Hello, my name is Kristina Peters and I am from Grafton WV. I am currently working at an elementary school in Taylor County, teaching third grade. This is my second year teaching third grade, and while I love my current placement my job is being cut next year due to the incoming number of students. Therefore, I will be moving to first grade. It will be my first time teaching first grade, but I am very excited and eager to get started. The new placement is at the same school in which I currently teach so I know the staff. The first grade team is a wonderful group so I know I will be happy working with them. I graduated from FSU with a BA in elementary education and am currently working on graduate courses. I am happily married (for many years now) and have four beautiful children. I have been blessed with two girls (Savanah age 14 and Mallorie age 12) and two boys (Gaberiel age 10 and Jayson age 7). I am always on the run with some type of sporting event including band. Because I am a mother first, teacher second, and student third I normally do not get to work on assignments until late into the night. This being said I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Voki

I have to start of by saying that I really like this activity.  In fact out of all the activities that I completed or participated in this is by far my favorite.  I could see myself using this site with any age group both young and old.  I actually had both my five and thirteen year old watching me create this Voki and they were both very interested. Below you can see my Voki. I used the smiley face because I think that it would work well for all ages. If I was planning on using this for younger students I would probably lean more toward an animal and for older kids I would use an image.

Wordle

I have had the opportunity to create Wordles before in other classes.  For this assignment I created three different Wordles.  Here are the three links:
ISTE-NETS.T 2000 Wordle
ISTE-NETS.T 2008 Wordle
My Wordle on the Holocaust and WWII
Below is a screen shot of the 2000 ISTE-NETS.T wordle:

As you can see from this Wordle the dominant feature or component is teachers.  Next is technology and then learning.





Next is a screen shot of 2008

As you can see from this Wordle the dominant features are learning and digital.  While teachers are also a main priority they are not the main focus.  It seems that the standards are now focused more on the digital learning instead of the teachers.  

The last Wordle that I created is for my future classroom.  I am not a full time teacher yet, I am just enjoying my time as a sub.  However, I am very passionate about history therefore I decided to create a Wordle on the Holocaust and WWII.  Below you can see the image that was created.  

As you can see there are several dominant features that I choose to include.  They include: Jews, Germany, Holocaust, Nazi, final solution, Hitler, and WWII.  I choose these words because they are what I feel is most important.  However, if I would do this activity with my students I would make it clear that their Wordles would or could be significantly different than mine.  

Google Sites

Fortunately I have had the opportunity to work with Google Sites before.  In fact for this assignment I was just going to make updates to one of my previous sites.  However, after careful consideration I decided to create a new site but use some of the content from my previous one.  I am a little confused about editing the side bar to include links to my different pages.  I played around with the site a little to see how to link them but it just keeps taking me back to my page that I downloaded into the site.  I am going to continue to try and figure this out but I wanted to go ahead and post what I have completed so far.  For this site I included a picture and quote that I love, and my teaching philosophy, both of which come from my previously created site.  Then I uploaded my resume and rubric into the new site.
I personally think that this is a wonderful activity.  I really enjoy working with Google Sites even though I am not very good at it.  In completing this activity I think students are most closely relating to standard 2 of the ISTE-NETS.T standards. This is due to the fact that students are creating and developing a web site of this own design.  The outcomes are limitless. However, the best thing about this activity is that depending on implementation and overall outcomes, it could easily be formatted to suit standards one, three, and five as well.
Here is the link to my new site: Kristina's Web Page
Here is the link to my Showcase Portfolio in which I wanted to include because it truly shows how much I worked with Google Sites.

Excel 2

I just figured out (MOST OF) the Excel 1 assignment and am now trying to complete the Excel 2 assignment!  Hopefully I will have more to post by tonight!
This assignment did not seem as difficult to figure out as the first.  However, I could not do this in Excel so I had to use the Student's T-Test site that was provided.  I imputed information from two different groups.  The first group was for the males and the second was for the females.  I put the numerical values into the site and calculated for both the One Tailed T-test and the Two Tailed T-test.  I also looked at the link provided that gave detailed information about the differences in the test.  But after reading this site I have to admit that I am still not one hundred percent sure what it all means.  I do know that the I will not reject the null because the P value is less then 5 percent for both tests.  This means that even though there is a difference between male and female scores it is more likely to be do to chance or measurement error then gender.  Below is a Jing capture of my T-Test scores:

One research topic I could have my students test is "Does weight effect how fast an object falls to the ground."  For this the independent variable would be the weight of the objects being dropped and the dependent variable would be the distance in which the object is dropped from.  I could have them drop a quarter and a baseball and have someone time to see how fast they drop.  One error that they may find is the person timing may start or stop differently.

Excel 1

I have to admit that I am really starting to get frustrated with this class.  I have Excel but it is an older version (one in which I probably need to upgrade, but until this class had no need) and it does not have an Add-Ons option.  I have tried to figure this out and can not.  I uploaded the state comparisons into a Google Doc and tried to figure out how to do the descriptive statistics using the HELP menu but it is no help I can not figure it out.  I have included a link to the document that I have so far and will continue to try and get it but it is not looking promising.
Also I posted in the discussion page so hopefully someone will have some advice for what I need to do!
Well I still did not figure out the short cut for descriptive statistics but I did figure out how to do most of the calculations manually in the excel that I have.  I am still trying to figure out how to get the standard error but I think I have the rest.  According to the data West Virginia is not doing so well.  We currently only have nine states that scored lower than us and forty-three that are above us.  The average of all scores is 220.4077278 and West Virginia's overall score is 214.3860242 which is significantly lower.  Below is a picture of my statistics and my scatter plot. I think I figured out how to compute the standard error and it is 0.9275.  It is not filled in in the picture below because I took this Jing shot before I figured it out.

Rubistar

I absolutely love this site.  I have used this site previously and again I absolutely love it.  Overall the site is easy to follow and very user friendly.  It contains so many great rubrics that you can either use as they are or make adjustments to suit any activity or lesson you are grading.  For this assignment I chose a rubric for elementary independent reading.  Although I liked all of the criteria listed for this rubric, I chose the main points that I personally would be interesting in observing and grading.  Here is the link to my rubric.