My EDM310 Blog Assignments are Now Complete

To my fellow classmates in EDM310:
I enjoyed getting to know yall and I wish yall luck in pursuing your education and soon to be careers. I hope yall all have a great break and a Merry Christmas! Mr. Wakeman, I also wish you luck in your career and all the other aspects of your life. Merry Christmas as well!

Week 13, What I learned

I think that this was a wonderful class in preparation for me as a teacher and also to me as a student. Before I started this class I would have considered myself to be extremely technologically challenged. Now I feel that there are many things I can do and so many more resources available to me than I ever thought possible. The most important thing I learned in this class is how to use Excel. I never knew how to work it and now that I do I think that it is a great program. Excel is a program I plan on using for my grade book when I am a teacher. I love the fact that we learned to use formulas with it. It really makes things so much easier. Another thing I learned was how to use Publisher. I really enjoyed using publisher because it is a program I can use in all aspects of my life. I also learned a lot about Word. I thought that I knew everything about Word before I started this class but there were so many things I didn't and I am glad I know them now. I also learned how to use Access. I would have never attempted to even open Access until this class. While it can be confusing, it also can be very helpful. Again, I really enjoyed this class and I am glad I am no longer technologically challenged.

Week 12, iTunes University

Itunes University is a great tool that allows users to easily search, download, and play course content just like they do music, movies, and TV shows. It delivers easy, 24/7 accesses to educational content from hundreds of top colleges, universities, and educationally focused organizations across the country. And it’s accessible to anyone with a Mac or PC. It also is Engaging to students. It offers audio and video that make subjects more vivid than any printed page ever could.

I know that I myself own an iPod and I love using it for music. I never realized that I could also be using it as an education resource. I think that this is a great new way to get kids to become more interested in their education. I mean who wouldn’t when it’s that easy and that visual. I am very glad that I searched about iTunes university because I think that this can be a great asset to me as a student and also as a teacher.

Week 11, iPods

Most people consider the iPod as just a portable music player. However, the iPod now is making its way in many K-12 and college classrooms. It is being used for anything from foreign language and music lessons to slideshows and pod casts. I did not know this. This is amazing. I think that this is a wonderful thing for our classrooms. This brings about so many opportunities. While it might be a difficult concept to master at first, I think that if teachers can take the time to master this and become comfortable using the technology than this will be a great resource in education.

In fall of 2004, Duke University gave each entering freshman an iPod and invited faculty and students to explore how the devices could enhance both the academic and student campus life. After a full year of the experiment, Duke now is offering iPods only for students in specific courses where professors have targeted plans to use the tools. Again, I think that this is such a wonderful asset to the classroom. I would love to see this happening everywhere. This opens up so many opportunities for students and teachers.
http://www.addysg.org.uk/ipodined/news.php

Week 10, Dr. Alice Christie

I thoroughly enjoyed exploring Dr. Alice Christies website. There were many parts to it that I found would be useful to me. The one that I found would be the most useful is the section about education technology. This section shows you what all types of things are available to you as teacher to use in your classroom. This is a website that I can see myself using in the classroom. I am the kind of person who wants to use technology in the classroom but just doesn’t know how to incorporate it. This will be a great tool for me so that I will be able to use technology in the classroom.

Another part of this website that I found very interesting was the part about GPS and Geocaching. This is an absolutely amazing concept. I have never heard of this before. I think that this is a great way to enhance the learning in grades K-12 and make it fun. If the school I end up working for offers this I will be thrilled.

Week 9, Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that can be used and edited by anyone. While Wikipedia can be a great source to just read for fun it can never be trusted unless the facts are verified from elsewhere. While all of my teachers in college have informed me to never use Wikipedia as a resource I never fully understood why, until now. Wikipedia has been known for getting edited by politicians, church groups, and even big corporations to enhance their image. While the person who invented Wikipedia had a great idea behind it, it just didn’t quite work out. The idea of having a collaborative source for subjects would be amazing if you could actually trust everyone.

A college student named Virgil Griffith created a program to scan Wikipedia in order to tell who is editing posts. It traces the edit back to the computer to let you know where it is coming from. Therefore, if you are reading about a corporation and you see an edit by that corporation you know that it is not reliable. While this helps the source out a little bit it does not eliminate this issue because anyone could just go to different computer (in say a coffee house) and edit again. While this Wiki scanner does help the source become a little bit more reliable, Wikipedia should still never be used as a source for anything factual.

Week 8, Creating Personal Learning Networks

This blog is about a teacher who wants her students to set up personal learning networks. She wants to help them set up an aggregator and then seed them with a few feeds to get them started. Her plan is to get them comfortable and then have them find some feeds on their own of anything they are passionate about. This will go along with their personal blogs and they will be responsible for keeping up with theirs and commenting also on classmate’s feeds. The two goals of this idea are to help them foster critical thinking (and things along that line with in the curriculum) and to also help them establish their own learning network. She wants them to be able find trusted sources and to also learn how submit trusted sources themselves.

I think this is a great idea! I wish that my high school teachers had started something like this for me. This is such a different approach to learning and I am almost positive that it is effective. This idea is establishing skills for the students that they can essentially take with them to college and even further in life. I know that when I first started surfing the Internet for sources for projects and papers I trusted almost every source I found. I know it sounds silly but at that age I just didn’t know. I did not know how to tell the difference from a source that is legitimate and source that was not. I wish I would have had a project along these lines to help me. It would have been so useful and effective. Not only does this project sound useful it also sounds fun. I would have loved to be doing something like this in my high school classes. I really enjoyed reading this blog and I think this teacher is a very smart woman with great ideas!