My class had a video chat via google hangouts with Robyn Hrivnatz who is a marketing and educator program manager for the teachers at Microsoft's USEducation Division. She says at Microsoft there are about 125,000 employees. When she went to college she majored in education and computer science. She now works with education around the world.
Robyn says to be successful you must understand your audience and understand your competition which means consider customers, teachers, and students. She also told us that when you are entering the workforce you should be professional but also be yourself. You can share personal information but only what is appropriate.
Some of Robyn's favorite tools to use in the classroom would be a video tool such as google hangouts or skype and one note. One note is just sheer power because you can work anytime, anywhere. This is good because every student would better at different times and no matter what you can give instant feedback.
This week in our class we were challenged to use MakeyMakey. MakeyMakey is where you take everyday objects such as foil, a banana, cardboard, etc. and connect them to a circuit board and plug that into a computer and that can act as your keyboard and operate your computer to play a game.
"Our group played the Frogger game. We struggled in the beginning on how to connect the wires to the circuit. After many tries we finally figured out how to get the game to run from our circuit. We first tried to connect every color to the circuit and we either connected the other end of the wires to cardboard or play doh. Quickly we saw that the cardboard wasn’t helping and not all the wires needed to be connected to the circuit. After looking at how our other classmates were doing and receiving some tips from our professor, we were able to get the circuit to run. What worked for us was to clip each alligator clamp to play doh and having every group member hold one caused arrow keys to respond. We also found that clipping an alligator clamp to someone’s hand was the final step to making our character move in the game. We also figured out that clipping the alligator to a shirt sleeve stopped the game from working. How we overcame the circuit issues was that we learned that everyone needed to participate in the group project. We assigned every group member a wire to hold and every wire also had play doh attached to the end of it."
It was very exciting when we got ours to work after the much confusion we were having.
Chapter 9- Connected Educator
The world is evolving. educators are finally realizing that the web has a great amount of knowledge right at our fingertips. What makes an educator great is when they take the time to learn the new tools that are out there to be used to their advantage to not only help themselves but also their students. If teachers can demonstrate and acquire the four components of learning 2.0 not only will they benefit but their students will as well. The four components are knowledge, pedagogy, connections, and capacity. Knowledge helps building classrooms and involving collective intelligence. Pedagogy helps to challenge the teachers to focus on the student's passion and creativity. Connections is teaching students to make a personal learning network to help with their knowledge. Capacity encourages us to keep an open mind and be open to learning new things.
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