week 8 education and technology

            Before this assignment I had never blogged before and I had never even thought about building a blog before. It was a bit of a steep learning curve for me to build a blog and figure out the website to build the blog. After I built the blog I was surprised to see that my blog was getting views. It was getting hundreds of views but just that some people other than me and the instructor saw my blog I felt self-conscious about my writing and began to correct my work even more than before. This can be useful with my future students because I can have them write things that the learned in a blog and it is easy to have other students peer critique each other’s work. It might be surprising to some of the students to see that their blog is being read by other people. The most time consuming aspect of this assignment would be revising the assignment to check the blog that other people will be reading.

Weebly and social studies classroom

            In social studies a technology that can be extremely useful is websites such as weebly.com. Websites like this allow students to have access to building their own website to show how well they understand content that they are learning in class. Someone can easily go to weebly.com and sign up to start building a page. Students can make their own profile or students can use their school email and their email password to build their profile. Once the profile is built they can set up their own URL to share with the teacher and turn in their assignment. If the students use a subdomain of weebly that ends in .weebly.com it is free to use. After the profile is set and the URL is found the students can choose a theme to have on their website. The themes include pictures and words on the website that would need to be replaced. When the students have completed their website they can publish the website and the teacher can then check the assignments online. The students then have a product that is published online and they can go look up the website on any device even if it is a weebly.com URL.

            What I find interesting about this type of assignment is that it allows the students to build something that isn’t an essay or a paper. They can still meet the learning targets of making an argument and conducting research to support a claim. Most students will think that it is kind of fun to build a website of their own even as it is becoming more likely for people to easily build websites for anyone to see. In my teaching practice I hope to use this website in at least one assignment per year so that students can have experience and exposure to building a website of their own. I hope that while doing this I can assess what the students in my class know and understand, and I can assess how well the students can write to support a claim without the added stress and boringness of writing an essay. What surprised me about this website is the ease of use of weebly.com. Once you have the website established it is easy to delete things that you don’t want and to add things that you want to add. There is a tool bar on the left hand side that you click and drag things that you want to add. If you want to add a picture you click and drag the image icon then copy and paste the picture into the block. It is easily something that Middle school students can work with an complete an assignment using this online tool.

https://www.weebly.com/

https://www.atlantapublicschools.us/cms/lib/GA01000924/Centricity/Domain/3549/Create%20Your%20Own%20Teacher%20Website%20Using%20Weebly.pdf

Week 3 Education and technology

           In social studies technology can be used in multiple ways to bring information to the students and to help bring history to life for the students. Blogs can be used for students to read instead of listening to a lecture. Students can watch videos and easily listen to music of the era that the students are studying. Using technology students can easily conduct their own research online. In this blog I will discuss how this type of technology can help the students learn more about the aspects of WWII.

          Teachers can write blogs so that students can read about the information they also get in class. The blogs could include typed works from the teacher as well as websites and videos for the students to watch while they read. As long as the students have access to technology they can read the blog in class or on their own time.This helps when students miss a day at school they can simply check the teachers blog and get the information they missed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Objoad6rG6U  Videos like this Crash Course video can help students understand the main points of events that happened in history and are fun to watch.

          In social studies with the assistance of technology students can watch videos about the era that they are learning about. These videos can either talk about the content in a different way or attempt to show an accurate portrayal of what the event was like at the time. Videos such as Crash Course are built for students to watch and get the basic information that is needed to understand an event and why it happened. Other videos such as Band of Brothers can be used to show accurate portrayals of what an event in history was actually like. Both videos can help students understand more about the part of history that they are learning about. Music is another way that videos can be used in classrooms. Teachers can find music from the era to help students better understand the social aspects of the time. This is especially true during the Vietnam war era but is also true with every era of history. 

https://www.youtube.com/watchv=O7umIJj8UBo&list=PLeulUC74_O8TfKoX2muaphFeCGZ3ms7qe&index=13   Videos such as this can help students think about when the event was taking place and what the people thought about the political events taking place.

          Students can use technology to research topics on the content that they are learning. Before technology students would need to conduct research in a library or using encyclopedias. While libraries are still a great way to get information about a topic, it is limited. The internet has opened up a huge amount of information that is available quickly from nearly anywhere. The issue with conducting online research is deciding what information is good and what information is inaccurate.

 http://www.military.com/Content/MoreContent1/?file=dday_index   This is a link to a website that would be easy for students to find and provide quality information about WWII.

D-Day invasion airborne and beach landings

     On June 6, 1944 it was time for the Allied forces to put all of their planning and deception to test. over the night of June 5 the airborne forces were flying over the English channel and into German occupied France. The airborne forces were dropped early morning just hours before the first wave of beach landings hit the beaches of Normandy. The mission was to hold the beaches and prepare for the landings of the rest of the allied forces to prepare to continue fighting and push the Germans out of France and back into Germany. 
     The airborne forces were sent out first to land in France and open up causeways for the main effort to continue movement inland. The airborne forces were a fairly new tactic to use in warfare and many of the pilots and soldiers were inexperienced in airborne operations in combat situations. The pilots were flying through weather that wasn't ideal and were caught flying through the German air defense artillery. Due to this the pilots became confused on their location and their altitude. The airborne forces were dropped into France and the airborne soldiers that were lucky enough to make it to the ground alive found themselves in the wrong locations. Groups from the 82nd airborne and the 101st airborne had to band together to accomplish the mission that was set for the airborne. It took days before many soldiers finally found their units.
     The soldiers that were a part of the amphibious invasion did not fair much better. Soldiers were stuck in a boat while listening to the rough seas underneath them and the whir of machine gun bullets being fired at them. They were protected until the ramps dropped in front of them and they had to push forward to take control of the beach that they were landing on. The sailors that were driving the landing craft got confused just as the pilots of the airborne. Soldiers often times were told to exit the landing craft before they were close enough to shore and they had to swim the rest of the way to the beach. Once the soldiers hit the beach they had a tough fight against defensive positions set by the Germans. Eventually the soldiers were successful and were able to hold the beaches. This secured a foothold for the Allies in WWII in France. This was the beginning of the end for Germany. Meanwhile the Germans were convinced that the invasion was a fake invasion and that the real invasion was still coming at Calais.

Advantage, M. (n.d.). Retrieved October 01, 2017, from http://www.military.com/Content/MoreContent1/?file=dday_index

N. (2011, May 31). Retrieved October 01, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwEJbr8Hl2A

V. (2014, May 31). Retrieved October 01, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12fV2Qul7jI

 On the morning of June 6, 1944, a small amount of German troops at Normandy beach were pulling security not expecting any action in their corner of the world. The German's had heard planes and bombs which was not unfamiliar in those days of WWII. What the Germans on the beach did not know is that most of the planes they had heard over the night were Allied paratroopers who were preparing for the beach landings which were about to start. As the Germans looked out upon the English Channel they could not see much other than rough seas and overcast skies until they could finally see the landing craft coming into view. The allied landing force was the largest amphibious invasion force ever to storm a beach in history. The Nazis believed that this invasion force was simply a distraction from the real invasion force that was coming much farther north than the beaches of Normandy. 

Nazi soldiers believed that the invasion force was coming in a different spot because of the in-depth deception used by the allied forces. Completely unknown to the Germans the British had cracked the Nazis coding machine known as the Enigma. A man by the name of Alan Turing built a machine that was able to read messages sent by the Enigma. Being able to read these messages gave the allies the ability to plan around what the Germans were planning. They were also able to understand if the attempts at deception by the allies were actually successful. Using spies in the Nazi forces the Allies were able to give false information that coincided with the deceptive actions that the Allies were taking. The spy known by the code name Knopf was in Hitler’s high command and, was unknowingly to Hitler, working for the Allies.

The British spy Knopf and the British cracking of the Enigma ensured the success of the deception used by the Allies in the Normandy invasion. To set the full deception the allied forces set a fake invasion force in England across the English Channel from Calais. This fake force included inflatable trucks and tanks that were moved around, fake outpost buildings, silhouettes that look like soldiers and fake radio traffic. This fake invasion force made sense because it sat across the narrowest point of the English Channel making the possibility of invasion even more likely. The confidence of the Nazis that the invasion was not happening at Normandy added to the surprise of the Nazi soldiers at Normandy that the invasion was coming straight through their lines. Even though the soldiers were well armed, well protected with a well-planned defense that Allied forces were able to successfully secure a foothold on the beaches of Normandy.

British Spy Knopf: http://www.vosizneias.com/49351/2010/02/14/london-vital-secrets-about-top-hitler-secret-agent-uncovered/

Cracking the Enigma: http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-alan-turing-cracked-the-enigma-code

Patton’s Fake invasion force: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5913Yy7LqI