Shane Warren's ED554 Blog

As part of my professional learning network I opened a Diigo account.  After reading about Diigo (which stands for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other Stuff") and getting to use it for a few days, I think that it will be very useful for me going forward in my teaching career.  What's the end goal of the website? The end goal for Diigo is to provide a tool that allows users to manage their knowledge and productivity.  Diigo provides a platform where you can store the websites that you use as a teacher, allows you to annotate those websites as you browse through them, and gives you a place to contact and learn from peers who also use Diigo.    Is the user experience pleasant and intuitive? I am still learning about the website and how to best use all of the tools that it provides, but for the most part I have found it to be pretty straightforward.  Installing Diigo to my browser and learning how to bookmark and tag sites took very little time to...

As I mentioned in my last post, as part of my first use of Google Classroom I created two activities related to third grade math.  The Mathematics Virginia Department of Education SOL that I chose to concentrate on was "3.12 a) The student will define polygon," and "3.12 b) The student will identify and name polygons with 10 or fewer sides," (Virginia Department of Education, 2016). In this post I will be taking a look at how my two activities address Standard H from the NSQ Standards for Quality Online Teaching.  After looking through the six different options under Standard H, I chose to focus on standard H5, "The online teacher continuously reviews and aligns all course content with applicable course objectives and standards," (National Standards for Quality Online Teaching). I believe that both of the activities that I chose to include in my Google Classroom meet standard H5.  I specifically chose activities that would align directly with the standards...

As part of my first use of Google Classroom I created two activities related to third grade math.  The Math Virginia Department of Education SOL that I chose to concentrate on was "3.12 a) The student will define polygon," and "3.12 b) The student will identify and name polygons with 10 or fewer sides," (Virginia Department of Education, 2016). In this post I will be taking a look at how my two activities address Standard D from the NSQ Standards for Quality Online Teaching.  After looking through the seven different options under Standard D, I chose to focus on standard D1, "The online teacher uses digital tools to identify patterns in learner engagement and performance that will inform improvements to achieve individual learner growth," (National Standards for Quality Online Teaching). My first activity, is a two question short response assignment.  My questions ask the students to answer "what is the definition of a polygon?" and "what is...

After watching the Pear Deck 101 video and creating my first Pear Deck, I think I will definitely utilize this presentation tool in my classrooms in the future.  I really enjoyed learning about the different types of slides that are available (multiple choice, text, drawing, etc.).    I also really loved all of the templates that are available which will help to make creating new Pear Decks relatively easy and efficient.  For my first Pear Deck, I created a review for a lesson on greater than, less than, and equal to.  This lesson follows the Virginia Department of Education SOL 2.1 c) "The student will compare and order whole numbers between 0 and 999," (VDOE, 2016).  The Pear Deck lesson is linked here .   I can see using Pear Deck as a great way to gather information from all of my student about what they know about a topic before beginning a lesson, or to make sure that they understood the main learning objectives that were covered at the end ...