ScienceSim Blog 6

Today we learned about using a virtual world. We went through a couple different steps to get us to where we were supposed to be. The steps included making a sim character, logging onto imprudence, and then teleporting to Alaska South. It took us awhile to get through these steps. It wasn't a smooth process at all. I either couldn't teleport, or I would get logged off. I think this could be a fun technology to use with my students if the program would actually work. It's not good to come into class and not have the program work. The lesson is thrown off and you've wasted your time as well as the students' time if the program doesn't work. I would use this as a teacher only if I could make sure it actually worked. I had this happen in my practicum where the computer program wouldn't work and so the whole class hour was wasted.

Google Doc Surveys

Today, we learned how to make a survey on Google documents. It was very fun and helpful. I can see this being very helpful in my future classroom. Students can use this to make quizzes of their own. You can learn a lot from students if you'll let them come up with their own quizzes. It's also fun for the students to be able to use technology to answer quizzes instead of pencil and paper. We also learned how to upload and save these documents. It's great to be learning about this information so when we're in the actual classroom we have resources to pull from.

Here is my survey!

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFpEc3Z0UnlUZ01yT0wySzFUS2ROYmc6MA

Spreadsheet

Today, we learned about how to make a gradebook on a spreadsheet. It was a little frustrating because I couldn't get my file to open. It said that it was read only no matter what I did. I got a little behind because of that, but once I caught up I understood the directions and got the gradebook finished. We learned how to make a formula so that the computer does the math for you. I wish we could have learned how to format the cells more and learned more functions to use in excel, but it was I did learn a few things. We also went over the website polleverywhere.com. This could be a neat tool to use when you want to poll your students. They can just text in their response. It's a lot of fun.