Lauren's+Page

= Welcome everyone! This is Lauren's page. = = = = I'm from Long Beach, New York and just moved to Maryland in August 2010. I teach 6,7,8 grade PE, Health, and Dance at Brooklyn Park Middle. =



Lauren, Vinnie, Andrea
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/12122869

5 new technologies:

 * ====Jing ====
 * ====Xtranormal ====
 * ====Wordle ====
 * ====Prezi ====
 * ====Wiki ====

4 ideas to share with others:

 * ====Have students watch or create an Xtranormal presentation to share or explain topics in Health Education. ====
 * ====Create a Wordle to discuss the meaning of Health on the first day of school. ====
 * ====Create a Prezi to introduce myself to my new class of students. ====
 * ====Using Wiki to share sport movements and videos of proper form. This could also be used to show videos of plays, dance movements, routines, choreography, etc... ====

3 principles of Universal Design for Learning:

 * ====Representation ====
 * ====Expression ====
 * ====Engagement ====

2 changes in your teaching to reach all learners in the digital age:

 * ====<span style="color: #bd21bd; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">text to speech to assist in reading texts. ====
 * ====<span style="color: #bd21bd; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">using all of this technology as a means of engagement to "hook" the students. ====

<span style="color: #bd21bd; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">1 BIG idea to implement on Monday:

 * ====<span style="color: #bd21bd; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">After reflecting on this year, I will make changes to my lessons and use UDL to continue engaging my students! ====

= __**Student Interview**__ =

=**Note: If we were presenting this to convince somebody, we would have video recorded this interview with actual students from our school**=

== Vinnie: She talks a lot…I kind of zone out and start thinking about what games I’m gonna play on my kinect when I get home. Then she does some problems on the chalkboard, then tells us what problems to do out of the book. I try to do the problems, but I still don’t get it. ==

== Vinnie: Well…I really like looking at pictures and graphs online. I also like playing games. There’s a really cool site called polldaddy.com. I don’t really know my classmates so it would be so cool to have them take a survey and use graphmaker to make a graph on the computer. That’s WAY better than trying to answer questions about graphs in our Math book. BORING! ==

Vinnie:

 * == More computer time ==
 * == Less paper and pencil writing and more typing ==
 * == More group projects ==
 * == Use of email to turn in assignments ==
 * == Computerized folders (zip drives) ==
 * == No more binders ==

Interviewer: What don’t you like about health class?
== Vinnie: It’s boring… Our teacher makes us read chapters from a textbook and then sometimes do round robin reading. Then he presents information from the same stupid PowerPoint presentation. On Monday, we usually get a big packet of work that needs to be completed by Friday. I really hate when we have to watch movies from the 1980’s.. No one talks like that anymore! Everything is so outdated!!! ==

Interviewer: How could it be better?
== Lauren: Maybe our teacher could integrate music and technology in the lessons… I mean, technology that we use! We don’t need packets of paper. It would be so cool to create a video skit and act out situations dealing with peer pressure, puberty, injuries,, depression, drugs, and all the other stuff we have to learn about… We can create these videos and borrow a camera from the media center! We can present our videos to the class. This is much better than just reading about it or discussing it. ==

== Interviewer: Thanks for your input Lauren and Vinnie. Just so you know, we will be showing this video to our school's Superintendent in hopes to make some changes in your school and get more teachers on board!! ==