This week I experimented with podcasting for the first time. I have been taking online classes for almost 2 years and have always wondered how professors capture these. I never realized just how easy it was. I chose to create a podcast to walk people through the website www.thinkfinity.org. I use this website all the time as a teacher. It searches various sites for lesson plans, interactives, and activities for students and teachers. I showed the various ways you can search on the site and what kinds of resources you can get. I have found that podcasts help me a lot when taking online classes just so I can have am example of what I should be doing. So I have to imagine that it would be helpful with my classes. I could se myself doing quick lectures or examples of problems so that my students could access them at home and have this resource to help with homework or to study.
I used Jing to create my podcast. It was super simple. I downloaded the free software, set up an account very quickly and was ready to go. I walked through the instructions and created my podcast in less then 10 minutes. The only difficultly I found was that I messed up towards the end of my video and wanted to just record over it, but I couldn't figure out how to do that and ended up just re-recording the whole thing. I could definitely see myself using podcasts again for many of the reasons I stated above. Also this could be useful in training teachers in the building, so we could get trainings or information on our schedule and not have to have a meeting as a set time. I could also see my district using these to walk through grade book technology. Every time I post grades I always forget the sequence, or leave a step out. If we have the steps somewhere in a podcast I could just refer to it when I needed it.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Saturday, February 18, 2012
MAPing and Social Bookmarking
After taking this Information Literacy Quiz I was shocked at the results. I consider myself a fairly tech savvy person. Although I don't have any formal training in computers, or web languages I think I can navigate the internet fairly well and get any information I need. So as you can imagine I felt pretty humbled when I got a solid 3, maybe going on a 4. How could I know so little about basic information navigation? Well that thought scared me, because if I consider myself pretty good at this kind of thing and score so low on this quiz, how must other person with less experience then me feel? I think going forward I will search for information a little different. I definitely learned that by searching with quotation marks can really weed out a lot of the information that pops up, but is not useful to me. I also am going to be more careful is figuring out exactly who posted the information and where it came from. I really take things at face value on the internet and never really thought I needed to take a closer look, but now I think it is a necessity. My confidence in information I have used in the past has definitely been rattled a little, and I don't want to fall into that trap again.
Teaching students how to find information, let alone quality information is a task that we must address quickly and seriously. I have had reports handed to me with www.google.com listed as a reference. And yes I am 100% serious. Students need to understand the implications of what taking false information can potentially do to their research. Most of these skills are not hard to acquire, but they must be emphasized so that in becomes the norm to use them. I was easily able to read through these tips and tricks in a few hours and have already began to implement them. Not only that but I have also begun to look at information with a more critical eye.
This week I also explored the idea of social bookmarking. I started by creating an account in Delicious. I see many advantages to organizing information in Delicious. Not only do you have access to all your bookmarks and websites, but you can also organize them in a much more visual manner then in your bookmarks menu in your browser. The fact that I can search for tags, or click on a label and find more resources about the same topic is awesome. It is better then a search in Google or Yahoo because you know people have already read it and and defined it as useful. The only problem I have with the site is that I didn't find it very user friendly. I would think of something that I would want to do and I would have to look at the articles or directions that were posted to figure out what to do. I could see myself using this site with my fellow teachers has a way to keep all of our resources in one place, and all be able to see sites and ideas we are using from the web.
I use social bookmarking sites Google Reader and Pintrest almost on a daily basis and I find these sites to be a little more user friendly. However these sites are a little different than Delicious, they allow you to see a snap shot of a page and usually that is all you need. Delicious offers you the ability to just have the direct links set up and organized for easy access. Overall I was glad to explore Delicious, but am not sure that I will use it in my daily life, however I think I will use it in my professional life.
Teaching students how to find information, let alone quality information is a task that we must address quickly and seriously. I have had reports handed to me with www.google.com listed as a reference. And yes I am 100% serious. Students need to understand the implications of what taking false information can potentially do to their research. Most of these skills are not hard to acquire, but they must be emphasized so that in becomes the norm to use them. I was easily able to read through these tips and tricks in a few hours and have already began to implement them. Not only that but I have also begun to look at information with a more critical eye.
This week I also explored the idea of social bookmarking. I started by creating an account in Delicious. I see many advantages to organizing information in Delicious. Not only do you have access to all your bookmarks and websites, but you can also organize them in a much more visual manner then in your bookmarks menu in your browser. The fact that I can search for tags, or click on a label and find more resources about the same topic is awesome. It is better then a search in Google or Yahoo because you know people have already read it and and defined it as useful. The only problem I have with the site is that I didn't find it very user friendly. I would think of something that I would want to do and I would have to look at the articles or directions that were posted to figure out what to do. I could see myself using this site with my fellow teachers has a way to keep all of our resources in one place, and all be able to see sites and ideas we are using from the web.
I use social bookmarking sites Google Reader and Pintrest almost on a daily basis and I find these sites to be a little more user friendly. However these sites are a little different than Delicious, they allow you to see a snap shot of a page and usually that is all you need. Delicious offers you the ability to just have the direct links set up and organized for easy access. Overall I was glad to explore Delicious, but am not sure that I will use it in my daily life, however I think I will use it in my professional life.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Electronic Portfolios
The article, ElectronicPortfolios as Digital Stories of Deep Learning, really made me see assessments and portfolios in a new light. The tenent that I identified with the most was: Assessment for learning should be sensitive and constructive because any assessment has an emotional impact. I think that as teachers we sometimes forget how much every single thing that we do as an emotional impact on the students, especially assessments of any kinds. Being told you did well will make a student have a good reaction, where as doing bad will have the opposite effect. Many times when a student sees they didn’t do well on an assessment they see it as a reason to give up because they don’t feel like they can do anything. If we as teachers used assessments FOR learning more often then to measure what they should have learned we not only help ourselves and our students, but we also help the overall feel of the classroom. Instead of feeling like they are failing the teacher can use assessment to see gaps and build up their students from there instead of bring them down because they are not where they should be.
Some of the classes I teach are math classes, and many students in these types of classes come in day after day, takes notes, do problems, do homework and take a test. From my observations, students never really take ownership of the information they are given and what/how they are learning it. Because of this retention of the information is low, and this creates all sorts of problems down the road. I think with electronic portfolios, or even just hard copy portfolios students could really take ownership of this information, what is it, how they are recording it, and have a great product to look back on to remember it or study it from. I see a lot of potential for using portfolios in math class. I feel like it could break up the monotony of traditional notes and give the students something that they want to keep up with and use on a daily basis. By creating these students will take the information, put it into their own style and wording, and that way they take it in, have a better chance of remembering it, and have all information they have learned in one place to go back to later. I think the idea of this in very intriguing and I am working on ways to develop it in my classroom to create a better learning environment.
To get a better idea of what impact this could have on education I am creating my own electronic portfolio located here: Adrienne Emerson's E-Portfolio
I also researched other E-Portfolio projects to see how other people are making this work in their classes/workplaces/studies. I found a lot of interesting examples but this one was my favorite.
I also researched other E-Portfolio projects to see how other people are making this work in their classes/workplaces/studies. I found a lot of interesting examples but this one was my favorite.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Wiki Week
The wiki I created is for the robotics team that I coach at school the Robowranglers. The reason I decided a wiki would be perfect for our team is because we have a lot of info, dates, and competitions to keep track of. I send out emails to the team, yet all the time I get emails or questions about information that we’ve talked about months ago and it takes me so much time to dig up old emails. I thought this wiki would be a great idea, because not only can I update information, but my students and parents can update information as well. Typically I take care of all travel arrangements, parents organize fundraisers, and students run the meetings. By using a wiki be can all update information and have it in the same place. This is better then using our website because it would look cluttered with all this information. I have started my wiki here: http://greenvillerobotics.pbworks.com and while I have not had time to introduce it to the whole team yet, I plan on doing that in the upcoming weeks.
I can see a lot of advantages in using a wiki for my purpose. With so many people doing so many different things on our team, this is a great central place to locate information no matter what project you are working on. By giving everyone the right to update information , the responsibility does not fall on ton one or two people, which is important when everyone on the team is already so busy.
The disadvantage that I can see to using wikis is that it is hard to control what information is being posted, if 50+ people are able to update a page. Although I don’t think that is would create a lot of problems I can definitely see someone accidently deleting something, or posting pictures that should be posted or something of that nature.
For our students that we consider “digital natives” wiki’s have the potential to keep them engaged in technology for everyday assignments and projects. Instead of just simple email or discussion a wiki provides a simple way to increase the use of technology without a major commitment by the teacher.
After exploring the eLearning Tool Wiki I was very intrigued by Mashups. It is something I have never heard of before and as I began looking at the examples I could see a lot of uses for this technology. Part of my educational technology philosophy was that technology should be interactive and fun. Mashups looks like they could be both.
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