Blog 10: Excel, Blogs, Future Technology Skills

          Excel will be a valuable tool for me as a future teacher. Assuming I am a middle school math teacher, I can create surveys on Excel for my students to take about how they thought an exam was, what I can do better/what they like about my teaching, etc. Surveys are a great tool that can be used to see how your students evaluate you and your performance, as well as how helpful you have been to them throughout the school year.
          I can also make graphs, charts, etc. to help my students understand the curriculum being taught for that particular lesson. In addition to that, Excel is a great tool to help teachers efficiently report/post grades.
         With all of the codes and formulas such as average, maximum, minimum, etc. Excel not only reduces the amount of time it takes to post creates and calculate averages, but it also allows for teachers to do it in a way more organized way than they have previously went about calculating/entering grades.
          When it comes to reviewing my classmates blogs, in general all the topics stood out and resonated with me. I found it more interesting to see what they had to say about the same things I was writing about, because they have been apart of my personal learning network and they have different interpretations of the things we have learned.
          For example, I found everyone's ILP's really interesting, because we all decided to take them and make them into our own, and it opens me up to seeing new ways of doing things, and possibly trying them out on my own. I felt the same way about our past 2 PowerPoint assignments that we had to complete.
          Seeing everyone take the assignments and make them into their own things is what is so interesting to me, because that is the part of a personal learning network that I benefit from the most. Everyone has the same assignments to complete, but goes about them differently, each discovering new parts of technology within them that everyone can learn how to use and learn from to further increase their technology knowledge for future needs.
          Especially because of the fact that not everyone in our class will become teachers, it is interesting to me to see how these topics apply to them and their professional career that they are about to embark on, and if anything how what they take away from the things we learn can help me as a future teacher.
          There are many technology skills that I have not yet encountered, but as a teacher would be super beneficial for me to learn about. One thing that really sparks an interest in me is the flipped classroom aspect. I know we covered this in class, however we did not go into it in depth, and I would like to learn how to master the flipped classroom technique.
          Now more than ever, education is becoming technology oriented, and flipped classrooms may become the future of education. It intrigues me how important technology has become in technology, and I really want to learn how to come up with my own strategies and my own classroom setup so when I get to finally become a teacher, I know how to integrate the perfect balance of flipped classroom and the average classroom that I grew up with.
          One way I can learn about the flipped classroom is using my Diigo account to join groups based off of flipped classroom. Another thing  I can do is take a MOOC on it, but I would want it to be self paced, so  I can learn it at my own pace.
          One new technological movement/advancement at a time, I want to be able to educate myself on it and be familiar with it so I can become the best teacher I can possibly be when it is my turn to finally have my own classroom and my own students.