Mrs. Freddy's Practical EdTech

For this blog, I was tasked with reading a book entitled Teach Boldly  by Jennifer Williams. This was not my first choice for books, but I was interested in getting some ideas after reading the description. In my opinion, the book centered around the themes of social justice and equity in education. Williams goes into detail about how to achieve these things through using educational technology. I enjoyed the different examples of what she had been introduced to. In particular, Chapter 3 is titled The Human-Centered Learning Environment. This chapter described a plan created after Google did a diversity analysis within their own company. They realized that their company was not as diverse as they thought and they wanted to help change that. To tackle the problem, they decided that they needed to start at the beginning -- in schools. This was the birth of the Google Code Next lab in Oakland, California. It was centrally located in a diverse neighborhood and help students from local ...

Social media has become one of the most essential aspects of our lives today. We use social media to connect with friends and family. We use it to connect with other professionals in our fields. Our students use it daily to talk to all their friends the same way that we wrote notes back and forth between classes when I was in school. This is why we have to start teaching them how to be safe and learn to find quality information at a very young age. Arguments on social media can be used for good or bad and it's up to the reader to make sure that they get the right information. Most educators do not consider the possibility of actually using social media to teach their students how to argue online effectively and appropriately. The question is how do we decide what is the most accurate information we read when following these arguments.  For example, I like to follow several different news sources to distinguish between the stories and how they are covered by the different sources. W...

I have made quite a few introduction videos in my time as a college student and teacher. Almost all of them are made with the same type of quality and aspects. Below is an example of one that was made only a couple of months ago for a college course.  The task I was most recently given was to re-evaluate my video and make changes or make a new video. I did some reading and a little research in preparation of being able to improve upon my original. As I was watching this original video, I began to realize just how much better it could have been. As you can see, there are no transitions and a boring background scene and no sounds. Hicks says that things to consider when editing should include: narration, panning and zooming, repetition, time effects, film effects, transitions, sound effects and music, captions and text. (2013) Below you can compare my newest version of my introduction.    As you can see, I added a fade in and out to make the beginning and end lo...

I cannot remember the first time I encountered an infographic. I'm sure it was even before the internet made them popular. We have been using infographics for years to share information. You can read about a history of infographics here . The idea of sharing information through pictures is definitely not new. We have been using images on posters, TV screens, and computers for years now. All this leads me to think that humans respond well to seeing visuals. We already know that some people are visual learners. Just think of the benefits of instruction with infographics to those students in your class.  The web-based world we live in now has so many ways to make this an easy task to complete. We can now research, plan, and create infographics in very little time. We can put out surveys to colleagues or students to collect our own data. Teachers need to now begin teaching students how to compose their own infographics. The ways in which students could use infographics to be assessed i...

I was born in 1981. The days of Polaroid cameras were in full swing. As a kid, taking those pictures that developed almost instantly, with a little shake, was so exciting. The fad died out in the 90s and we moved back to regular film that had to be developed over several days. It was not until after I was out of high school that digital cameras came around. The best part was being able to see if your picture looked good right away, instead of having to take film to a store and wait two weeks for it to be developed. With the invention of digital cameras, came a great rise to the opportunity of how things could be placed on the Internet. We could see our pictures instantly and, in essence, delete them if we did not like them. This all gave rise to social media and what has become a huge part of our everyday lives.  Today, people post pictures on social media and websites throughout the day. Naturally, when I began reading  Argument in the Real World , I found it very interesting...