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.