Final Entry for EDU 610

The importance of incorporating the use of technology into the classroom of the 21st Century cannot be overstated. Considering how pervasive technology has become in everyone's lives, to not include technology in the classroom would be regressive and counterintuitive.

For students, technology allows for greater engagement, collaboration, and ownership. Additionally, given technology's ever-increasing, omnipresent nature, it is absolutely imperative that students gain as many technological skills as possible. These skills will only become more important as technology continues to expand and improve. Technological skills must also stay current in order to meet demands.

For teachers, today's technology opens up a whole range of new teaching methods never before available. From the ability to collaborate globally to the ability to have the world available at your fingertips; technology allows educators boundless creativity in writing and delivering lesson plans.

As to the challenges to technology in the classroom, there are many. The globally interactive nature of the Web 2.0 presents issues with regard to student safety and preventing "unsavory elements" access to students. And educators must be fluent in the use of technology in order to not only maintain classroom management, but also effectively communicate a lesson plan.

Personally, my entire attitude toward technology has changed during the course of this class. I no longer view the Internet and all of the latest gadgets as a means of separating people from their "real" lives. I now view these things as a conduit to the world around. This is not to say that my previous concerns were unfounded. With the use of technology comes responsibility. Part of that responsibility includes a weariness to pitfalls and the knowledge of how to avoid them. To continue to believe, as I previously did, that technology is inherently negative is to distance myself from what is now a global community.

Reflection on Presentations

1. In our reserach about digital portfolios, I found that one of the benefits of a portfolio, as well as other digital mediums, is that it can be a window to elements of our own personalities that we may not have previously known. Applying that knowledge to my reflection on my classmates’ digital presentations, I find that the theory of multiple intelligences comes across as bluntly as a sledgehammer. I find that I have a new understanding of may of my classmates, as well as myself.

2. Producing an online digital presentation, whether it be a video, a Glogster poster page, or a PowerPoint file, can be just as much of a talent as anything else. You may find that although you are speaking quite clearly the microphone might not be recording your voice as well as you think. Certain kinds of text may not appear very well over certain backgrounds. Things may not translate as well for the viewer as were intended.

It is not my intention to be critical of anyone’s presentation other than my own, however, as a class, we are, more or less, new to this technology and cannot be expected to have any mastery over what we are doing yet.

Fortunately, with proper reflection and time spent honing skills, these issues can be overcome. This issue echoes one of the things I learned from one of the videos, which I believe was Mandy’s. “Teachers must be learners themselves.” I think this is something I’ve known for a long time, but to have the words right there in front of you is a much different experience.

3. I discovered that a vast wealth of information can be can be delivered to a user in a small amount of time. In the 30 to 45 minutes it took me to look through everyone’s presentations, I absorbed the most information of over a dozen technology in education articles all on different topics. The speed with which I obtained this information would not have been possible had I chosen to read all of those articles myself.

What is clear to me know is that this project was not solely about individual learning. It was an exercise in collaborative learning between my fellow classmates and I. Without necessarily being conscious of it, we’ve laid the groundwork fo a collaborative learning experience as we each pursue our teacher’s certificates and to become collaborative professionals beyond this experience.

Portfolio Examples

Good example: http://kids-learn.org/

This portfolio contains complete lesson plans that Susan Silverman taught to her second-grade classes. Each lesson plan has a title that clearly denotes what the plan is about and they are all listed and linked on the main page of the portfolio. Any teacher could happen by this portfolio and immediately take and use one, or even all, of these lesson plans.

Also, a link to email Susan Silverman is clearly posted on the main page of the portfolio to contact her and discuss the plans she has posted.

Bad example: http://durak.org/kathy/portfolio/index.html

In looking through this portfolio, I found nothing of any real substance, save for this woman’s resume. No where was there any material that might be of use or interest to anyone and what was posted was done so in a very informal way.

Additionally, the resume hadn’t been updated since the mid-1990s.

Smartboard Lesson

I’ve found interactive whiteboards to be an extremely useful tool in the classroom setting, however I feel that their importance should be limited to that of one of the myriad tools available to a teacher. Having taught a lesson using an interactive whiteboard, I can say that it is equally as advantageous as it is disadvantageous. I say that because an interactive whiteboard has the potential to be distracting to a teacher, which can be detrimental in terms of classroom management.

However, I would like to have one in a classroom because of the advantages, such as the ability to easily show video to an entire class; the ability to use color, graphics, and sound in a lesson all from one piece of equipment; the various games that can be employed; etc.

But, while this can be a boon, it must never be forgotten that the single most important tool in teaching a classroom of students is the teacher. An interactive whiteboard can help engage students, however it cannot do all of the work. It can be nothing more than supplemental to the teacher.

While it is best for a teacher to make use of all the tools available to teach students, it can be detrimental to the educational process for a teacher to rely too heavily on one tool alone to get the job done.

Video Project

I thoroughly enjoyed every step of the video making process. This project touched on two of the most engaging elements of my personality, collaboration and creativity. The project mimicked one of the best experiences of my life, which was making an album with five other musicians in a professional-level studio.

I found that Mandy, Joe and I worked well with one another; bouncing various ideas off of each other at every step of the process and choosing the one that best suited our needs. We also exhibited, on several occasions, an ability to adapt quickly and modify our original plan to suit new situations.

I would say that we genuinely had a lot of fun working on this project over the entire course of the process. Because of the high level of fun we had as a group, this did not seem like work that we had to complete. Rather than a project, this felt like an activity.

Also, because we were able to choose our topic, we felt as though we had ownership over our work. I can say that I now feel that the results of this project are an accomplishment for myself and something of which I can be proud.

Ultimately, I feel as though I’ve not only learned a skill that I can apply professionally, but one that I can also apply personally as well. I plan to take on several video projects in the next few months not only for myself, but also for my band all the while honing my professional skills.

I feel that the question of whether video has a place in the classroom is rather moot since video has been proven to have educational value over the past several decades. The real question should be what is the value of video in the classroom produced by the teacher and/or the students?

As a tool for teaching students, teachers have a world of possibilities available to them thanks to video. Things that a teacher cannot do in real life standing in front of a class can be done in a video, thus possibly conveying a difficult concept in a new and more understandable way.

For students, a video project can be an extremely engaging way, much as it was for me, to provide them with ownership over a project and the make use of the Web 2.0, possibly. Students can create a video to accompany certain projects and then those videos can be shown to the class. The teacher could even adjust the class to be like an actual movie premier.

I think video could be applied for any language arts lesson in which students are all taking part in the same reading. Various scenes could be acted out to aid in student comprehension of the text, which would then be reinforced by subsequent screenings of the video. The most obvious challenge to such a project would be access to the necessary equipment to produce such a video. Second to this would be the students’ background knowledge of how to operate such equipment. This project could quickly turn into a project on creating a video and lose sight of the original essential question.

PSA - "Drunk Rider"

Week 6

In learning how copyright applies to the classroom environment, I was surprised to learn that copyright applies to the classroom environment. Prior to this lesson, my, obviously inaccurate, understand of the situation was that educational purposes were exempted from copyright issues. However, while I was wrong to assume this, I was also correct in some applications. There is leniency in copyright in the educational setting, such as the amount of the material used, the frequency with which it is used and how it ties into the curriculum.

Despite the ever-present danger of copyright infringement, I’ve found that many schools and teachers are completely unaware of the issue. Fortunately, the demands of the modern educational system, coupled with a general lack of technological savvy amongst teachers, keeps many educators from making mistakes. This lack of misstep seems less tied an understanding of copyright and more to an inability to make use of things that might invite infringement.

However, the same cannot be said of the public at large. American society does not seem focused on concept of intellectual property. Ideas, thoughts, concepts and art all seem to exist within a cloud of public domain. The best example would be music. Rather than being seen as a commodity produced by oftentimes several people who would not survive without financial remuneration, songs, by virtue of the mp3, are often seen as apples hanging from a tree of public domain; ripe for the taking. That they exist for people to propagate through folksy means without commerical concern.

I absolutely feel that it is the job of teachers to educate their students about copyright since it is a teacher’s responsibility to foste responsible citizens. In a classroom environment, I would treat copyright in much the same way that I would classroom management. At the beginning of the school year, the groundwork would be laid through informing the students as to what copyright is and how it will affect their classwork. Then, throughout the year copyright issues would be applied to students’ work in order to get them thinking about it on a day-to-day basis. It must be an omnipresent aspect of their ongoing education. The NETS-S standards that would apply here include all under 5. Digital Citizenship, including “a. advocate and practice safe, legal, and responsible use of information and technology; b. exhibit a positive attitude toward using technology that supports collaboration, learning, and productivity; c. demonstrate personal responsibility for lifelong learning; and d. exhibit leadership for digital citizenship.”

With regard to Chapter 7 in Educause, I would say that the survey results were in line with what I would have expected. Communication, such as email, instant messaging and cell phones; gaming; social networking and downloading are things that have appeal outside of the classroom environment. As such, I would expect them to be the biggest uses among younger students. However, once students move further and further through their educational experience, it only makes sense that they would become more familiar with other applications. Additionally, it’s my informal experience that technology still has a long way to go in the educational setting. Because of this, I’m not surprised that some students make use of technology more than others.

If I had been a party to writing this survey, I would like to explore how students brought the use of technology to bear on their education of their own volition, without regard to whether technology had been integrated into their classrooms. What is their sense of innovation in how technology can help them achieve their own success?

Week 5

For a person who may have never seen a computer before, the basic operation of PCs and Macs would probably be difficult to distinguish. After all, both consist of, generally, the same hardware, excluding the tower vs. CPU-in-the-monitor feature, and operate in the same basic manner with a series of on-screen windows, icons and menus allowing access to various storage spaces and software.

However, this is where the similarities end. From an angle of aesthetics and feel, Macs are sleek, fast, refined and cool while PCs tend to be slow and clunky. PCs also require a greater understanding to operate since many functions are still performed in a very "computer-speak" way. Conversely, Macs are extremely user-friendly for individuals with a limited knowledge of computers. In other terms, PCs require prior knowledge to successfully operate while Macs tend toward a common-sense style of operation.

I personally prefer Macs, however, in my 16 years as a commonly accepted computer user, I have used a PC for all of about three or four years. And those years were fairly recent. So, to be fair, I am probably biased in my opinion.

Having said that, I find that Macs tend to facilitate my creative flow rather than impede it, as I have found with PCs. This may be due to the wider range of factory installed software, such as GarageBand, found on Macs or it may be due to the speed with which the common-sense operation of a Mac allows me to realize my thoughts. The truth probably lies in a combination of these factors.

So, for me, the advantage lies with Macs because, as a creative person working in a variety of different mediums, Macs allow me to process my thoughts and ideas into a tangible form with such speed and efficiency that my stream-of-consciousness pattern is hardly ever broken. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for PCs.

To note, however, I would appreciate a world in which various format types were compatible between both platforms.

Week 4

Excel has many uses applicable to the classroom environment and is infinitely customizable for teachers. These are just a few of the ways that Excel can help educators.

1. Excel can be use to track student disciplinary matters. Given a scoring method for the severity of infractions, Excel can be used as a means of identifying trends when concerned with large amounts of students. This information can then be used to help determine whether action needs to be taken and can serve as a secondary source of documentation, which is of the utmost importance when dealing with disciplinary matters. In this application, Excel can also provide a means of determining whether any action taken to address an issue has been successful and to what extent.

2. A similar scoring method can also be used for teachers to track their own experiences with lesson plans. In this way, lesson plans can be ordered according to their effectiveness, richness of content, applicability and their degree of necessary revision. This would be an invaluable for an educator in the first year of a grade-level of subject area. In just a few minutes, that teacher would be able to retrieve data on an entire year’s worth of lesson plans and determine what plans worked, what didn’t and what might be revised into a more successful plan.

3. What might be the most obvious application of Excel in the classroom would be attendance, which could be sent electronically at the beginning of the day, or even each class, to the school’s administration. Additionally, students with attendance concerns could easily be targeted for action since records could be called upon almost instantaneously.

4. With regard to language arts, Excel could be used to track student progress with independent reading. Currently, students conference with teachers once a week to report their progress. The information gleaned from these conferences is typically recorded on paper in a binder. However, this information could be stored in an Excel file in a matter that could easily be read rather than as handwritten records, posssibly written by othe individuals, that might be difficult to read.

5. And finally, many students are now tapped to attend extracurriculr activities during the regular class day. Many of those students may be missing out on valuable classroom instruction by attending too many activities, or by attending them too often. By keeping track of the time spent in these activities, teachers could later pull up a report of several days or weeks of information and see whether a student’s extracurricular participation is cutting too far into classroom attendance without having to keep mental track of the matter.

While Google Docs does not have as many features for word processing and spreadsheets as Microsoft Word and Excel, many of the most valuable tools are still featured. Additionally, Google Docs provides another element that makes it far superior to the Microsoft alternative; it’s online.

Documents saved in Google Docs are accessable by anyone chosen by the user that created the document. Because of this, Google Docs is an open repository for collaboration between fellow teachers, departments, administrators, etc. Conversely, documents saved in Google Docs do not have to be made public to anyone and can stay without a single user’s account.

Additionally, Google Docs is accessable from any location with an Internet connection and information stored in Google Docs is saved offsite and backed up. Because of these simple features, Google Docs should be the preferred alternative.

Week 3

Social Bookmarking is the act of saving links to various online resources to a single, user-created web page and then sorting those links through various tags created by the user. These links can then be accessed by the user from any location with Internet access. Additionally, the links can be accessed by other users. This open access amongst multiple users can be thought of as a Community of Resources.

As a student, Social Bookmarking holds several advantages. First, reserach can easily be done from several locations, such as at home, at a library or at a computer lab. Because these links are stored online, they can easily be accessed from all three of these locations streamlining the effort to seek and find online resources. Next, students in a study group or a class working on the same project together can easily share the resources the have individually found with their classmates since the links saved to a Social Bookmarking site, such as del.icio.us, BlinkList or Simpy, are online and accessable by anyone. Also, because these links can be accessed by anyone, the student is capable of receiving real-time support from educators checking on their progress. And finally, because saved links are sorted by tags created by the user, in this case the student, the information can be easily organized to streamline the creation of the final project.

For educators, Social Bookmarking allows teachers to easily share resources they have found and utilized in their classrooms, such as online lesson plans, sites with information that may reinforce an existing lesson plan or online, educational games. In this way, teachers can communicate to each other what things are working for them since teaching contains an element of stealing ideas from one another. Additonally, information teachers find that might be of use to their students can be placed in an online Social Bookmarking site, tagged together for a particular lesson and shared with the students without the need to print anything out. This element of conversation can go both ways. Students can share what they have found online with their teacher and receive feedback as to whether the student is on the right trail to finding the appropriate information.

While an added benefit of Social Bookmarking is that it encourages students to unwittingly become responsible netizens by engaging them in the folksonomy of tagging, a strong argument could also be made that Social Bookmarking may be the most important tool of Web 2.0 in streamlining the education process. Like Google Docs, a real-time conversation can be held between educators and educators, students and students and educators and students, thus improving and speeding up the flow of information within a class.

Week 2

Students of today live in a hyper-connected community. The ability to publish their thoughts and ideas and instantly receive feedback is not limited to the occasional opportunity, but it a minute-to-minute reality. And for many, if not most, students this has been their daily reality, thanks to blogging, cell phones, instant messaging, etc., for their entire lives. Multitasking for these students is not second-nature. It is their nature. The intimacy of this interconnectivity has helped to foster a sense of community activism and optimism in members of the Net Generation not seen since the Baby Boomers.

Bringing these students into a traditional classroom and asking them to focus on one subject, sometimes for more than an hour, or to work alone without the benefits of conversation can seem like tedium for them and is an environment ripe for boredom. While most students agree that the face-to-face interaction of a classroom setting is still vital to learning, many teachers fail to account for how technology has changed how these students become engaged in an activity.

There exists a gap between the learning environment of the traditional classroom setting and the learning environment in which today's technologically savvy students live. The fact that most students feel classroom learning is still important illustrates that students are willing to do their part to close the gap on their end. As teachers, we must be willing to close the gap on our end and speak our students' language. Failure to do so will result in failure to engage our students and provide them with any type of learning. This does not necessarily mean that we need simply employ technological gadgets in our classrooms. We must speak a language of confidence in technology and a language in which learning is developed through conversations, both in and out of the classroom; a wide variety of media and convenience. This is summed up perfectly by the quote, "Students should be given the opportunity to interact with faculty and researchers outside the confines of the curriculum and to develop meaningful relationships with them," taken from page 5.8 in the Educause text.

Google Docs is one example of how technology, and free technology at that, can be used to help bridge the gap. This online application transforms he traditional research paper format into a real-time debate with educators and fellow students, as well as, possibly, the entire online, global community. This application also allows students to instantly draw from a wide variety of online media, including web pages and images, through the linking and importing features. And finally, Google Docs speaks to a student's need for convenience by providing a single repository for their work that can be accessed from any place an Internet connection is available at any time.

Just this one application alone has the potential to be a game changer in educators' attempts to reach out and engage their Net Generation students. Given this one example amidst a vast ocean of technologies and ideas, while it may take extra time and effort of the part of teachers, ample tools do exist to make 21st-Century learning a success.

Week 1

After assimilating all of this week's reading materials, I am left with one simple thought: Learning in the digital age requires new methodology regardless of, and even in the absence of, technology. By that I mean that technology, defined as the Internet, digital media, computers and so on, has structured how Digital Natives most effectively learn, or absorb and process information into knowledge, but that technology has failed to prove itself absolutely necessary to the learning experience.

For example, a classroom of students can be subdivided into groups of four or five students allowed to work together. Thus, those students are allowed to network their learning in a fashion that mimics the interactive flow of information on the Internet without the use of electronic equipment. This creates and "information ecology" and supports the thought that knowledge results from consensus-building through conversation, asserted in the article "Learning Amongst the Riches." In other terms, this would be a classroom as cloud computing.

However, learning in the total absence of technology would be a calamity. The Web 2.0 allows students to broaden their Personal Learning Networks far beyond the confines of the classroom and supports learning as a social process. In addition, technology can bolster experiential learning in in ways that a traditional classroom experience, save for rare lessons such as chemistry experiments, cannot.

For example, elementary students in the Governor Mifflin School District are allowed to play online learning games in class. One of these games asks students to burst a wall of balloons, each with a number on it. To accomplish this, the student must fire another balloon, again marked with a number, at the wall of balloons. In order for the balloons to burst, the fired balloon must make contact with a stationary balloon in which the numbers correspond to a mathematical equation, such as x+y=z. This turns simple math drills, which students might find boring, into an experiential, game-based activity.

Today's learning environment requires teachers to adapt their methods to the innate learning paths with which Digital Natives are endowed. But perhaps the most important lesson teachers must convey is, "The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information...," which was proposed in the article "Connectivism." Technology and the teaching methods created by technology are only pipelines through which information is fed to students. Teachers are necessary to shape students into thinking individuals capable of filtering out the unimportant information in an age of increasingly over-abundant information.

Initial Test Post

This is where I will post my weekly reflections on the readings in my EDU 610 Ed. Tech. class. I hope that these reflections will be profound and provocative.