EDM Final Post

Here we are! We’re already at the end of this course, and I can hardly believe it! This course has been a great experience that I know will change the way I teach one day. One of my favorite parts about this course is how practical it was. A lot of times, we just read about different ways to enhance the classroom or watch others do it. However, in this course, each week we were challenged to not only research, but also to create and take part in new technologies that are sure to enhance my teaching.

My three biggest takeaways from this course are: the importance of technology in the classroom, the many resources that are out there to help, and the benefit of going out of my comfort zone to explore new technologies. Before this class, when I heard anything about technology in the classroom, the only thing that I thought about was the students having laptops. However, technology in the classroom is so much more. In this class, each week, we explored new ways that technology can be incorporated into the classroom. It is so much more than laptops. The students have ample resources, to use, as well as the teacher. I had never heard of most of the resources we had to explore this semester. At first glance, I didn’t want to have to explore all of them. “I already have enough tools and resources to use,” I thought to myself. However, once I got to exploring, I realized how many there are that are so awesome and can be helpful for me in the future! On example was LibreOffice. I was hesitant to download that onto my computer, but after I did, I’m sure that I will use it for my future students. This free resource is a great tool for students to use.

My favorite assignment in this class was the video creation in week 4. Making this video allowed me to revisit iMovie, which I hadn’t used in years. It was fun to be able to be creative and tell a story over a video. To be honest, I waited pretty late to do that assignment. I wish I would have done it sooner so that I could have had more time to do more edits and effects. Either way, it was a fun assignment, and it never hurts to get to talk about my puppy!

Two ways that I plan to incorporate technology into my class that are different than what I would have done prior to taking this class are through audio and videos, as well as use Formative to make formative assessments for my students! Through videos and audios, this class taught me how easy they are to make, yet how helpful they are to students. Specifically, I plan to use these two tools to help my students with instructions, announcements, and inside of online assignments. For example, if I assign my students an activity such as Nearpod, having my voice in there on an audio giving them instructions and hints can help them so much. Hearing instructions instead of reading them is a game changer for me. Before taking this class, I still knew this, but didn’t realize how simple it was to create videos and audios. Having to do it for an assignment opened my eyes to show that I am capable! In addition, I will definitely be using Formative in my classroom. Making one for class showed me how great of a tool it was! I had never heard of Formative before. I think sometimes it can be most important to do formative assessments in math to assess where students are at and what they’re missing. Formative is a great tool to get to do that. It was a great learning experience.

Overall, there are several takeaways from this class. I never thought I could learn so much in just 8 short weeks! Before the course goes away on Canvas, I plan to make note of all the resources and helpful tools given to us in a document that I can keep. I will start my student teaching in the spring and hopefully get my own classroom next fall, so to have a document that I can refer back to then will be great!

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Week 7 part A

This week, I enjoyed researching ways to assess students formatively in the classroom. I think this is so important, so finding fun and engaging ways to do this was great. I know I’ll be using most, if not all of the resources that were in our module this week.

The first tool I used was Formative. Formative is a great tool to make formative assessments, especially in math. Formative offers a free subscription, as well as paid ones that offer more details options. I chose this tool because it had so many options. For each question, I could make it pretty much any format I wanted. I used multiple choice, true/false, short answer, draw it out, etc. I also loved the way that you can give active feedback and chat with each individual student as they take the quiz. This is the true definition of formative assessment to me. I will definitely use this tool in my future classroom to quiz the students after a lesson. This will allow me to see what they’re understanding and what misconceptions they have. I also think it’s a great tool for small group use. Here is the link for my Formative math quiz on quadrilaterals: https://app.formative.com/formatives/6155cff9f5e22fc01e2f31a3 enter code WFE4X8

The second tool I used to make a short assessment is Kahoot! I have participated in plenty of Kahoots throughout high school and even college, but I’ve never had the opportunity to make one. I love to participate in them because they’re fun and engaging, therefore I know I want to use them in my future classroom. I thought it would be good to go ahead and get familiar with making one now to save time in the future! I love the competition side of Kahoot! It is so fun for students to get to race to get the right answer to see their name on a leaderboard. This is so much more motivating than a quiz on paper. I didn’t even realize that there were more options rather than multiple choice because that’s all I’ve seen. It was helpful to get to add in different types of questions such as true or false. I think this tool will be very beneficial to me in the future. I would use a Kahoot like this after a lesson or as a review before a test. This type of engagement will help the students want to know the correct answer. Here is my social studies kahoot! : https://create.kahoot.it/share/social-studies/a16c1ad7-c4b0-4342-81d0-ac526dce6be6

Week 6 Nearpod Creation

https://app.nearpod.com/?pin=ASLQ3&he=true

Above is a link to the Nearpod activity that I created this week. The access code to the activity is ASLQ3. Nearpod is an incredible tool that allows you to create presentations, activities, and more. It has many pre-made templates that are awesome. I enjoyed looking through those, thinking about how I can use those in the future! It also allows you to create your own interactive presentations. The activity I created would be used as a review after a lesson on the different stages of matter. This could be a great tool that would benefit my students greatly. It is interactive which will keep them engaged. Some review questions are in the form of a game, so it makes the students think they are playing a game, instead of doing review work. In addition, one of my favorite tools that Nearpod offers is the ability for the students to interact with each other. On the last slide of my activity, it engages students with a question that really makes them think, while seeing what others in the class have to say.

Week 6- Audio Recording

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p8x8IFh4MttkF_vPssKEBvJHCEyk6Pwi/view?usp=sharing

Above is a link to my audio recording for this week. This is an audio of me reading the beginning of a book to my “class.” I acted as if I was sharing this recording with my students to get them started on a reading. I read the first couple of pages, told them to follow along, and then asked them to read the rest on their own.

I used the Voice Memos app on my iPhone to record this. I had trouble sharing the recording on this blog, but then put the file in my Google Drive and shared the link. One thing I have learned throughout my college career is that Google Drive is capable of everything and can fix every problem. Maybe not every problem, but it sure seems like it.

In the future, I can definitely see myself using audio recordings with my students. Reading a story like this can be a great way to model fluent reading, especially with the younger grades. I also appreciate hearing directions given through recordings. Reading written instructions doesn’t have the same affect to me. This can be a great tool to use for homework and online assignments.

Week 4- Video Creation

This week, I really enjoyed creating a video. I used iMovie to create it, which wasn’t too hard because I’ve used it to make videos in the past. In high school, my friends and I would get together every weekend and make silly videos that we swore would make us famous. We had a lot of fun filming them, and we would spend hours editing them. We didn’t get famous, but I did learn how to work iMovie! I’d call that a win. There were some things that I had forgotten, though. I had to research how to get pictures to be over the video as I talked. I also had trouble getting the music to do what I wanted. I wanted the music to be very soft in the background as I talked and get louder when it was just showing the pictures. I played around with it for a while, but I never got it exactly as I wanted it. I also couldn’t figure out how to get the credits to roll like at the end of a movie. I ended up just making several different pages to use as my credits. Overall, it was a fun experience. I wouldn’t consider myself a super creative person, but I do enjoy projects like this that allows the little creativity I do have to come out. And of course, it’s always a pleasure to get to ramble about my dog!

EDM Week 3

This week, I used Canva (https://www.canva.com) to create a presentation that explained Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and the uses of technology for each one. Canva allowed me to chose a presentation template and add in my information to the already created template. I was able to add my own touches to the presentation design by choosing which template I liked for each slide. I chose Canva to create the presentation because I was already pretty familiar with how to works; however, I normally use Canva to create single page graphics not presentations. Even though though I wasn’t familiar with doing Canva presentations, I didn’t face any big obstacles. It is very user friendly. The biggest challenge I encountered was thinking of what Web 3.0 technologies can be used in the classroom. Webb 3.0 didn’t seem as straight forward as 1.0 and 2.0.

I will definitely be using Canva to make presentations for my classroom. The content you can create on there is so versatile. I can do presentations, graphics, photos, etc. It is a great way to present information visually so that my students can develop a deep understanding of the content.

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EDM Blog #1

This week, I was instructed to create a matrix using information about learning theories and make a blog post about it. So, here we are… back on my blog. I used this blog throughout my time as an undergraduate student, spanning from my sophomore to my senior year. I had several classes that required weekly blog posts, and I honestly didn’t hate them. Blog writing can be fun. I feel the freedom on here to express myself more naturally than I do in a discussion forum or a paper!

This week, doing a matrix was intimidating at first because I have never done one. In fact, I have never even heard the term matrix used in a classroom setting, only when people are talking about the weird old movie. So, I had to do a lot of research. At first, the research stressed me out because almost every matrix I saw looked different. I wasn’t sure which one I was supposed to do; however, I just used the basic template that most all of them had in common. Once I got past the daunting task of getting a template, plugging in the information wasn’t so bad. Luckily, over the summer, I took an educational psychology course that mainly focused on behaviorist and cognitivist theories. I used the book from that class, as well as the resources provided in our module on canvas to complete my matrix. I anticipate this knowledge of learning theories to influence my practice in the classroom by using these theories to connect to my students in the best ways possible. Every students has their own ways of learning, and there are many theories about how to teach. I plan to use each of these learning theories in the way that best fits the individual students. The goal is never to teach just to teach, but rather to teach to facilitate learning among my students!

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Life Lessons From Our Guest Speaker

This week, we had the privilege of talking to someone that is currently an executive assistant at an agency in Colorado. I have loved hearing the guest speakers in this class. Unlike some other guest speakers that I’ve heard in the past, each of these have kept my attention and have kept me interested and engaged. As I think back to the three speakers we have had, the common theme among them is that they are actually practicing what they preach. All three women that we have heard from are in the agencies and speaking to us from real experience. This is very helpful to hear as a student. It’s one thing to read things out of a textbook but to have it brought to life through them brings a whole new meaning and outlook on what we are learning.

One thing I’ve learned about life in an agency is that it’s almost never a story of getting a job right out of college and staying in that position forever. At the beginning of every speaker as they are introducing themselves, it seems to always include a pretty good sized list of jobs that they have had, and by good sized I mean that there are a lot! I really appreciate that aspect of this field. It seems like a constant growth cycle into what you really want to do. I appreciate that so much because that is the way I am wired. I never really know if I like something until I really experience it. I have to try things out before I even begin to know what I’m really looking for. This is something that scares me about a career. I hate feeling boxed in or stuck with something because who knows if I could even like the career path I choose or not!? So, this aspect of working in an agency is very attractive to me. It would allow me to get inside, get my feet wet with different jobs to eventually transition into the role I’m truly passionate about.

Another thing that stood out to me from the speaker is when she told us that as an account manager, you have to learn to not take things personal or get your feelings hurt when things are being communicated between the client and the creatives. That stood out to me because I could see myself falling into that so easily. I wear my heart and emotions on my sleeve, and I think it would be hard to not take things personally when a client is getting upset. However, this was really good advice for any time of work that I plan on doing. Somewhere along the way, someone is going to have opinions that fall onto me because we are in the corporate world. Learning to brush it off and know that at the end of the day, it’s just a job and it’s not about me will be vital and helpful.

What Creatives Want in an Account Manager

Last week, we read and discussed what the idea client would be like. We learned how important it is to know the client and have expectations for what you want out of them. This week, “oh how the turn tables.” That’s a quote by Michael Scott, and if you know it, I love you. If you don’t, just know that this week, the tables have turned, and the eyes are on account managers. However, not from the client. This reading discusses what creatives want in an account manager. 

This reading was interesting. Even looking at the title before reading, I was eager to learn about this creative and account manager relationship. I’ve always thought the creatives were the brilliance behind every campaign, but maybe it’s both.

The first thing the book does on page 153 is outline what creatives think about themselves and what they think about account managers.  hey were pretty straight-forward and a little humorous. The outline explains that creatives are creative, multitalented, independent, zany, etc., while the account managers are pretty much the opposite of all of these characteristics. It even says that they don’t know good creative and that they are extras instead of stars. That’s crazy, right? This entire semester we have been learning about what an account manager is and what all they do. The section about the hats they wear was enough to make them a star in my mind. The section continues with explaining that if an account manager doesn’t work well with creatives, it doesn’t matter who the client is and how much they love you. You will fail to deliver to them all the value your agency has to offer. 

The book continues to draw out what exactly the creatives are looking for in an account manager. The theme that stands out to me is that they must understand each other and both put in the amount of effort required on their part. For example, a creative’s job is so difficult without a good creative brief. It is up to the account manager to deliver that to them with quality input. After getting them the proper brief, the account manager must understand what the creative process looks like. The creatives want to be understood in the fact that they don’t want someone breathing down their neck telling them to just throw something together. 

It seems to me that the key factor in account managers and creatives working together is understanding and appreciating each other’s differences. The book talks a lot about the personality and character traits of most creatives. It’s funny because even reading through it, I can picture these people, and I think the book is so right. It’s great that account managers aren’t just like them. If everyone were the same, proper work wouldn’t be done! Both of these roles are major for an agency. The agency literally couldn’t operate or produce work without them.

Ideal client

The most interesting part of this week’s reading is that it talked about what the perfect client would be like! It outlined the characteristics that would be ideal for a client to possess for a client-agency relationship to run smoothly.This was so interesting to me because I have never thought of the client being a deciding factor for whether to work together or not. I’ve only thought about the agency’s side and what they can deliver. 

Earlier this fall, I got engaged and have been in the process of planning a wedding in the spring! So often when people hear about the engagement, they ask me questions such as “how did you know he was the one” and “when did you know he was the one?” I explain the true story of how after meeting my future husband, Matt, we knew each other for a while and just became good friends. I was able to observe him and see all of the great (and not so great) qualities that he possesses. Months after getting to know him, I made a list of all of the things I liked about it. I then realized that all of these things about Matt are the same things that I’ve always wanted in a husband. That’s how I knew. That’s when I knew. 

So, you might be asking “how does this relate to a client-agency relationship?” If you are, great question.

Like I did with Matt, an agency must learn many things about a client before they commit to them. They might not be saying “yes” to someone for their whole life like I am, but in the agency world, a “yes”  to a client and a huge project seems pretty close to the same level of commitment. 

There are about 20 different questions to ask to see if a client is ideal for an agency. Obviously we don’t live in a perfect world, so a yes to every single one of those questions is super unrealistic but the more the merrier. Here are 3 of those questions that I found to be the most respectable: 

“Are they (the client) committed to high standards and the agency’s best work?”

This question to me really shows how important it is for a two way relationship. Both parties have to be committed to high standards, not just the agency or not just the client. It’s both.

“Are they open-minded, and do they value objective, constructive candor?”

If a client is open to whatever the agency proposes for them, in a trusted relationship, it can make all of the difference in the world. The book explains the importance of the agency being able to tell the client the truth about their products.

“Do they expect to be surprised, pushed, and challenged by the agency?”

Great things never come to those who play it safe and never challenge themselves. I think that comfort can sometimes be the worst enemy to greatness. The client must be willing to think those same things and be willing to be uncomfortable.

These 3 questions stood out the most to me because these 3 things are vital for a working relationship with my fiance! We must be willing to both put in the same amount of work for our relationship, be open to truth from each other, and expect to be challenged by each other.