Free Online Applications

Zoho

I highly recommend Zoho to my coworkers for their use, and their students use. The Zoho Office Suite is a Web-based online office suite containing word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, note-taking, wikis, customer relationship management (CRM), project management, invoicing, and other applications developed by ZOHO Corporation. It was launched in 2005 with a web-based word processor. One of the strong points of Zoho is that you can use all the Microsoft office programs online (free!) and you can collaborate with your fellows online. Zoho applications are divided in three groups: Collaborative Applications, Business Applications and Productivity Applications.

v  Collaborative Applications: chat, docs, discussions, mail, meeting, project and wiki.

v   Business Applications: assist, books, bug tracker, campaigns, creators, CMR, invoice, live desk, market place, people, recruit, report, site 24/7 and support

v  Productivity Applications: calendar, notebook, sheet, writer and show.   

Sumo Paint

            Sumo paint is an easy and fun image editor tool; you can use it online without having to install nothing in your hard drive. You can edit and share images as a professional just like Photoshop. Sumo has many of the same tools of Photoshop, but Sumo is more addressed to work with illustrations than with heavy images. The advantages are that first, it's free, second, is easy to use, third, you can work online making it easy to share.

Google Sites

Google site is a very interesting place where you can create awesome websites that can be very useful in your instructional design. For this assignment I created an ‘’Annotated Websites’’ with the purpose of have a place where I can find resources and references with the information that I need for work in my projects. I am currently working in a project about Emerging technologies and Technology integration in the classroom. So, with this website I can find all the information that I will need in just one place. This site has two pages; the main page has a vast list of sites with technology integration articles with links and a detailed description of what you can find in each page. The second page has a list of web 2.0 applications with a description of each tool.

I also plan to use this site to integrate in my lesson plan as a tool to engage my students in researches of different topics. Further on I’ll incorporate more information about others themes that allow students use as a support site.

Here is my link: https://sites.google.com/site/instructionaltechnologyedt5410/home 

Bubbl.us

This concept map represents the elements of a novel, structure and plot. My idea with this concept map is to explain to my seven grade students in a simple ways the basic elements of a novel. I planned to use the example for a literature class.   

Description of the concept map:

Conflict and Character within Story Structure.

The Basic Three Act Structure:

Act 1 (Beginning), Act 2 (Middle), and Act 3 (End) refer not to where in time in the story they lie but instead fundamental stages along the way.

In the Beginning you introduce the reader to the setting, the characters and the situation (conflict) they find themselves in and their goal. Plot Point 1 is a situation that drives the main character from their "normal" life toward some different conflicting situation that the story is about. 

In the Middle the story develops through a series of complications and obstacles, each leading to a mini crisis. Though each of these crises are temporarily resolved, the story leads inevitably to an ultimate crisis—the Climax. 

In the End, the Climax and the loose ends of the story are resolved during the Denouement. Tension rapidly dissipates because it's nearly impossible to sustain a reader's interest very long after the climax. Finish your story and get out.

Reference

http://www.musik-therapie.at/PederHill/Structure&Plot.htm

Jing

In this computer-based task my K-12 students will use the technology tool Jing, to make a tutorial on how to solve a math exercise. But first I’ll show them a tutorial about what they have to do.

The main goal of this task is that my students can use their critical thinking to construct their knowledge integrating technology tool in the lesson.

European colonization of the Americas

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For my idea for a lesson that would incorporate the use of a map, I created a map using Google Maps for my K-12 class of History. My map is about European colonization of the Americas. This map describes the routes followed by European colonists and some relevant facts of that history period. This a lesson in form of an interactive lecture in which I’ll explain to the learners different history facts about the European Colonization  of the Americas, people and places involved and the relevance  of this history period to the world today. 

The students will be able to see the different routs taken by the expeditionist , the first places discovered and the time period. The learners can make question and interact with the teacher while they are listening to the interactive lecture.          

HPI and Podcasting

Reflection

            Achieve, through people, increasingly successful accomplishments that are valued by all organizational stakeholders (p.35). This is the vision of the Human Performance Improvement that we find in the chapter 14 of the Trends and Issues book. I can relate this vision to my professional practice because as a teacher I hope to achieve successful accomplishments through my students, when my students make a good performance that’s an achievement for me and all the educational stakeholders.

            Human Performance Improvement involves the behaviorism approach that I constantly use in my professional practice. Behavior is individual activity whereas the outcomes of behavior are the ways in which the behaving individual’s environment is somehow different as a result of his or her behavior (p.136), to stimulate (reward/punishment) my students to achieve the desired results is an important part of my instructional design.

            I can see many opportunities where the ideas developed in this chapter could help me in my practice. For example: the Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model. Although this model is not intended for k-12 education the behaviorism approach in it, can be very helpful for my practice. In the model, we can see the stimulus as a relevant and frequent feedback on adequacy of performance, the response as organize work processes, and the consequences for poor performance.  The part of the stimulus in the model can help my students to be more involved in the class, through feedback, reward or punish depending on their behavior.

Podcast:
 

Grammar girl: Quick and dirty tips for better writing

This is a very useful podcast about good grammar and writing, and the author is very charismatic. The duration of the podcast is 8 minutes.

Mignon Fogarty is the host of Grammar Girl and founder of Quick and Dirty Tips.  Mignon was a magazine and technical writer, and an entrepreneur.  Mignon has a B.A. in English from the University of Washington in Seattle and an M.S. in biology from Stanford University.

The podcast episode that I chose is called: Where do I use commas?  This episode has the next segments:

Commas: Are There Firm Rules or Just Guidelines?

In this segment the author talks about the different uses of the comma, and what makes them confusing.

Don’t Put a Comma between a Subject and Its Verb:

This segment explain why you should not put a Comma between a Subject and Its Verb

Pauses Do Not Equal Commas:

Here the author explain the myth of putting a comma everywhere we pause

Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Appositives:

Here she gives us an easy example to help us remember the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive appositives.

Here is a link to the podcast: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/where-do-i-use-commas.aspx

Niagara Falls

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