Week 12 (11/29/10)

We looked at some virtual gaming sites. I looked at Viva Piñata and it wasn’t very interactive but I did check out a site called James town, which was very engaging, let you make the decisions and learn how your decision would have affected the pilgrims when they landed where ever you selected to land your ship. It was very interactive and very personal. I liked this because it allowed me to learn about history in a fun “hands on” way.

I felt that the group facilitators did a good job of showing us a new aspect that we could bring into the classroom. One thing they did well was engaging the class and dividing us up evenly. There was a lot of uhms and the speaking volume was a little softer than it should be. Overall, it was pretty good chapter review and I was exposed to Jamestown which is something I hope I can someday use in my own classroom.

What is the difference between games and simulation? In short, games are simulations that give immediate feedback.  In some aspects this is more useful in comparison to traditional schooling because in the classroom, we often do not get immediate feedback. The best advice is to start to build knowledge of “gaming” so that you can connect with your students and it can be a good way to connect with them.

Technology is our friend, we need to learn how to use it!

Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts Chapter 6

In this chapter I learned some of the useful aspects of using the web in a social aspect. Things like Twitter, Diigo, and Delicious were the key social web tools that they hit on. Some of the ideas of using Twitter were to use it in order to communicate between teachers and students or even students to students. It can be used to collaborate about homework or share project ideas, etc. Another useful website was Diigo or Delicious, both of which are an online bookmarking site that connects to other users. The other cool aspect is that it can be accessed from any computer via the internet. This would be useful to save useful things or web pages you would like to share with the class or for your own personal reference.

As cool as a resource that these are and even though I have a Delicious account, I don’t think that it is something that I would use in my classroom. I plan on teaching upper elementary school and I’m not sure that this is something that I would use in my classroom because I think that it is something that is a little to challenging for them. As far as using Twitter in my classroom, I think that there is too much potential to get off task or it to be used inappropriately. While these maybe useful tools for some teachers I don’t feel that it would be affective

Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts chapter 5

The use of RSS feed could potential be very useful in the future for many reasons. I like the idea of having information coming to you instead of you looking around for relevant information. This has the potential to cut down greatly on wasted time looking for resources. I think an RSS feed could really benefit both teachers and students because of this easy access to info. This can be used to help find research topics, stay up to date on current events, or even for teachers to keep tabs on their students with their blogs.

This whole concept of RSS feeds is something new to me and I’m glad I learned about it. This is something that I will defiantly use for at least myself and maybe encourage my students use as well. Since I already have a Google account, it would be easy for me to setup an RSS aggregator or mailbox to receive my feeds in. An idea that I got while reading this chapter was to have students set up an RSS on something that they like and then once a week have them pick an article and have them write a review on it and possible present it or post it to their blog (if they have one). There is so much potential for the use of RSS and what it can do in the classroom.

Exiting Post (11/22/10, Week 11)

Today in class we went over some articles related to technology and students learning and how video games/ media is having an effect on their “lack” of learning. Many schools reaction to this problem is to use more technology in the classroom. We also discussed an article where the teacher used an online forum in the beginning of her class and they had iPods in the classroom to respond to the daily question. This was an interesting aspect to see how contemporary technology teaching methods are making their ways into the classroom.

The most valuable thing I learned was form our discussion leaders who did a brief recap of the book and got our input on how we felt our opinion changed. Personally, I have taken away from this class and the book that there are a lot of cool tools to use in the classroom but I only need to use the ones that I find easy and useful to use. Most of these cool tools I will use more for myself probably than for my students in the classroom. A few of the tools I may use in the future would be blogs, wikis and RSS feeds. I feel like those are the most effective resources that will stay the most consistent that would be applicable in my class.

Exiting Post (11/15/10, week 10)

We had some good discussions based on the book guides activity. They had us go on line for 3 min and research something related to science and then for another 3 min we had to research on photosynthesis.

During class, we ended up looking at a charter school in Minnesota at newcountryschool.com. This got me really excited about the charter school systems and possible looking at getting a job at a charter school after graduation. This is something I want to look farther into and do some more research on.

We went over some other tips and tricks for the IRLO project and using scratch. After this demonstration I still don’t feel that this is something that I would use in the future and in my classroom.

Dweeber Screen Cast

The easiest part of this project was probably going through and discovering the website and writing the script. For me I had troubles trying to match up my script and what I wanted to do on the screen because I had a hard time trying to do both at the same time. It also took multiple tries to get down the timing for my screen cast with the script I had prepared. I would say the most difficult part of this project was not the writing of the script or even the recording, but the uploading to the class wiki and my blog was the biggest headache for me and making sure that the link worked.

I feel that this could be useful knowledge to have so that if a situation came up where you needed to make a screen cast showing your students how to do something you could do it. Personally, I would demonstrate anything I expect my students to do with a computer for them that way there could be immediate feedback. However, some options could be to do a screen cast while demonstrating to the class the expected task on the computer so that they can reference it later or anyone that was out for the day can find it online and watch the screen cast.

dweeber_screen_cast

Exiting post week 9 (11-8-10)

I felt that the discussions group had a good activity that represented how different the outcomes of using technology in a learning situation can be. I felt that it lead to a good group discussion. I’m still fairly neutral about technology vs. memory because it depends on the situation. The questions that were given in the activity, I knew all of them with one exception. I feel that if I needed to look up all the answers it would have slowed me down, however,  I feel that there are instances were using the internet to look up information is a good resource to have at our disposal to not only double check our selves but to also use when we don’t know something. It depends on if it is going to be used for fact finding or for learning.

We also went over some more details for the podcast and talked briefly about the screen cast that is due. These are some of the podcast tidbits that we went over:

-Give overview of issue, what is the big idea

-Summarize the resource, what are the main arguments; what are they trying to share, what is the message

-*My reaction to the issue. My personal commentary.

Write a script related to these three areas. The audio needs to be clearly audio speech, and must last 2-3 minutes. Also need up to 15 sec lead in and 15 seconds of lead out music. There must also be at least one sound effect. This must be published in mp3 format. This can be submitted to the d2l drop box. This will be due in two weeks.

Exiting Post (Week 8, 11/1/10)

I felt that we had a very interesting class discussion, which was different from the norm and the activities that we did. However I didn’t feel that it quite represented the chapter in the greatest way. After the lesson we finally went through some more useful aspects of the SMART board technology, some of which I knew already and some I did not.  The infinite cloner was pretty cool. That one I did not know about. We also went over the “6x6” rule; no more than six lines with no more than six words per line. We need to pay attention to the color, size (no smaller than 36pt.), position, and contrast of the text and slides. Also, the height of our students should also be taken into consideration. You can also add sounds to a object by linking a sound using the sound tab linking it to prerecorded files.