Ed Tech Profile Assessment NETS - 5

In this assignment I used EdTech to evaluate my educational technology proficiency at the beginning of my technology class, and at the completion of the class. As you can see my proficiency in technology increased greatly.

FAIR USE HARBOR - Copyright Ethics NETS - 3 & 4

This assignment provided information about the fair use of copyright material for educational purposes, personal use, and additions to the work. Fair Use Harbor gives us the legal and ethical protocol of copyright use for written, photographed, and video. In addition, this document was created thrugh the use of google docs in collaboration with two of my classmates.

iMovie Software Proficiency - NETS - 5

In this assignment I had the opportunity to work with imovie on a Mac computer. I used film footage of CSUSM to create a public service announcement to prospective students by using Video Fx, Sound Fx, transitions, and music to create a one minute film.

Journal 10: Enticing Teachers with Technology

Elper, James (2009, March-April). New Visions For Transforming Teaching. Learning and leading with Technology, Retrieved April 8, 2009, from http://www.learningandleading-digital.com/learning_leading/200904/

Technology can be a scary word; especially for teachers. It means learning new programs, which can be complicated and intimidating. However, teachers desperately want their students to be engaged in the learning material. Technology is the way to bridge the gap between the generations that separate students and teachers. Kids understand and love technology, and they use it everyday in their own lives. James Elper writes that the problem in getting teachers to learn about technology is a type of fear factor. Teachers don't want to sit at a conference or a learning workshop while a bunch of techies speak computerese and run programs the teacher doesn't even know how to download. Elper took this knowledge and applied it to his district's technology for teachers program. Instead of the techies teaching the course Elper and his staff offered stipends for teachers to teach other teachers about the success and technology they have been using in their classrooms. Not only did more teachers show up to the learning workshop, but they actually understood what was being said. Having the lead teachers teach the basics instead of all of the bells and whistles helped the teachers get a better grasp on the fundamentals of various programs. Elper also offered the incentives for teachers involved and signed up for the workshop. The teachers could use an LCD projector and had access to several great programs they could use through out the year. In exchange for the incentives the teachers who took part in the program had to write how the program influenced and benifited their classroom. Technology will continue to play a major role in education, and it's crucial to entice teachers to be excited about adapting to technology.

Question 1: How can we get teachers in the San Diego district to want to attend technology seminars?

Answer: I think Elper had the right idea with offering teachers incentives for their participation in seminars. money talks... especially to teachers who could always use more. The principle and purpose of the educational seminars is to show teachers how awesome their classroom can be when they use technology to relate to their students. Sometimes you have to use a little bribery as an incentive.

Question 2: How can teachers ensure the technology they are using is something their students will take interested in?

Answer: Teachers should always ask for feedback from their students because it is the most valuable information you can get. If teachers figure out what their students get excited about the teachers can better plan their lessons with technology.

Journal 9: What's Your Kid?

Waters, John (2009, March). The Kids Are All Right. T H E Journal, Retrieved April 3, 2009, from http://www.thejournal.com/articles/24104

Chances are your kid or other kids you know are better with online technology than you are. It is inevitable your child will end up online chatting with friends, creating blogs, profiles and possibly even making their own website. So where do your children or students rate in their level of online activity? According to John Waters there three different levels of online involvement that kids fall into. The first is called the "hanging out" category. The kids who are just hanging out are focused on basic technology skills mostly used to navigate the internet for information, and the necessary technology to talk to their friends through things like IM. The second group of kids are a step above the first in what's called the "messing around" group. This group is a combination of kids who are just hanging out, but who have also taken the time to learn some new programs and dabble in the technology world. Many of these kids are new to technology, but they have found an interest in what's available for their use. Finally, the third group of kids are those who are "geeking out." These children are fully immersed in online technology and often know more than adults do. The geeking out kids usually have the ability to navigate the internet, chat with friends through a variety of different outlets, and they are creating their own wiki's, web pages, and even posting videos. The geeking out kids have the ability to adapt to the majority of all new technology. It's amazing what kids can do; take advantage of what they know and learn from them!

Question 1: How can you take advantage of your students online technology knowledge?

Answer: I know you are the teacher, but take this opportunity to allow your students to teach each other! When a student teaches another student how to do something they tend to relate to one another much better than we teachers can relate to our students. Plus this opens up a great window for you as the teacher to understand what kids are into. When the teacher can get the students engaged in an interesting topic they enjoy the amount of learning that can happen is phenomenal!

Question 2: What is the benifit to using online technology as a part of your classroom?

Answer: As adults we are always complaining that students spend too much time online and not enough time doing their homework. What if we made going online their homework? Have the students create their own blogs, or communicate through google docs, or engage them in a class wiki. This way the students can do their homework while they talk to their friends online. They are great multi-taskers.

Journal 7: Make it Easy

Bigenho, Chris (2009, March/April). Mining For Gold. Learning and leading with Technology, Retrieved April/2/2009, from http://www.learningandleading-digital.com/learning_leading/200904/

Did you know that you can receive only the information you are interested in on the Internet through an RSS Aggregator? The aggregator collects updated information from the Internet, and based on the preferences you set your aggregator to it will send you the information only from the topics you have chosen as points of interest. That's like watching TV and only having to view the funny commercials you actually enjoy watching! According to Bigenho the RSS aggregator is one of the least utilized tools of Web 2.0 because most people don't understand how to use it. It is as simple as using the RSS feed and setting your preferences to the information you would like to know about. As a person who is interested in sports all I need to do is set my aggregator preferences to things like Football News, Basketball News, ect. and every time the aggregator picks up something new related to my topics it sends it directly to me. The aggregator is convenient because it weeds out all of the other countless articles and news on other things I do not care about.

Question 1: How can high school students use aggregator as a tool for the classroom?

Answer: Students can set up their own personal aggregators and preferences to receive information on various topics. The teacher can assign a variety of topics to class, which the students can add to their prefernces. Prior to coming to class students can easily access information about the assigned topics, read articles and information, and come to class prepared to talk about the recent events and thoughts on that particular topic. This not only saves the time of having to read in class, but makes it easier for the students to view the right information.

Question 2: Why should students use the RSS Aggregator over google search engine?

Answer: The RSS aggregator does the google search for you as soon as you have logged into your computer. Instead of having to type in the topic and then weed through the mess of articles and opinions of others your information is already waiting for you organized and ready to go.

Journal 6: PLN's

Warlick, David (2009,March/April). Grow Your Personal Learning Network. Learning and Leading with Technology, Retrieved 4/2/2009, from http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Publications/LL/LLIssues/Volume3620082009/MarchAprilNo6/36612w.pdf

A PLN is a Personal Learning Network, which can be useful tool for networking with people and other online resources. There are three different types of PLN's that can be used to collaborate with people and web sources. The first PLN is called Personall Maintained Synchronous Connections. You can use this PLN to solve problems and ask questions in real time, which means you can talk to anyone in world at a certain moment just like if you were in a conversation with them at an office or a coffee place. The second type of PLN is called Personally and Socially Maintained Semisynchronous Connections. Semisynchronous basically means the participants and collaborators can get back to the questions and conversations on their own time without the concern of geography or time of day. Usually this type of PLN is used at any time rather than in the "now." The final type of PLN is called Dynamically Maintained Asynchronous Connections. The main function and tool used in this PLN is RSS Aggregator, which allows people to search a variety of quality web links from a social network of people who recommend the sites. This often eliminates a tedious google search for good links or sites, and helps collaborators grasp onto a network of social bookmarked sites.

Question 1: How can asynchronous PLN's be used in a classroom?

Answer: As a teacher it would be a great idea to have students break up into small groups and work together on a project requiring Internet research. Each group should be given a section of the project to research, and that particular group can bookmark their sources through a program like Delicious. Each group will do the same for their section of the project. For the sections the groups did not have they can use the bookmarked sites and sources the other groups have marked in order to finish their research.

Question 2: What are the advantages and disadvantages to the Personally Synchronous Maintained Connections?

Answer: One advantage is that you can talk to people all over the globe for free in an instantaneous conversational manner. This allows a variety of opinions and knowledge to be shared in the moment when a person is searching for answers. The disadvantage of this type of PLN is if you cannot talk at the same time as others. This is when you would want to move to the Semisynchronous PLN's like google docs, which does not require you be available at a specific time.