Technology in Education

Hallelujah!!!!

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I jumped on the social networking site bandwagon last fall. Thought it was stupid and didn’t really have the time for it. Well, I was wrong. I joined FaceBook and managed to connect with friends, family and current/past colleagues. I only use it for personal reasons. All of these sites are blocked at school so I don’t see much relevance for them there. I checked out both sites (Classroom 2.0,  Ning in Education) and found nothing that really interested me. In fact, I was quite bored. Maybe I stayed up to late last night. No, the sites were just boring. If we want to use something like this with out students, it had better be much more attractive to them. If you are marketing to 50 year-old teachers, then you might have a shot. I also don’t like the idea of “socially” interacting with students outside of school. I am their teacher, not “friend.” This isn’t exactly smiled on in our educational setting.

I was even unimpressed with some of the topics being discussed. The members seemed out-of-touch and out-of-date. Are Interactive Whiteboards good in the classroom? That boat sailed a long time ago. If you aren’t using these now, something is wrong. Education vs. Video games: Do they not see what’s embedded in games today? Have they even played a game in the past decade? I am not a big gamer and do limit my childrens’ use, but even I see the benefit of gaming. My 3rd grade son is currently playing one of the Medal of Honor games. The other day he started telling me all about different battles from WWII. He’s never studied WWII. But he can name several battles, generals/leaders involved, tactics used and the outcome. And he was totally engaged. He was a part of the ‘action.’ Needless to say, I was not impressed and do not plan on joining these sites anytime soon.

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Here is the feed that I thought was amazing:

FOXNews.com – New Technology Could Put 500 Movies on One DVD – Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News

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Being in Technology, I tend to focus on technology feeds. The Fox SciTech news feed is something I’ve subscribed to for awhile. This feed talks about the new technology being integrated on disks. I know that disks were so 90′s but this new technology will have repercussions on other technologies as well. Taking data from a linear format to a 3-D format is going to have compounding effects on data storage. I can’t imagine fitting all of my DVDs on only 2-3 disks but it looks like it is in the near future.

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I spent the past hour or so messing around with my page in Pageflakes. It is very easy to use. It really reminds me of SharePoint with all of the various “flakes.” In SharePoint they are just called webparts. I see Pageflakes pages being used like webpages used to be used. Except it has much more potential. The first webquest I wrote a while back dealt with the Nevada Test site and the construction of the nuclear waste dump. It would be so much easier to create the webquest now using Pageflakes. The page would have all the research links, weather data, email addresses, etc. I could include links to Google Docs for the students to collaborate on the project. Dang, that would so rock. Now i just have to find the time to recreate that webquest!

Students can also use it as a research point for a topic of study. They create a page for the topic, grab whatever flakes they need to pull in the info they need. Then they just have one-stop shopping for most of their research.  Pretty Cool!!!!

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I can’t believe I’ve never used Google Docs before. What an amazing, online, free tool. So long Office!!!!! I can’t believe we are paying thousands of dollars for Office licenses when this is available free.

Ok, I’m off the soapbox. A group of us in Cherokee are creating a shared document for teachers to use at the beginning of the year. It’s nice to be able to collaborate online. I can definitely see a group of students collaborating on a paper or slide-show using this product. No more worries about them all having the same edition either. The spreadsheet tool will work great for my baseball team. We’ll keep the stats there and then just put a link on the wiki page.  

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I admit…..YouTube is not for me. Only every now and then do I go to the site. Usually it’s because someone has sent me a link to a specific video. There is just way too much irrelevant/inappropriate material on there for me to want to waste my time perusing the site. But I know the kids are there and love to post stuff. While I’ve blocked the site at my house, I know my son loves to create videos to post on his FaceBook page. The idea would be to get the kids to create these same type of videos but have them based on the standards for the class(es) they are taking and then post them to an alternative site. And that brings us to TeacherTube. What a great idea. A safe place to view videos and post one relevant to student learning. Well, maybe not all videos are relevant. The one I posted below totally cracked me up but has absolutely no educational value. I did view some newly posted videos on WWII and found them to be very informative. Sorta like watching the Discovery Channel.

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Podcasting can be a very valuable tool for educators. Using the technology we have, a teacher can record his/her lesson while instructing the students in class. The teacher then posts the recording onto their pod/vodcast host and the students automatically get the feed to their home computer. No more trying to recall what you teacher said 4 hours and 3 classes ago. Now you just go home and, voila, the entire lesson is waiting for you at home. Awesome!

This doesn’t mean that I find all of these podcasts out there to be relevant. I spent time listening to several of the podcasts(GEEK!ED!, One Minute How To) listed and was pretty much bored. It was like sitting through a bad lecture. The vodcasts were better but not exactly gripping stuff.  Students today know when something is boring. If you want to get attention you need to be creative. The CommonCraft guys are an example of how to teach a lesson creatively…but even that routine is starting to become cliche’. So what’s a teacher to do. Have fun! Be creative…or better yet, let the students become the teacher and create your pod/vodcasts for you. There ideas will knock you out.

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I’ve spent the past 45-60 minutes exploring Library thing. I typed in author names and titles and was able to drill down to specific books, reviews, groups, etc. I even spent quite a bit of time building my own “My Books” library. One thing I didn’t like was how they listed several editions of the same book when displaying books by title and author. Depending on which edition I chose, I was shown different reviews and groups. I wish they had some way of consolidating all the versions to one home page.

I did enjoy the author cloud page. I found it interesting which authors were getting “hit” the most. And I guess I’m a little more mainstream than I thought. I didn’t think that many people read Louis L’Amour and was nicely surprised by how huge C S Lewis was.

In the groups area I ventured into the 50 book challenge and even posted some replies to users who were going to be reading books I have already read…oooooooh. With the “suggester” I was a little frustrated again by the numerous duplicates of titles since there are so many different versions listed. Instead of getting 20 recommendations, it worked out to about 4 since so many were duplicated.

Overall, I love this site. That’s probably because I love to read. Now if only I had time to read the books that were suggested.

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Okay….I’m officially on overload. How can anyone maintain a blog, a wiki, RSS feeds and a Delicious page? Aaaaaaaaaah! I do see how Delicious can be used when collaborating with other teachers. But couldn’t the same be done with a wiki? Ok, ok, maybe I’m just a little negative because of the overload. I do like how Jerrie used Delicious to site her pictures in Thing 11. That would be helpful when using several different items from many locations. I guess since we use SharePoint and have the ability to share webparts, I don’t see a need for Delicious when collaborating. I just don’t know….maybe tomorrow I’ll feel better about it.

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Well, I’ve pared my reader down to 9 streams and seem to be handling them okay. Not great, just okay. My news feed, I read daily and get my dose of world, national and local news.  I have a Flickr feed with the “Interestingness” photos. Some of the photos are really cool….some aren’t. I guess I’m not that artsy.  My TechLearning feed today had a really great site for my High School math teachers. The site is by Texas Instruments and has a ton of lessons and activities for use with the TI calculators. I’ll definitely be sending that out!!!!

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