Melissa Quinn's Blog (7)

Just this year our district started using Google Apps for Education and it has changed the way I teach.  While I have used many other tools to collaborate and share information with my students such as Edmodo, Schoology, Microsoft Office Suite and other Web 2.0 tools, Google Apps for Education combines so many of these tools into one area plus much more.  These tools have made me a more efficient educator giving me to ability to easily collaborate with fellow staff, parents, and…

     I always love Kahn Academy for it’s educational resources.  It has a wealth of videos aimed at educating viewers math, science, economics and finance, humanities, programming, and other topics of interest.  Since I am planning to take the Mathematics placement test to attain my secondary math endorsement and I haven’t actively done math problems since college over 23 years ago, the course I chose to take for this experience was an online course on functions. 

     I was able to…

I really struggled this week to come up with a good opposing view of why Virtual Reality games or simulations shouldn’t be used for educational purposes.  I’m not sure why I struggled so much but as the technology teacher I felt I needed to have a good reason.  While other colleagues found reasons like a child’s change in behavior when playing in virtual worlds, taking on the characteristics of the avatars, distinguishing from real life and from video game life, and lack of face-to-face…

After completing week 4 of my Master’s class on Social Networking and Digital Citizenship I have discovered several new technologies and lesson ideas that I’d like to pursue.  One of my colleagues and I also created a Digital Citizenship Policy that I will use and share in my classroom when teaching digital citizenship and especially when expanding our connections to the outside world.

One of the new technologies I’d like to pursue and find out more about ways to integrate…

How do we keep students safe online while at school?  According to the National Education Association school districts need to have an effective Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that contains six key elements, a preamble, definition section, policy statement, acceptable uses section, unacceptable uses section, and violations/sanctions section for computer uses when on the schools network.  This AUP is signed by both parents and students and defines the appropriate behavior…

How Bloom & Marzano Have Impacted My Teaching

Because I received my teaching license in an unconventional way, through the Alternative Teacher Licensure Program, I did not have a strong understanding of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Marzano’s Instructional Strategies.  Even though they were mentioned during my alternative program, I did not begin to understand how important they were to the learning process until I started my masters program at Regis…

 During our Frogger Programming Unit, we use many of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy and Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy.  Students are taught computational thinking patterns that hit on higher order thinking skills like applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.  For instance, the computational thinking pattern of ABSORB is used in programming when one agent absorbs another agent.  

As a class we discuss real world examples of absorbing, for instance when a car enters a tunnel or a…