JOURNAL 1

In the article, “Power of the Mashup, by Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss a spectacular way of developing student participation and interest has been put into action by combining old ideas of the past with new ideas using technology. This provides hope for teachers who find it difficult to capture student interests in such topics as Literature and History. Though they are two of my favorite subjects, they are not always the easiest to keep interesting to young children. The article describes sort of a virtual reality trip students can create as they follow a particular body of literature or historical time period. I incorporates a visually stimulating images that go with the given topic to increase understanding and interest. I have always looked for new and innovating projects when teaching to these subjects in order to maintain student interest. The ideas expressed in the article are not only fun for kids, but serve a secondary, yet important, purpose which is learning new and useful technological skills as they work on their project.

Questions:

1. How can a teacher with low technological capabilities use some of these ideas in their classroom?
That is the great part about this project. There is a website called Google Lit Trips that demonstrates how this works. It is probably a good idea for the instructor interested to create their own lit trip using a favorite novel of theirs to test and record their findings. This way the instructor can experience and predict problems students may come across during the process Instructor can learn from them their own triumphs and failures to aid his or her students.

2. What if I do not have enough technological resources to utilize this for an entire classroom?
This type of project would be ideal for an extra credit opportunity or for those overachieving students who seem to finish class work or class projects quicker than the rest of the class. Students can work on this independent project during that extra class time in teams or individually. The students creating a Lit Trip can complete a project for pleasure of for school or district wide academic competitions.

Introduction Letter

My name is Jerry Speedon and I am a 34 year husband and father of three. I have two daughters and one son. The oldest is Isabella who is 10, the middle child Natalia who is 7, and the youngest of the three is Emilio or “E” and he is 5. My wife, Christine, and I have been married for the past 12 years. I have lived and grown up in Oceanside, California my entire life. I attended public school in the Oceanside Unified School district throughout my K-12 scholastic career and graduated from Oceanside High School in 1990.
My experience in technology has grown tremendously over the course of the last 22 months and I consider myself a PC person. Simply because it is all I know!!!! In the spring of 2002, I was hired for my first teaching position in Perris, California. The school was located in a low income area and the school itself only had one computer per classroom. Therefore, we did not do much computer work with the students and the lab was not large enough to accommodate my entire class. I was not comfortable working on computers on my own. I would always seem to run into unfamiliar territory and my greatest fear was loosing the data I had already entered. Therefore, teaching children to use computers felt like a futile effort. The lack of resources at the school enabled me to sustain from using a lot of technology within my lessons. I did learn to use the computer for grades and a few other tools, but that was as far as I took technology in my classroom. This went on for about 3 years. As I think back now, I feel like I did a great disservice to those students during that span. I left the classroom in the fall of 2005 due to district cut backs and entered a position in sales. The first thing they gave me in my new position was a lap top computer to work on in the comfort of my home. This was not comforting! My first thought after this was that I was going to either sink or swim. I use the computer in my office or out in the field multiple times on a daily basis. After asking many questions, sometimes the same questions just on a different day, I began to understand how easy the computer can be, as well as, visualize the advantages that technology can provide for students in school. I do not have the same feelings about using computer technology as I did 5 years ago. I am currently trying to get back into the field of teaching elementary education and look forward to passing on my newly learned technology skills and to my future students.
The section of the CSUSM mission statement that speaks to me is stated in the first sentence. I believe in the idea of preparing an educator to use technology in his or her own everyday practices. This creates the possibility of their own students to apply the same efforts into their education and life. That is a primary goal of mine when I attain my goal of reentering the classroom as an educator.