Technology Class Insights and Experiencs

Experiencing the variety of technology available to aid in engaging students in learning has been invaluable. It has been invaluable not only to me as a future teacher, but also to my future students. The more engaged in learning the students are, the more successful they will be in their individual pursuits as adults. This class opened my eyes up to a host of technological tools and their applications that I had never had to use and therefore did not know they existed. I feel it is very important to present information to students using different tools and methodologies. The class assigned readings also helped show where and how these tools can be used to be most effective. These tools incorporated along with traditional methods of teaching will help make my lessons more captivating, thoughtful, and realistic. The class had me worried in the beginning, but now I feel like I can figure anything out. I just have to be patient.

Google Docs is a fantastic tool for teachers. It enables them to communicate to their students as they work on an assignment. The teacher can assign projects using Google document, spreadsheet or presentation and make correction or suggestions to the student easily via email. This tool extends the classroom! I think it also helps in organizing the students work and keeping it all in one central location.

I will definitely have a blog for each of my classes and will have it as an option for students to make one for individual projects. This tool enables the student to work independently, take ownership of their education, and feel a sense of accomplishment when the project is done. They are the creator. I may also use this as a reporting system for group projects,. There are many ways to incorporate blogs in the classroom. The students take what you taught them and extend their learning by creating a blog and at the same time entrench the material that they learned in class.

Video games are something I want to pursue. More and more studies are showing them to be a viable and successful learning tool. Even though the studies look promising, parents, teachers and school administrators still have a lot of negative feelings about them. Elite colleges are working together and researching "effective learning" from video games and tabulating the results.

The Smartboard has turned out to be my favorite tool. I can't say enough about it. It incorporates the abilities of a chalkboard, video player, computer, TV, and the Internet. It would take me years to find out all the ways I can employ it in my lessons. Changing, updating, and researching new ways to present information to my students is very important to me. Making the video was completely new to me, but I know my son (16) makes them for fun. This tells me that this would be a great tool to use because it incorporates their tech world with learning. When a student is interested and enjoying school; learning is taking place. Polling by cell phone is another tool I want to use in the classroom. It is a great way to assess student content knowledge.

Yes, I will be using these tools and hopefully keep up with the new technology as it becomes available. I learned a great deal in this class and thank you for all your help along the way.

Electronic Portfolios - Some better than others

Searching the Internet for examples of electronic portfolios pulls up a great deal of information. Information concerning the different types and contents which both vary depending on the purpose. I had a difficult time finding portfolios to look at and judge. No matter what I did I could not locate a sample (or labeled) example of a "bad" portfolio. I finally found a bunch of graduate portfolios and looked at all of them. By reading the assigned article and the information I had found on the Internet, I was able to view the graduate portfolios and come to my own conclusion of which were good portfolios and which were not so good. Ms. Bammi's portfolio I rated as very good. You can view it at this link, http://web.me.com/bindu61/Bindu/Bindu.html. Her home page clues you into her area of expertise, which is art and design, specializing in graphics and technology. As you look at the different areas in her portfolio each section reflects her vocation. It is very well organized and easy to move from one section to the next. She has labeled tabs on each page to help direct you to any section you want to view. She has the necessary component parts of a portfolio, an introduction (shown as her welcome), teaching philosophy, resume, description of her teaching practices, artifacts which detail her class planning, and show her effective teaching skills, and her future educational plans. Each page not only details the information but reflects visually her artistic talents. It may sound corny but viewing her portfolio gave me insight into her personality that connected me to her on a deeper level. Portfolios provide a great advantage for employers (and job seekers) over the traditional resume. The only thing she does not list is teaching standards and that is because she is not teaching in the states.

Most of the portfolios were good but one stood out because my reaction to it surprised me. It was so flat. It consisted of just a report with a few pictures on the main page. The pictures remained the same on each page with just the information on the page changing as you clicked the different tabs. He covered the basic information needed on a portfolio, the introduction, his philosophy, his future tech plan (listed this way), and his resume. There is no spark, joy or enthusiasm for teaching conveyed in his portfolio. You can see it at this web address,
http://www.msu.edu/~guttinge/portfolio/Electronic_Portfolio/MSU_Year_1.html. I didn't feel like I knew him any better after reading it. In fact it gave me the feeling that he did not put a lot of effort into his portfolio, which if I were a prospective employer would deter me from hiring him. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, it may just be that he is so young that he doesn't have many artifacts to put in his resume. Still he could have had a much better and inviting design.

Class Smartboard Presentations

Digging in to learn this new software for this technology was time consuming but well worth it. I liked that all the class presentations were different; each person had their own style. I realize that it is a great tool, but only one of many tools. For instance, I liked the way Melanie used cards in her lesson. She used a different visual tool, which reinforced her Smartboard information and increased student learning potential. Her Smartboard presentation included a good video demonstration of the circulatory system that was interesting. Jaquella's presentation kept my attention the whole time. Her handout was great and my attention secure, because I was busy learning the information necessary to do the next problem. She really did a great job of layering her information, which provided us with the scaffolding necessary to complete the problems.

By participating as a student, I learned that it is much better to employ several different tools as well as different methods of teaching. I liked the lessons that were ease to read, and the message was clear. I think backgrounds should be used carefully so they don't overwhelm and distract from the lesson. I am going to rework my concept map and a few other pages where my font is too small. When I would be working on my lesson I would get so caught up in adding and changing things that I wouldn't realize how long I was working on it. I think it would be great to get a series of lesson "groups" made up for the Smartboard that you could pull up quickly to make a point. Each page of a group can be titled for quick reference.

I also learned not to fill each page with so much information. I want to use small bullets of information in the future. At the end, I had a handout of the concept map (which was in my presentation) for students to work on in a group. I think it would have been better to have handed out a work sheet in the beginning and use it to help reinforce the information as I taught. All in all, I learned a great deal regarding the Smartboard software and using it as a teaching tool.

Interactive Whiteboards

I am excited about the variety of educational applications that the Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) affords teachers. They can use it to show pod casts and engage students in web based interactive lessons. It can be used to create lessons that students physically participate in by dragging informational pieces or write in answers to solve problems. Teachers can make notations on presentations, or highlight information in their lessons to help further explain a concept and then save them. The IWB can also be used to simply write notes or draw diagrams to illustrate a lesson. When they write on a page if the IWB has hand writing recognition, it can convert it to print. Teachers can do many things with their pages they can label them, duplicate (clone) them, quickly and easily reorganize them, and incorporate preexisting pages in a new group.

What is exciting is that the IWB really expands the classroom giving the teacher essentially unlimited board space. Studies have been done to research just how teachers are using the IWB. It seems that the phrase "using the interactive whiteboard," meant different things to different teachers. The study defined five basic contexts for using the IWB. The first three involve the teacher either as a demonstrator, a modeler, or in control inviting the students to participate in a class exercise. The last two basic contexts are pupils in control being guided by the teacher, and pupils working independently on a task. At the close of the study teachers not only felt that they now had a way of uniformly assessing how they are using the IWB, but it also help some to expand their methods from just whole class - teacher centered work to independent pupil centered work.

There are published concerns about the US being behind in acquiring IWB for the classroom. Well if we are behind one good point is that the technology in our classrooms has to be newer and each year technology improves. Other people are arguing that the hardware is more important than software and vice versa. How can one be more important than the other? If one were bad it most likely would cause the user not to succeed in their endeavor.

 

Do not text and drive!

Video taping scenes for the PSA on texting while driving was fun. There were four people in the video, John, Kristy (his girlfriend), Jeremy (my son), and me. Fred, the dog, was also a very willing participant. We all collaborated on the scenes and dialog, but John was the main director. He actually hung off the side of a truck to tape some scenes! We searched for sad music on Youtube and I was surprised at how many we had to choose from.

Next he and I discussed all the different ways we could use the video in conjunction with different transitions and music. We could have the video play without sound except for sad background music and have scrolling printed statistics, or just our voices stating the statistics as the video plays with sad background music, etc. All these different scenarios brought us to our final video composition.

This was my first try at editing a video. I have made many family videos but never used software to edit out sections or add transitions and music. We taped ourselves stating statistics of driving while texting but decided not to use our own voices in favor of printing our statistics and using them as transitions in the video. We then inserted the statistic next to the best video clip. Since our video clips have an audio part of us talking, we added our sad music as a second (background) audio.

It was a lot of work but I really enjoyed the learning experience. Since the first clips we captured and edited were corrupted when we saved the video, we got to do it all over again. It is really amazing to me how minutely you can edit a video. This helped me get a lot of practice and since I have never done this before, and I needed it.

Videos in the classroom can be invaluable. Apart from just showing a science video, such as Bill Nye the Science Guy, videos can be interactive. As a science teacher I could show interactive videos depicting, active volcanoes, seismic studies of earthquakes, life science studies, etc., all with sections for student participation. These engaging videos help to bring science alive for the middle school age group that I will be teaching.

digital copyright

Copyright Laws

The ways the copyright laws are written make it difficult to know if you (the educator) need to get permission or not. In class we learned if you don't step outside your classroom when using any permission granted copyrighted material, and you just show it to the students for educational purposes, you are acting within the law. Could I show it to another teacher? I would think I could within my classroom. What surprised me was when Jaquella asked if she could make copies from an old textbook she used to use in order to supplement her new textbook and was told no. I can't imagine how many unknowing violations occur every day. The music examples in class pointed out how arbitrary and tricky these laws can be. I would think that George Harrison's lawyers did the proper searches prior to releasing his song. It would be interesting to see if his lawyers were sued. I really think the copyright laws cover too much ground and that is why they are so open for interpretation by people. Fair use is great but it is easy to make a mistake with the four fair use factors. It seems very subjective. If your being sued, you just have to hope that your judge, who is performing a "reasoned" analysis, is looking at the case from your point of view. The following paragraph came from module 2 of our reading:

A fair use analysis is fact driven. Each unique set of facts regarding a proposed use
leads to its own reasoned conclusion. Reasonable individuals may come to different
conclusions concerning the same set of facts, but the word is "reasonable."

I am comfortable with the statement that fair use is fact driven, because when you deal with facts it is either a yes or no situation. You know exactly what behavior is expected of you. The rest of the paragraph takes you into the subjective gray zone of uncertainty, because reasonable is not clearly defined.

We are all taught in school that you cannot copy someone's work verbatim. Until reading about copyright laws, I thought that it was all right if you copied a picture to use in a report for educational purposes if you properly gave the author credit. I was never taught in school that you actually should get the permission from the materials creator. From now on I will get permission. I have an animation I found last semester that I would like to use in the future. When I looked up the parties involved in the making of the animation it turned out to involve, NASA, The French space agency CNES, IPSL (French Institute), and Hampton University. There were three people from the Hampton University listed and I have emailed the director of the program for permission to use the material. It will be interesting to see what happens.

21st Century Classroom

I will be teaching middle school age students, which is the age group my son just left last year. Over the last four to five years I have observed my children grasp and master any new digital "toy" that they were given for birthdays or holidays. They are more savvy then my nieces and nephews that are six to ten years older then them. It is funny to see these younger kids instructing the older ones when we get together. It did worry me that I did not see my son reading much and I am surprised at the lack of assigned reading from school. Apart from an occasional book here and there, I only saw him carrying these big complicated manuals for his games. That is when I realized that the digital games get him to read, like our favorite novels got us to read. The added benefit with the "game" reading is the learning taking place in order to operate the game. He has unending patience when playing these games and perfecting his skill. The games are the only thing that requires all his attention. He applies what he learned from the previous game to the next one and if it does not work, then he reads the manual. For the most part he will be on the Internet while texting and watching TV. He never just does one of those three things. He multitasks constantly, so when I think of engaging students in the classroom, along with traditional labs, I picture using ones that incorporate new technologies.

When I observed in the schools recently, I did not see a gigantic difference in the methods of teaching and I did see a lot of squirmy unfocused 7th and 8th graders in several classes. One teacher used the Smart-Board to draw a diagram in different colors and another teacher used the online textbooks quiz to teach. The classes that had students actively working in groups on labs or projects were the most focused and engaged. Not all students have access to a computer and quite a few do not have cell phones. Only one school I observed had a computer lab, two others are hoping to get one. The laptops are carted from class to class. I think it would be great if at the middle school level they started a technology class. The students would have forty-five minutes to learn all about the latest technology and develop some skill with it.

I would want to have a Smart-Board that is attached to the wall along with all the necessary, and suggested (by the company) equipment like the projector and ceiling attachment, in order to optimize its use. There are so many interactive engaging lessons you can do on the Smart-Board with the students. It really brings the subject alive. I would want my students to have Mac laptops that have web cam capabilities (I’m not sure if this is standard or not) and the school to have Internet throughout the building. Students could continue with their projects regardless if they are in the auditorium or a study hall. There would have to be something in place to restrict access to undesirable sites. I would have the students learn and use Google Docs for their assignments. This is a great tool for quick communication between teacher and student. I would also have them use Excel for their data organizing and for plotting lab charts and graphs. If I had six classes then one person per period would use each laptop. My classroom would have eight lab tables and I would want eight digital cameras available to my students for group projects. The cameras could also be used outside the classroom for class projects like identifying and taking pictures of different types of weathering. We spoke about some uses for cell phones in the classroom and I would like to be able to give my students cell phones with GPS and Bluetooth capabilities. I have come across great lesson plans using the GPS. Bluetooth seems like it could be used as a facilitator for quickly transferring information from one device to another, like a photo on your cell phone to your computer. I would also need a Bluetooth dongle per computer in order for the computer and bluetooth to be able to communicate. I would also love to have clickers in my class. I like how it interacts with the Smart-Board and you can quickly assess the students. I also like an old tool that I used in the Methods I class and that is an Elmo. You can use this to quickly make points that students bring up during class or put on a picture or diagram to make a point. I’m not too sure how often we would use these in the lower grades, but I would like my students to have a graphing calculator and get comfortable with its basic functions

Excel - A great Classroom Tool

There are many reasons to use Excel in the classroom. No matter what subject content you are teaching, Excel can make it instantly more visually understood by putting the data in chart/graph form. This also makes the data easier to understand. Students don't have to get bogged down in the actual plotting of the data on a graph (as we used to), but can spend more time analyzing the information presented to them quickly and efficiently by Excel. I do think that in the early grades that students should go through the actual "hand" plotting of their graphs when first learning the basics of graphing. It is important to get students familiar with Excel. School districts should make an effort to have the most up to date version for their students, so that they can go smoothly from the secondary classroom to college or the workplace.

Some examples of how students could use Excel in my classroom are listed below:

• Lets chart the effects of earthquakes on buildings. Over the past decade earthquakes have increased and are affecting the world population. It is current events and this is a lesson that could be coordinated between the Science, Social Studies, and the English departments of our school. I think projects like this have a much bigger impact on the students than just each class studying separate topics all the time.
  

• Lets create a Timeline. This could be for an experiment, to compare several experiments or to show the history of famous scientific experiments.

• Lets help the environment. We will track and chart our family's water usage on a weekend day when everyone is home. We will all compare our family's water usage and come up with three ways each family can conserve (I would get parental approval). We could take it one step further and plot the most common ways that all the students feel that they can improve the water usage.

• Lets see where solar energy works best. We will plot the annual daylight patterns for our area, the equator and the arctic. By doing this exercise they will also see how the earth's rotation affects the amount of daylight over the course of a year.

• Lets find out the acid rain levels in our state. We are going to research the pH levels, use Excel to make a graph. We will also look into the causes and possible solutions to this problem. This lesson would also be a good one to coordinate with the Social Studies and English departments.
  

• Lets look at this chart and work backwards. We are going to reconstruct the original study from the data represented on the chart. What was the reason this chart was made?
  

There are endless ways to incorporate Excel into the students daily activities associated with the current lesson plan. It helps students look at information in an analytical way. In an instant they can see the comparison and relationship between multiple sets of data. They can pick which type of graph or chart they feel best represents their data. Excel does help students visualize and interpret data.

Social Bookmarking - a tool I definitely want to use.

I am definitely in favor of using anything that improves and makes my life easier. Social bookmarking is a tool that I plan to start using. I had saved bookmarks on my browser and quickly found that I had to get a method for grouping similar topics together. I did this by picking a word per group and saving related bookmarks using the word. It worked alright. I was still left with a huge list that I had to scan down each time I went looking for something.

Social bookmarking is so much better. On a large scale, it enables teachers to globally network with other educators, coordinate bookmarks within as well as between the different departments in your school, and collaborate with other schools currently working on the same or similar projects. On a small scale, it helps the teacher share resources with the students and also screen the sites the students are using. This also allows the parents to view what the students are working on and what sites they are using. The students benefit by learning social bookmarking. It is an "active" tool that they will find terrifically beneficial as they progress not only in education, but in the work force. It is another resource for them and one that they will be able to see how valuable it has been for others.

I looked at both Delicious and Diigo. There are a bunch of these social bookmarking sites and they are not all equal. When comparing Delicious with Diigo, I found Diigo a much more user friendly site. There are some things that Diigo has that Delicious does not. In Diigo you can highlight. I love to highlight so I can go back and just pick out what I deemed important the first time (a real time saver). I am also a big sticky note fan (adding comments), and I can't wait to see how I can sticky note in Diigo! I don't twitter, I am on Facebook (a lot of my computer loving friends and family have emailed me to death about joining--so I did and I accepted them as friends - to quiet them down) but I don't use it. However, I do have a blog and I'm told I will have a web site (I do want a website - for teaching) and in Diigo you can send bookmarks to the service you want to use. Diigo also does more than just bookmark the link, it bookmarks the entire page. This is important to me. I have found information on sites that I really wanted to use and reference and then when I go to use that site, or section of the site I liked, it is gone or not available. In Diigo, I would have had the page of information to reference.

Technological Perspective - Google Docs

In thinking about my perspective on the language that students speak and how it would differ from their perspective, I immediately thought of my son and daughter.

I think that because my children have talked about the new tech. inventions that they are interested in as soon as it comes out, I am used to the terms they use. What I found out from talking to Jeremy is:

• He does not know the proper terminology for the technology he is using. When I asked him what Web 2.0 was he said he didn't know but had heard it before. The generalization in the text that the Net-Gens don't read manuals, they just want to do, is correct as far as I can see.
  

• For the most part, technology information is both given to and received by peers. That generation does not care to know the proper terminology which is applied to the technology that they are using. What is important is the doing, and doing it quickly and efficiently.

• There is technology that he is not using or learning in school and therefore it is not important to him, because he does not need it right now. He uses Facebook as a message center but does not blog. He does not know about social bookmarks, has never used online graphing or photo tools and has never made a Wiki. What is really exciting is that he heard they are great for organizing events, and He wants me to show him how to make one!

• Both my children look up every thing on the web. My daughter found just the car my cousin, Barbara, was looking for on the web. Barbara had been hit from behind, her car was totaled and she needed a car fast. My daughter searched tons of sights, found one in NJ near my cousins house, that had just been posted an hour early. Everything worked out so well. The type of car my cousin wanted was rarely found as a used car. If it were not for the Internet and my daughters determination, my cousin would not have this car in two days. When the dealer was contacted they had already received a call from someone interested, but no deposit had been made.

However, Everything is not always easier the "net"way. Erica's driver license was stolen and so she searched the Internet and found out how to get it replaced. When she told me everything she had to do, I sent her to the Notary - a much easier process.

Today devices are much more user friendly. I really feel that my generation was leery of computers because when we started to use them--we had to learn programming languages-yuk! They were not user friendly. The process was down right painstakingly slow and labor intensive. If you were not the type of person who enjoyed this painful process and felt rewarded by achieving the success of getting the computer to do what you wanted it to do (just as important as getting the information you needed the computer to provide), you did not use computers unless a course required it.

What is funny is that I have started to change in how I approach new technology. I do not just get out the manual to learn how to operate it--I just start to explore the buttons and features. I haven't read the manual for cell phones in years. I used to need to know all about something before I used it--not anymore.


What is Google docs and why is it considered a R/W program? How can it benefit students?

Google docs is a site where you can do almost anything. It is a R/W site because it supports social networking by providing the ability to create and edit documents online individually or in groups. Each group has the ability to track the changes that have been made and publish the document. This makes it a great tool for the classroom in counts applications for any subject matter.
I haven't used it but have been told that some of the applications are easier than Microsoft office, so I will definitely give it a try.

The Net Gen./ Digital Natives

The Net Gen. and the Digital Natives are one in the same. They both:
1) learn by doing rather than thinking something through first
2) like working in teams (I have always observed this in labs)
3) like graphics and as little text as possible
4) want to be able to access information quickly
5) want to know the intended goal but to achieve it by random access--instead of the traditional
step by step approach.
6) they love multitasking--I never see my son doing just one thing
7) they prefer games to serious work
Today's students are different. I can tell that from my son (younger than the Net Gens) and my daughter (a Net Gen.). Maybe that is why I don't think the idea stated by Dr. Bruce Berry, in the article by Marc Prensky, that different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures is radical. I think people sometimes label concepts, people and things "radical", when they don't want to accept an observed change, a change that will not be going away.
These changes in technology have affected our students. I hope most of the schools can afford the technology available that will help us educate our students by engaging them in learning activities that are both social and learner centered.
I am concerned that the Net Gen. and future generations are too impatient on all fronts. There are some things that just take time and practice, like learning an instrument. Not all material that has to be learned can be in a game format. I am also not in favor of word banks on test. Students will say they know enough of the material to guess when they see the word bank on the test. I really believe that it is important to incorporate three steps for long term learning, hearing, seeing (by reading) and doing.

first post

This is my first blog!