7. Concept Map-Elements of a Story using "Al Capone Does My Shirts"

Parts of a Story

I.       Plot

The plot is the sequence of events involving characters in conflicting situations. The plot has four main parts, the problem, the roadblock, the high point, and the solution. In the book Al Capone Does My Shirts, there are several different plot lines going on at once because of the multiple problems and solutions for each character. The overall main problem though is Natalie not getting into her special school and the problem remains until the end of the book thanks to Moose and Al Capone.

A.    Problem

1.    Moose needs to move to Alcatraz island

2.    Natalie doesn't get into her special school

B.    Roadblocks

C.    the high point

D.    solution

1.    Moose learns to like Alcatraz.

2.    Moose writes to Al Capone and gets Natalie into her school.

II.     Characters

A character is the people or personified animals in the story. In the book Al Capone Does My Shirts there are several characters that hold an important role, however the three main characters are Moose, Piper, and Natalie. These three charters are the ones who develop throughout the story and are in the story the most. Mr. Flanagan and Mrs. Fanagan could also be considered main characters.

A.    Moose

B.    Piper

C.    Natalie

III.    Setting

The setting is the backdrop form which the story is taking place. The setting can include the location and the time period of which the story takes place. In the book Al Capone Does My Shirts, the setting is Alcatraz island in the year 1935. Because Alcatraz is in San Francisco, California, that is also part of the setting.

A.    Alcatraz

B.    1935

C.    San Francisco, California

IV.    Point of View

Point of view will determine the extent of the readers understanding of the story depending on which point of view the book is written in. There are three different points of view, their person omniscient, their person limited, and first person. The book Al Capone Does My Shirts is written in the first person point of view which means that the whole story is told through the eyes of Moose Flanagan, the main character.

A.    First Person

1.    Al Capone Does My Shirts

a.    Moose

B.    Third Person Limited

C.    Third Person Omniscient

V.     Theme

Theme is the underlying meaning of a story or the moral of the story. Al Capone Does My Shirts has several themes that happen through the book. Mostly all of the main characters at the end of the book have a change that happens to them due to the events that happened previously in the book.

A.    Treat all people the same even if they are different

B.    Don't dwell on the past and look towards the future

C.    Sometimes change can be good

D.    Confront your problems

E.    Stay true to yourself

 

 

5th Grade
Common Core Standards:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.2,
 CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.3,
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.5, and
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.6

6. Podcasts

When it comes to listening to things vs reading things there is both pros and cons to each. For me it really depends on the subject that is being taught that determines which is better. Reading an article can be a necessary tool. When you are reading you are not only looking at the words but your mind is creating a picture and you can read over things more than once until you understand. You can look back and refer to things that really help students out with their studies. The downside to reading is it can be immensely boring. I have had moments where I really needed to just stop reading because I got to the point that I couldn't understand it. Listening to an article gives you that engagement. Listening lets you relax and not really focus on the words but focus on the message. Listening to articles (depending on the speaker) really has the potential to really engage an audience through persuasion, humor, thought and many other tactics, but it also is hard to keep track of the information. Unless you are completely dialed in and have a pause button its almost impossible to get all of the information and if you missed something its a pain to go back. I listened to two TED podcasts and I know for a fact I wouldn't have been as engaged if I would have read the information. The first podcast was done by Ken Robinson and he discussed how schools kill creativity. His argument was extremely persuasive by pointing out that our schools are strictly focused on academics. Kids learn to be afraid of having a wrong answer because it so pushed in the school system, and some of the brightest most talented students never think they are worth anything because what they were good at acknowledged and was put down. The quote I will always keep with me that he said is that, "if you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with creativity". He basically describes how the creativity we are born with is educated out of us. His message was amazing and something I will keep with me but it was also hilarious. To keep the listener engaged he constantly was adding humor to the story and that is not something you can read. The second podcast was done by Christopher Emdin and his point was that we should teach teachers how to create magic. His discussion was not funny but the way he talked and presented the information made me completely dial in. His whole podcast was about how teachers today that are in school are learning the information. They are studying this and studying that and are focused on lesson plans and standards and so much more. These teachers are the ones that the students avoid. The teachers all of us hated growing up. The teachers that we loved, many of them didn't learn how to teach through education but from watching other people in engaging churches or at concerts so they could watch how they get the audience to respond to them, to stay engaged. He wanted us to see that the magic that a teacher needs in order to have a successful classroom cannot be taught with a lecture but through action and observation and practice. I myself have really gotten overwhelmed by all of the standards and what to do and how to do things but none of that will help me teach. Yes it will give me the information but in order to learn how to teach I need to watch and learn from people who already know what to do and how to keep students engaged and excited about learning. Again I couldn't have gotten this message through reading. So if you asked me which I would like better, reading or listening, I would tell you that it really depends on the person that is writing or talking.

5. How Shutterfly and Other Social Sites Leave your Kids Vulnerable to Hackers

Summary:
Due to millions of kids being in sports or other activities, coaches and parents have turned to social media sharing websites in order to make things run more smoothly. The most popular option is a website called Shutterfly, which allows users to upload photos of kids, home addresses, emails, gender information, phone numbers, school names, jersey numbers, and game schedules all in one place. The bad thing is even though Shutterfly claims to have a proviate policy using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is not using the encryption for much of the website, leaving kids information exposed. SSL is a protocol that shows a user that, that particular site is safe and legitimate. It shows that the website hasn't been hacked and that no one is intercepting information. It's easy to identify SSL because all you need to do is look at the web address and if it has https instead of http, then it is protected by SSL, however most websites don't use SSL for most of their pages due to cost. Information obtained by Mother Jones, show that representatives for Shutterfly were fully aware of the problem of security for at least six months now and have done nothing to fix the issue or warn the users to take their child's information off the site. Two other websites, Eteamz and TeamSnap, do the same thing as Shutterfly, giving very little security. After things were exposed by Mother Jones, TeamSnap quickly started encrypting pages but still left several pages open and insecure. A man named Porterfield decided to test the security of the sites and set up several fake accounts on these websites. He then was able to easily download Cookie Cadger (a hacking program) and hacked all of the pages he created with extreme ease. He was able to get and change information about the kids, as well as add his email address to the mailing list for sports teams so he could get personal information about the whereabouts of the kids. After making his experiment public, Shutterfly and TeamSnap announced they will address the problem and recommended parents avoid putting personal information on the site. Eteamz refused to comment on the issue. Thankfully no major hacking has been done but most of the sites say that there is no reason for concern and Shutterfly even said "There is no option to view the site without signing in to your Shutterfly account.", which was disproved by Porterfield's experiment. The main point Porterfield wanted to make was to make sure parents and coaches are aware of what could happen and how easy it is to do so and prompts them to take all personal information off of the sites.

Reflection:
This is another prime example as to why I do not like signing up for social sites. I sign up for as little as possible (which normally means I only do things when I am required too). It was really nice to know about SSL though and how I can watch out for it now. It gives me a little bit more security on what websites I can really look at and feel safe signing into. However it is scary to know that there is programs out there that can hack into my stuff so easily. It is also scary that children, who do not even know about how necessary it is to protect their information, can have their lives ruined at such an early age and it also posses the question of how safe these kids are. Most children stay at home alone or walk home from school and this just makes that all the more dangerous. There should be laws to just get rid of this stuff. If it is so well known why isn't it gone? I almost wish I lived in the days without computers, then the fear of our lives just being ruined would disappear. I think technology could really be a wonderful thing if steps could be taken to better protect information.

4. With Tech Taking Over in Schools, Worries Rise

Summary:

Many of the schools today has adapted to the use of technology to better education and create a simpler means of doing things. At New York State Elementary School, teachers are allowed to use an app that monitors and keeps a record of students to determine if they are good or bad. In Georgia, some schools have changed their cafeteria line letting students pay for their lunches by scanning their hand, and state all over our nation are using social media sites to spread information for students who play sports. Schools are becoming more and more technology based in order to help achieve a better learning experience, but all of the technology used in the schools have allowed for technology companies to gather tons of data of students and have very little restrictions on what they can do with that information. Parents started to speak up and question the privacy and security of their children, concerned that certain information like learning disabilities or family issues will leak out and effect their child's future college or career life. Critics about technology in schools say that the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act isn't keeping up with the digital age because many of the education sites and apps are not covered by the law due to them not being a part of the official institutional student education records. In fact, last year parents voiced their concerned about inBloom, which is a student data warehouse that offered to streamline how educator and apps received students information, and forced them to shut down. Because of this concern over privacy, over one-hundred bills across the nation have been passed in the last year to try and prevent student information from getting out, California being the one that has made the largest leap forward. California passed a law that prohibits education sites, apps, and cloud services from selling or disclosing any sort of personal information they may have received about a student at any grade level. This bill prohibits companies from selling, disclosing, or using students online searches, text messages, photos, voice recording, biometric data, location information, food purchases, political or religious information, digital documentation, and many more things for marking purposes. The purpose for this, is to prohibit companies from using student information without permission. However, it is not fully passed yet. Governor Jerry Brown has not chosen a side concerning this new law, but if he does not say anything by the end of the month, this bill will officially be passed. James P. Steyer says that this bill was issued in order to put parents minds at ease and get them to trust in online learning.

Reflection:

This has always been a concern for me as a student. My parents always warned me about how I need to protect my personal information when it came to the internet or technology in general so being forced to sign up for websites because of school has never really sat well with me. It's nice to know that people are making an effort to stop companies from stealing information but I also don't like how it is only for Kindergarten through the 12th grade. I think these types of laws should be passed for college students as well. We as college students has more to lose. We have jobs and we are working towards a future career. We are learning how to handle money and most of the time, technology is a huge part of all of that. Students in general should be protected not just Elementary through High school. 

3. Notes on Horizon 2014

-The NMC Horizon Report: 2014 K-12 Edition is a collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the Consortium for School Networking. 

-The internationally recognized NMC Horizon Report series and regional NMC Technology Outlooks are part of the NMC Horizon Project, a 12-year effort established in 2002 that annually identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years in every sector of education in some 65 countries around the globe.

-The NMC Horizon Project model derived three meta-dimensions from the CCR framework that were used to focus the discussions of each trend and challenge: policy, leadership, and practice. Policy, in this context, refers to the formal laws, regulations, rules, and guidelines that govern schools; leadership is the product of experts’ visions of the future of learning, based on research and deep consideration; and practice is where new ideas and pedagogies take action, in schools, classrooms, and related settings.

-Policy- 

          -It is widely agreed that expectations for teachers are evolving rapidly, especially as student centered learning and flipped classroom models are increasingly emphasized by departments of education and school administrations

           -The European Commission’s Creative Classrooms Lab recently convened a Policy Makers Workshop to develop standards for successful flipped classroom implementation and their consensus was documented in a report, Policy Maker Scenario: Flipped Classroom, which calls for teachers to use emerging technologies to support their roles as guides and coaches in the classroom.5

-Leadership- 

             -the rise of open educational resources (OER) is creating opportunities for schools to take advantage of high-quality, free content for both teaching and learning

-Practice- 

              -A widespread emphasis on integrating deeper learning approaches in the form of project-based and hands-on learning has already spurred more real world opportunities for students.

-the teacher’s role is becoming that of a mentor, visiting with groups and individual learners during class to help guide them, while allowing them to have more of a say in their own learning

              -Key to nurturing the new role of teachers is providing them with plentiful opportunities for professional development

-Deeper learning is a term increasingly used to describe a variety of approaches in which students gain knowledge and skills by investigating and responding to a complex question, problem or challenge

-A major component of this trend is the rise of students who are learning important lessons by creating projects, products, and services that directly benefit the world around them.

-The notion of sharing is inherent to the philosophy of open content, and in 2002, the non-profit organization Creative Commons began to address the need for alternative licensing so that people could legally share and adapt creative works.

-Resolving intellectual property issues has been crucial to supporting the movement toward OER

-In 2013, the EU identified the development of OER as one of three actions of the “Opening Up Education” initiative proposed to bring the digital revolution to schools and universities.

-To aid teachers with integrating OER into their classroom practices, the OER Commons is an online hub for content curation and training that was developed by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education.45 The OER Commons provides teacher education on the use and creation of learning materials with Open Author, a three-step online publisher that licenses and shares the content with the OER Commons community.

-Hybrid learning models, which blend the best of classroom instruction with the best of web-based delivery, place a strong emphasis on using school time for peer-to-peer collaboration and teacher-student interaction, while online environments are used for independent learning

-By categorizing hybrid learning as either sustaining or disrupting the traditional classroom, the Christensen Institute report provides school leaders with an underlying structure to consider as they gauge the effects of their efforts

-In practice, hybrid learning is seen as a way to level the playing field for rural schools by providing more access to a variety of high-quality courses

-Rapid Acceleration of Intuitive Technology: The appeal of this innovation is that a learner can experience information presented in a variety of modes without the distance that traditional interfaces impose; in other words, nothing gets in the way between the user and the information. Students have the opportunity to truly interact with the content

-Electrovibration refers to the process when a finger is dragged across a conductive, insulated surface, creating an electrostatic force that results in a rubbery, sticky, bumpy, or vibrating sensation

-While the traditional model prevails in many classrooms, there are initiatives now that award funding to schools for their work toward innovative redesigns of the school day. Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), for one, allocates funding for Breakthrough School Models, which put personalized learning first through flexible learning environments that leverage time, space, roles, and instructional modes to meet the needs of each student.

-In 2013, U.S. President Obama announced an initiative to rethink the high school experience with the goal of preparing students with relevant, real-world course work that would pave the way to college and then into the competitive workforce.

-Authentic learning, as defined by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, typically focuses on real-world, complex problems and their solutions, using role-playing exercises, problem-based activities, case studies, and participation in virtual communities of practice.

-EDUCAUSE’s report, Authentic Learning for the 21st Century: An Overview, suggests that authentic learning prepares students for the skills and knowledge demanded by universities and the workplace

-learning by doing in science, students gain the foundational skills, knowledge, and understanding of real scientists and technicians, as well as important related skills such as critical thinking, research and writing methods, and presentation techniques

-Virtual Enterprises International is an example of how authentic learning experiences can connect students with the world of business and entrepreneurship, preparing them for continuing their education and entering the workforce

-The goal of integrating more personalized learning into schools is to enable students to learn with their own strategy and pace, and demonstrate their knowledge in a manner that is uniquely their own

-Though the term “personalized learning” may conjure images of students working alone, the school encourages collaborative activities in which students share ideas and create materials together, based on their learning similarities and differences

-The term “complex thinking” refers in this report to the ability to understand complexity, a skill that is needed to comprehend how systems work in order to solve problems. Complex thinking could be described as an application of systems thinking, which is the capacity to decipher how individual components work together as part of a whole, dynamic unit that creates patterns over time

-Computational thinking entails logical analysis and organization of data; modeling, abstractions, and simulations; and identifying, testing, and implementing possible solutions

-With more people concerned about sharing their data through social media sites and their mobile apps, initiatives that aim to aggregate massive sets of student data and then work with third-party providers and vendors to develop educational solutions are experiencing an unexpected backlash that has all but stalled progress in this area. Ensuring the security of student data is important, but solutions are complicated because it requires an orchestration of modernized government policies, updated third-party agreements, and most importantly, a greater awareness of the issues.

-These new models often tout smaller classes, more personalized attention from teachers, and better access to high-caliber tools and technologies. While innovative new pedagogies and ways of thinking are challenging traditional paradigms, some pundits are concerned that the competition is not being fueled by the altruistic desires to improve learning experiences, but instead by where more money is being invested

-Unschooling rejects conventional methods of learning and instead emphasizes education through natural means, such as gameplay, work experience, and household responsibilities, while encouraging the freedom for learners to pursue their personal interests

-Society’s expectations about what skills students should learn in schools and how they should learn them are changing. The focus is drifting further away from traditional academics — language arts, mathematics, sciences, and social studies — toward the conception of more modern, interdisciplinary curricula that reflect real world work environments

-The technologies, which the members of the expert panel agreed are very likely to drive technology planning and decision-making over the next five years, are sorted into three time-related categories — near-term technologies that are expected to achieve widespread adoption in one year or less; mid-term technologies that will take two to three years; and far-term technologies, which are forecasted to enter the mainstream of education within four to five years.

-There are currently seven categories of technologies, tools, and strategies for their use that the NMC monitors continuously

-Consumer technologies are tools created for recreational and professional purposes and were not designed, at least initially, for educational use — though they may serve well as learning aids and be quite adaptable for use in schools

-Digital strategies are not so much technologies as they are ways of using devices and software to enrich teaching and learning, whether inside or outside of the classroom.

-Enabling technologies are those technologies that have the potential to transform what we expect of our devices and tools

-Internet technologies include techniques and essential infrastructure that help to make the technologies underlying how we interact with the network more transparent, less obtrusive, and easier to use

-Learning technologies include both tools and resources developed expressly for the education sector, as well as pathways of development that may include tools adapted from other purposes that are matched with strategies to make them useful for learning

-Social media technologies could have been subsumed under the consumer technology category, but they have become so ever-present and so widely used in every part of society that they have been elevated to their own category

-Visualization technologies run the gamut from simple infographics to complex forms of visual data analysis

-The integration of personal smartphones, tablets, and PCs into the workflow supports an on-the-go mentality, changing the nature of work and learning activities so that they can happen anywhere, at anytime

-Adoption of BYOD policy into the corporate sphere has provided a model for educational contexts, and the practice is gaining acceptance in schools all over the world

             -For schools, BYOD is less about the devices and more about the personalized content that users have loaded onto them. Rarely do two devices share the same content or settings, and BYOD enables students and educators to leverage the tools that make them most efficient and productive.

             -BYOD has profound implications for primary and secondary education because it creates the conditions for student-centered learning to take place

-Cloud computing has become widely recognized as a means of improving productivity and expanding collaboration in education.

-Gamification may be the new idea that moves this set of ideas and supporting technologies into broader use. The idea is to integrate game-like elements and mechanics, including quests, experience points, leader boards, milestones, and badging, among others, into non-game environments.

-School leaders are just beginning to understand which data is useful for advancing learning, as well as the scope of privacy and ethics issues; however, the potential of using data to improve services, retention, and student success is already becoming evident

-New kinds of visualizations and analytical reports are being developed to guide administrative and governing bodies with empirical evidence as they target areas for improvement, allocate resources, and assess the effectiveness of programs, schools, and entire school systems.

-The Internet of Things, a concept advanced by IP cocreator Vint Cerf, is the next step in the evolution of smart objects — interconnected items in which the line between the physical object and digital information about it is blurred

-While there are many examples of what the Internet of Things might look like as it unfolds, it is still today more concept than reality

            -While Internet-enabled appliances are gaining traction in the consumer industry, concrete and well-documented implementations for teaching and learning are difficult to find, particularly in the K-12 sector, though potential applications are easy to imagine

-It is no longer far-fetched to envision a world where all objects and devices are connected to act in concert.

2. the learning myth

This is how I will try to run my classroom. Positive reinforcement is key to having successful students but it's interesting to know which positive reinforcement to use. Instead of congratulating them on what they know congratulate their progress. Congratulating what they already know is what a good test grade does, our job is to focus on letting the students know that we are proud that they worked so hard to get the grade they received and encourage them to strive towards a better grade. I believe this kind of thinking, making them think they are important, will help students with their grades and give them a motivation to want to learn and enjoy school.