Week Fifteen: Wikis

I created an account so that I could create and edit a wiki. For this activity, I edited a page on the "Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki." I like the idea of wikis for creating a webpage that can be done collaboratively. I do think wikis can be a bit dangerous since anyone can post anything to a wiki. People need to understand that and use them correctly and not as a factual database.

Week Fourteen: Library Thing, etc.

For this week's activity I joined shelfari. I had never heard of shelfari and I'm not a huge reader so I was a bit skeptical about how or if I would use this site. As it turns out the virtual book shelf it kind of useful. I can group together all the books I have read, or want to read so they are in one convenient place. You can also read and write reviews about books which could help me decide what book to read. I can also see what books people with similar interests are reading. I don't know that this will give me any additional time to read, but it might help me be more strategic about what I decide to read.

Week Thirteen: Slide Sharing

Student Leaders

View more presentations from jshawonw.

Week Twelve: Screencasting

I decided to use screencast-o-matic for this activity. I made a screencast of myself making a smiley face in paint (http://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cXlIFtvpw).

I also decide to download Jing! and I am going to use that for my final project.

Week Eleven: Break

Take a break - I am particularly good at this particular activity! :-)

Week Ten: Viedo on the Web

Who doesn't love dancing monkeys?!?!?

Week Nine: Instant Messaging

For this activity I went with Google TALK. It was very quick and easy to use, plus it's free, which is always a plus! If you want to invite someone all you have to do is know their email address and you click invite, then type in their email address. If you have a gmail account it will also give you access to you contacts list so you don't have to remember them or type them in. I decided to look into the difference between the regular Google TALK and the Labs Edition for the purpose of this assignment since I was already using Google TALK on a regular basis. The Labs Edition had way more features that I like, for example you could do a conference chat and they had cute little emoticons that you could add. Unfortunately, it was never up and running very consistantly. I even tried emailing google about it, but I have not heard back from them yet. Ultimately I decided to stick it out witht the regular Google TALK and just IM one person at a time.

Week Eight: Cloud Computing

In the past, we have always had access to our files at school through "My Files." This year that has gone away because we have switched over to Windows 7. As a result, all teachers were encouraged to use "Cloud Computing" as a replacement to "My Files." For this projcet I used something I was already working on. There are 5 teachers in the math department that teach Geometry and we were all working together to create a final review sheet since we were all giving the same final exam. Cloud Computing allowed us to do it over the weekend at our individual houses instead of having to all drive back to the school to meet. Some of us live 30-45 minutes from the school so it wouldn't ahve been a very good use of our time.

Week Seven: Microblogging

For this activity I decided to joing twitter. I am much more of a reader than a poster. I myself do not see myself "tweeting" a lot in the future, but I do enjoy reading the tweets of others. I think twitter is very user friendly and it has been very easy to find people to follow. I even like that if you are wanting to follow some type of famous person they let you know which one is verified to be that person. The most useful person I am currently following is our school athletic director. I enjoy following him because he attends all of our school sporting events and tweets updates. It's too difficult for me to attend everything but I still like to be involved. I also follow a few teachers at school that are in my department. I am a KU graduate so I also decided to follow KU because it helps me feel connected and up to date on what's going on. For me, microblogging will help me stay connected and current on the things that are important to me. I love that it's a very flexible way of doing that.

Week Six: Tagging and Social Bookmarking

I went ahead and created a "Delicious" account. I wasn't too sure about whether or not I would use a social bookmarking site, but after digging deeper I did find value in it. As a traveling teacher, I have three different classrooms that I teach in and I use 5-6 computers at school on a regular basis. I also work from home quite a bit. I've always been a big "favorites" user. but that only works if you use the same computer every time. With Delicious, I don't have to worry about it. It's like having an internet based favorites list that goes with me anywhere I have internet access. I has been pretty easy to use and I think it could come in handy in the future.

Week Five: RSS and Feed Readers

Acticity #1 -
I chose the google reader because I am in LOVE with all of the other google apps that I currently use. I love that I don't have to go out and find information, it comes and finds me. My only concern is that it can suck you in. I was subscribed to about 30 different feeds and I would get hundreds of new posts to read each day. That was WAY too many for me to keep up with. I now have a much better system that works for me. I have folders to organize where they go and that helps me tremendously. I have an Architecture folder with 5 subsriptions and a Geometry folder with another 8 subsrciptions. Even those can get a little overwhelming if I don't stay with it frequently. You just need to train yourself that not everything is going to be worth reading and you have to pick and choose.

Week Four: Photo Sharing

This photo was taken by Marco Barbieri and it belongs to the Lights and Lines photostream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/lightsandlines/5315246823/in/photostream). As an Architecture teacher I really enjoy this particular collections.

Before this semester, I had never used Flickr. I have found how useful Flickr can be through a number of assignments and project that I have worked on throughout the semester. It has really made my presentations look much more professional by including interesting photos from Flickr istead of clip art, which is what I had typically used. It takes a little more work on my end, but the results are totally worth it.

Effective Instruction

The first paper I read, A Model of Effective Instruction, focused on the four elements of QAIT: Quality, Appropriateness, Incentive, Time. The part of this that I personally struggle with is the Incentive component. It's important that students are motivated to do the work you are assigning. This ties back to what Alan November was talking about. He found a way to do that by getting the students involved in their communities and taking ownership of the problems they were working on. I would love to do that, but I'm not entirely sure how to.

The second paper I read, Principles of Effective Instruction, had two main principles that it focused on. The first was the idea of reflexive learning. That means that students need to reflect on what they are learning. I agree that this is incredibly important to student success in terms of complete understanding and retention of the material. My issue is that it feels like there's never enough time to allow for that to happen in class. We are being told we have to include more and more into the curriculum every year and I feel we don't get to go as deep into as topic as we should because there is never enough time in the school year. The other principle is support. There are three different types of support that were discussed: cognitive, motivational, and emotional.

I think it's important for a Technology Integration Specialist (TIS) to be an effective instuctor. The role of a TIS is to help classroom teachers become more effective instructors. Ultimately, students are more successful when their teachers are effective instructors. This means it starts at the top with the TIS and trickles down.

"This week we began studying presentation design. I had no idea..."

that C.R.A.P. (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity) was one of the most useful acronymns in the design world. I realize that I do many of the things you really shouldn't do with presentations. My goal from this point on is to focus more on making the visual aids eye catching.

Week Three: Online Meetings

I watched a webinar called "The Mouse Pad Traveler" which was all about creating travel plans using the internet. It was hosted by a man name Tome Peters and he did a very basic overview of participating in a webinar before he began his actual webinar. I think online meeting and webinars can be very useful. Not everyone can just drop everything and travel anywhere in the world to attend a seminar. However, this becomes less of an excuse with webinars because you can go anywhere in the world to attend a seminar about anything without even leaving you home or office. I see a lot of potential for this technology over the next 10 years. I think about how much Skype has taken off in people's personal lives so it only makes sense to me that people in their professional lives attend more webinars.

10 things that make me go Hmmm... about technology in education

1. If the rest of the world new about SMART Notebook, then no would use PowerPoint ever again.

2. You Tube is not just for laughs, you can actually use it in your classroom.

3. Clickers are possible the greatest invention on the planet. Kids are excited to use them and they minimize grading by the teacher.

4. Scantrons are right up there with clickers. Best way to give a final exam if you don't want to spend hours grading right before the start of summer. Plus is gives you tons of useful data to compare with your colleagues.

5. Calculators are the worst thing to ever happen to students learning math.

6. If you have a problem with your technology, don't call the tech people, ask your high school students. It's crazy what they know.

7. SAVE! SAVE! SAVE! You computer will always crash at the worst possible time.

8. Will there ever be enough time for me to learn as much about technology as I want?

9. Compulsive email checking is not a sickness, it's just good practice.

10. If technology is supposed to make my life so much easier, why does it always make me so angry.

Week Two: Online Communities

I know a lot of people have decided to go with Facebook for their online community. My guess is that many of them were already members of Facebook so it makes sense. I am not a member of Facebook and I really have no interest in joining Facebook. I decided to join Classroom 2.0 and one of the reasons for doing so is that I really want to keep my personal life private and seperate from my work life. I like that Classroom 2.0 is geared towards colaborate technology in education, which is what I was looking for. I was not familiar with this particular online community before starting this project, but I hope to expand my professional learning community to include people from all over the world by joinging Classroom 2.0. I know that our school librarian is a member of Classroom 2.0 because I found her on there and sent a "friend" request. However, I think she is fairly new to the community so I'm not sure how she intends on using it. My guess is that she just wants to be able to collaborate with other librarians.

"Education has missed the boat, with respect to instructional design. Teachers come up with lesson plans on the fly, with little thought to why ..."

I don't think it's fair to group all teacher together in this statement. I think this quote perfectly describes some teachers in the profession. However, this quote is probably as far from the truth as possible for other teachers in the profession. I also think that this quote can apply to some teachers on some days, but not to those same teachers on other days. I have to admit that I am not always 100% as prepared as I would like to be in a given day. I try to the best of my ability to be prepared, but life happens and teachers are human beings. Sometimes you just have to go into survival mode and that may mean that you are forced to come up with lessons on the fly. I don't believe that is how most teacher want to teach.

When I first started this section on instructional design I thought it was going to make me feel like a really bad teacher because I do not currently follow one of the fancy little models. However, as I learned more about it, I started to realize that I do go through most of these steps as I plan my instruction I just do it without realizing it because I don't have a pretty check list of the steps that I can cross off. I think that now that I am more aware of the models that are available to me, I can spend some time finding the model that fits me personally. My hope is that by following a model and being more aware of the steps I can optimize my instruction to better meet the needs of my students.

I believe educational technology is...

more complicated than I ever realized. It is an area within the field of education that has seen more change than any other field. It was only recently that I discovered that what I thought was educational technology is really more accurately described as technology in education. Educational technology is not in itself about the technology used in classrooms, which is the misconception that I had. That is technology in education. Educational technology is more about trying to solve the problems that arise in human learning. It is a complex marriage of the people and resources that try to work to better student learning.

Week One: Blogging

Blogging is relatively new to me. I have known what blogging is and had a basic understanding of how to do it for quite some time. However, I have never ventured out far enough to actually create my own blog. I have to admit that it is a little intimidating to me right now, but I am looking forward to reading the blogs of some of the other particpants in this activity.

23 Things Kansas

Today is my first day on a new adventure called 23 Things Kansas. I am hopeful that as I work through the 23 Things Kansas Activity I will find new (to me) and exciting ways of bringing the wonderful tool of technology into my classroom. If you would like more information on this activity, please visit their site.

Welcome!

I created this blog as a way to reflect on what I have learned as I work towards my goal of getting my Master's Degree in Educational Technology as a Pitt State Gorilla.