Scribe APP

 The first and most frequent use of Day One is for writing diary. It has a setting to give daily push notifications to remind the user—it’s time to write your journal. This picture below shows the user has set the notification to remind user every day at 20:25 to write journal.

We don’t necessarily have to write something upon notification, however using Day One regularly would help us form a conditioned response to reflect about the day and what had happened that worth keeping a record. Students normally need this kind of training to form a habit of writing. Many students have a passive learning style in the classroom I used to observe, which is listening to lectures from the teacher only, they lack time for self-reflection. Keeping journalling and scribing in class helps them to express their thoughts and ideas through writing. 

Using Day One will help a student to form a habit of collecting. We could create different tags to keep a specific category of items. Such as school notes(different subjects), food recipe, reflection to books, and reflection to films, etc. This can be instantly recorded through mobile version of Day One, and it can sync on any other devices online, such as computer, tablet, webpage. If student has some good ideas, it's most effective when jot down immediately to keep the idea fresh and solid, after a while, people forget easily. So Day One mobile version can also helps to catch moment of inspiration. Collect and arrange different ideas and thoughts. 

In the classroom, students can scribe the lecture, and share it with others through mail, messages, twitter, facebook or linkin etc. As time goes by, this would become a valuable student legacy. Student's relationship to the knowledge has become the real owner of knowledge rather than passive receiver.

Day One is cloud based, it can store information for as long as you want, the cost is $39.99.  It could be used for as long as you want. Day One also could geotags your entries with your current location and makes a note of the current weather, you can tag your current activity status (such as walking, running, flying, etc.), and you can export all your entries as plain text or PDF or HTML. Moreover, you can also tag your entries for better organisation, and you can star certain entries to mark them as being extra special or important. On the iPhone, Day One logs your current activity status, and the Mac version has a terrific map view.

Some other added benefits of keep DayOne journaling is that it's good for one's psychological well being and physiological functioning. Some researchers, for example, have shown that people who journal reports having significantly less distress, feel less depressed, and have an overall better mood. Therefore, I would highly recommend my students to use this journaling APP to practice writing, if necessary I would also give a lesson to teach them how to use it.

Concerning the integration of Day One into classroom, it would take a lot of planning and organising, however the long term effect is very rewarding and worthwhile. The danger of this APP is that students might have some difficulty to express themselves deeply through this new software, however, with practice and teacher's encouragement, they will gradually get the happiness of journaling with this convenient way. They could basically write wherever they go, it takes off the burden of carrying a diary book or pen that increases the weight of student's bags.

Parents welcome letter

 Dear Parents,

   

Welcome to Preschool! I’m so excited to have your child in my class this year! To start off the year right, I’m sending you this letter that introduce to you our class schedules, activities and other important information which hopefully will enable us to make this a very positive and rewarding year.

During the school day, we will provide lunch and snacks. After lunch, there would be one-hour nap-time. Each day we would have one outdoor activity if the weather permits. Each week we would provide a variety of materials and activities for students to explore and study. The classroom environment promote independence and creativity, and we apply a child-centered approach to guide the children into self-learning through operating materials and explore the environment on their own.

I believe that communication is the key to maintain a great parent/teacher relationship. I encourage you to contact me if you have any questions or concerns at any time. I hope together we could make it a year of magical wonder and amazing growth for your little one.

Please feel free to contact us at any time if there are any questions.

Sincerely yours,

Yining Li

(978)272-5612

henhaomood241@gmail.com

My Educational Philosophy

Looking at the classroom 20 or 30 years ago is like peering into a different world, students seated together in a crowded room, the teacher stand on the stage ramrod straight and strict, giving lectures by rote from an old fashioned slate blackboard. Technology has come a long way since then, now new gadgets; new software and digital classrooms are emerging. However, due to the disparity and inequality of economic development, there is a huge gap between urban and rural education development. In rural areas in China, the resources are lacking; instruction method is stale; lack of specialized instruction and tutoring. Any excellent education technology resources can make a great difference in student’s lives.

I believe the first thing is to raise the awareness of people about the importance of the use of technology in education, and then they would start to invest in technology and bring it to school.

Second, it’s essential to break the stale atmosphere in a traditional classroom by setting up a creative system or platform that attract students’ attention. A student’s brain is always paying attention to something, described by Patricia Wolfe as “attention is selective”. So the problem truly lies in how to keep student’s attention focused on the learning experience that are relevant?

Third, similar to the perspectives of Sugatra Mitra, Dr. Maria Montessori also believed that no one is educated by another person. A truly educated individual continues learning because he/she is motivated from within by a natural curiosity and love for knowledge. Therefore, fostering children’s interest and curiosity is vital. Applying a new education technology in classroom would quickly attract students’ attention and give them something new and fun that promote them to learn by themselves. Take the example of reading class, students are often tired of the limited amount of books that are available in a resource constrained setting; teacher’s instruction method is just by reading it, if there is any words students don’t understand they have to stop and use dictionary. But if we could supply this classroom with tablets that has a reader for every student, they could browse the list of books and choose their favorite to read. If there are difficult words to read, they could use the online dictionary to quickly catch the words and translate them. A tablet is a study platform that contains teaching video, quizzes, pictures, text materials etc. Students could already learn by themselves with this tool. Teacher in this classroom becomes a guide or coordinator to help student learn by themselves rather than the teacher lecturing the whole lesson.

When technology was being valued in school, I believe it’s also useful to introduce the Universal design for learning guidelines. It gives a guideline and framework for multiple means of representation, multiple means of action and expression, and multiple means of engagement. Students learn and focus better when they can use their hands, and they are stimulated in visual, auditory and kinesthetic ways. Education technology can be applied in promoting Universal design for learning guidelines in classrooms that benefit the learning process of students.

Last but not the least, safety and healthy boundary of using technology in classrooms should be equally stressed.

Tutorial Designers APP-- Prezi

In a traditional classroom in China, teacher normally use blackboard to write or use powerpoint to present their teachings. Students are often bored by this traditional way of learning; students lost interests and curiosity because instruction style is too stale, lack of creativity. students can't think creatively and critically. 

Prezi is a software that also incorporate images, sounds, videos, text, charts as Powerpoint. Compare with traditional presentation tool Powerpoint, Prezi is more fluid and visual, it has a non-linear navigation and learning curve. It can work both from computer or on the web. As we design the slides online, we could always save it by a click, and access it anywhere as long as there is internet.

When design slides online, we could click “new presentation” and a window popped up with “choose your template”, different template has different learning curves. We could choose a specific template, and many slide pages within this template would come out. We could input more information into the slides.

As we make the slides, if we want to change the feature of the slide, click “Customise” on top of the screen. Then on the right side of the screen, many theme backgrounds appear to be selected. Or we could also choose blank if we don't want it to look too fancy.

The benefit of Prezi is that it could look at the big picture and details by just a click; it can skip back and forth; it has a map-like layouts; it could present as brainstorming. Once it’s done, we could share it in many ways by clicking the share icon. It could be shared on Facebook, or present remotely to people. It could download as PDF file, or portable prezi to use when we don’t have internet access.

I think the good thing about Prezi for classrooms is its visual experience,  which is more dynamic and fun. Student could follow its learning curve and map layout more easily than the traditional linear navigation of Powerpoint. It’s also convenient for teachers to create teaching slides, they could access to it easily wherever they go. The danger of Prezi is that students might sometimes use too much transitions or fancy applications that lose track of the content itself. We could always prevent that by limit the pages or application functions.