may help students understand what wombats are like since they are not native to this country and most students have probably never seen one. I uploaded my presentation to Google Docs to share it here. I look forward to seeing everyone else's presentations.

Cutest Pets...

If there's a cutest pets contest, I think you can see from the pictures above that my furry friends should definitely be finalists. :)

Jackson Pollack Art

When I clicked on the link in the activity list, I was a little surprised that there were no instructions. The site ( http://www.manetas.com/eo/pollock.swf ) immediately takes you to the application of creating a Jackson Pollack style painting online. There seemed to be no way to change colors or to stop the movement of the mouse from painting. Because the color of the "paint" was a bright orange, it led me to create a large round shape on the page which resembles a sun a little. Once I frantically moved my mouse around a bunch of times to create something I kind of liked, I had to remember how to do a screen capture. I went back on the activities list to look at the Image Capture instructions. I hit the print screen button and pasted it in Paint. Then I cropped out the toolbar from the top. The image I created is below. I named it Orange Chaos. Enjoy!

Photoshop Express

I signed up for the free account with Photoshop Express. I took a picture of my cat, and I used the editing tools to make only the red stand out. I then added some red and green balloons around his head. I took a picture of me and my dog and made it black and white. Then I added a post it note border around it. The last one I edited was a picture of my girlfriend and me. I changed it to a red tint, cropped it, and added silly costume pieces (a bow tie and glasses). I had fun with this assignment. Again it was another instance where I've seen pictures with only one color popping out and wondered how they were created. Photoshop skills could be useful in the classroom as a teaching tool and as a useful skill for students in today's media-rich, communication-driven culture. You can check out my first attempts at "photoshopping" here.

Web Album

I went to Flickr and I uploaded some photos of my Jeep. It took me a bit to make sure I had the privacy settings and sharing options right. I've uploaded pictures to web albums before, and I like to be able to organize my photos and share them this way. If you want to see my web album of jeep pictures click here. This could be useful for saving pictures for a unit of study (on China or Africa for example). Photos don't have to be stuffed into dusty old photo albums on someone's closet shelf. They can be shared and enjoyed by friends and family across the world.

Image Capture

I had always wondered how people were able to get screenshots from their computers. Now I know how. I went to the Washington Post's homepage, ad I held down the shift button and the Print Screen button on the top right corner. Then I went opened Paint and pasted the screenshot taken. I resized it by clicking on the corner and moving diagonally with the two arrows showing. I saved the file as a .jpg image on my computer. Here is a picture of my image capture. I can se how this would be useful in sourcing or referencing information for a blog. If i am discussing my opinion on a specific event, video, news item, etc., it is helpful to have a link to or a screenshot of what I am referencing. Another cool thing to know how to do.

Delicious

I had never heard of social bookmarking sites like Delicious before this assignment. I have often had a long list of bookmarks saved on my web browser which is too long to navigate through easily and is unreachable through other computers. I started using portaportal for my links for students. I found it to be an easy way to keep your favorite sites organized in one place that is accessible from multiple locations. Delicious follows the same concept. Your sites are organized on a website not on a solitary browser. This allows you to access your sites that are marked with descriptive tags in an orderly way. It also allows people with similar interests or connections to keep track of each others' sites. This is a cool website, and I like adding the easy to use tagging button on my browser. I will keep adding sites as the semester progresses. I love it when I learn about things that I can actually use.

Crappy Graphs

Crappy Graphics has a memorable name and a useful feature. It was simple to use. I created my Venn Diagram pretty quickly, but I wanted to adjust the font size. If the program offered the ability to change text or graphic sizes, I didn't find it. I chose to create a simple Venn Diagram comparing facts about Washington and Lincoln. We teach a unit on famous Americans around President's Day. It can be used to teach social studies content, to assess reading comprehension, or to provide a model for students to create their own Venn Diagrams. You can see my initial "crappy graph" by clicking here or you can look at the embedded version below.