Blog #6 The Wiki
The Wiki
The Engstrom article defines the wiki as “A collaborative Web site comprised of the
perpetual collective work of many authors.” In a sense, it is a website that people can go to and actually edit. After reading the article, I agree with them in that most people use wikis to teach a population about some technology solution. I worked for webassign on N.C. State’s campus over this past summer and they used wiki pages for all the coders to share ideas and solutions with each other. It brings to light the business solution that the article also points out, online staff development. I believe professional development would be very cool using a wiki. Since all the contributors are faculty and are using it to sharpen and hone their skills, the information would be very good and the medium would be great for us to provide each other with quality sources of instruction. My dad works in a company that uses wiki pages for collaboration on projects. They are all on the internal network and password protected so that no one, except the team that is using it, can edit it. This leads me to the site
http://www.wikipedia.org/ , the online encyclopedia. I first found this site about a month ago when a guest speaker praised it during a presentation of online resources. I was very excited about the idea of an encyclopedia being maintained by all of the people in the world. That would ensure that the content is always up-to-date. When I brought it to my students, they questioned the accuracy of the information. They told me that, many of them, would simply post odd or false information about a topic just for fun. “What if a second grade class came to that site right after we posted false information on it?” they asked me. I’m not sure how to control the wiki so it is still easy to use for everyone to add to the knowledge, but still maintain its security and integrity. While reading the article, I noticed that the teachers noticed that the kids didn’t like all the editing restrictions that they had. If we give more privileges to the kids, then how do we maintain the security and integrity? I guess that, in a classroom, we could control it since we have such a small population and it could be a powerful learning tool.
The application side of what I have learned from the article couples with a blog I posted earlier. I was thinking about how I might be able to use a wiki page for my students to create their online textbook. As I have learned from the article, I need to prompt the thinking of my students with good questions and be very direct with the information that my students need to post. I think the idea of a page that they could continually edit may be the best way for me to try this book/website idea I have. I’m going to give it a try and see if it is as good of a learning tool as the article describes.
Blog #5
Online Digital Archives (Hofer Article)
An online digital archive is simply a collection of information on a website. They are centered on a particular topic or theme and can vary in medium, from pictures and movies, to sounds or articles. In order for these archives to be used effectively to support teaching and learning, they must be well organized and maintained. I disagree with Hofer in that everything must reside on one webserver. With the speed of internet access, you can put information on multiple servers, as long as it is easy to access and very well organized. One thing they noted in their article, which I agree with, is that the organization needs to be very student-friendly if it is going to be used effectively in the classroom. As a teacher, I tried using the website
http://www.unitedstreaming.com and found it very well organized for me as a teacher (which is what it is designed for). It is a great storage of video clips that cover any subject you can think of. This provides me with a wealth of information that I can use to add to my lessons. For example, with access to this digital archive, I was able to show my students a great video clip about how imaginary numbers are used in measuring electricity. The video was able to show the inside of a power plant, which I couldn’t have done with just my whiteboard. Having access to just this online collection, gives me the ability to enhance my curriculum in ways that allow my students to make connections to other subjects.
The next step for me is to find a way to get access to other such archives and give them to my students. One site that I have found was
http://www.purplemath.com which is actually a math-teaching website. It is a collection of lessons for students to get some extra support with different topics of mathematics that we cover. It is well laid out and very easy to understand. The one hesitation that I have about this particular collection is that it is only text, and a few pictures, which is kind of hard to understand. I wish that they could provide some streaming video of a person working out the problems. I think that would make the archive a much more effective tool.
I do want to look into the NASA archive that they have described. Science and math are so intertwined, that seeing science would help them understand the math and why we learn the math. Again, having access to these archives can provide me with a much deeper and richer curriculum than teaching without the internet. I do note the two objections that they share with us, bandwidth and copyright. Bandwidth is a big issue at my school, just like other schools, and streaming video is usually very choppy. I’m sure it would be a violation of copyright if I stored the streaming video on my computer, but it is tempting in light of our slow network speed. I think if a school is going to encourage teachers and students to use online digital archives, especially video, they should make sure they have a very robust network to support it or else, we teachers will just ignore it.
Blog #4 Telecollaboration
Telecollaboration is a cool idea that I learned about after reading the Harris article today. I found a section of it so interesting, I wanted to blog about it. The article is written by Judi Harris and in it she describes eighteen different activity structures to help you, as a classroom teacher, develop solid online projects for your students. These activity structures are really just design tools aimed at giving the teacher some good guidelines, and ideas, for the projects. There were eighteen tools to talk about so I want to focus on just two of them, Peer Feedback Activities, and Electronic Publishing.
Peer Feedback Activities is built around students being able to provide feedback to each other in a controlled environment. They describe a writing project in which kids can provide feedback about each other’s feedback on the web. I think this would provide such a unique and powerful learning experience for my students. Most of their schooling has been to write papers for a teacher. If they could write for each other, they would be so much more interested in and focused on developing quality writing. Once the audience becomes the entire world, the student wants to give a great impression and try hard to make themselves sound intelligent. What’s cool about the project they talk about in the article is that professional writers will get on and give feedback to the students’ writing. That would be the greatest thing, for a kid to get feedback from a professional in the field! That kind of advice would go much further than advice I could give. This idea has such a great positive impact potential, I want to think about how I can transform my class blog into this kind of idea. I’m going to do some research and talking to other educators to try to find a way to do this because I think this would have a much better impact on my students’ writing.
The other tool, that is even cooler, is the Electronic Publishing. The idea behind the tool is to have the students look through online galleries and create ones of their own. I love the idea (that is why I chose to do this blog right now!) and it made me think about how I could have my students write an online textbook. I’d love to get my students to create and maintain the content of the textbook year-to-year to make it all relevant and accurate. What a perfect way to hit the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy, have my students assume the role of teacher! After all, my biggest frustrations with the classic textbook is that it is outdated, stagnant, and the students can’t take it with them. With an online textbook they create, the information would always be accurate and up-to-date. The students could bookmark the site and come back to it to re-learn topics they need for the next math class. We could even promote the site to help other kids trying to learn Algebra II. I thin this would get my kids interested once they see how much of a help it could be to other kids. I think it is the perfect way to get my kids to create a quality product using some new literacy skills (perhaps a wiki page) and for them to cement the learning they have done in the classroom. What a great tool!
Blog #3 Video Production
Video Production
I want to write a bit about some things I learned in session 10, tools for students to create video projects. One tool in particular that I learned about in the Bremer article, Filming Compassion. The thrust of this article was to talk about how students can use videos to make service learning projects. This article was very real to me because the school I teach at, Broughton High School, has a 100 hour community service requirement for graduation. We are a school that is focused on giving back to the community. Our student body is very used to watching video clips during our morning announcements. How cool would it be to have students, for community service hours, to make videos for some of the non-profit agencies around Raleigh? This would be a great project for our video production class to take on. Usually, they produce short interview-type videos about what is going on around Broughton. I loved a line that she put, “By the end of the grading period, students felt good not only about successfully completing the class and building their video production skills but also about having contributed a useful promotion tool to a worthy organization.” This is the kind of stuff that we teachers live for. We want a kid to feel good about the work they do. The collaborative learning, the different audience that critiques your work, and the final product being used outside of school make this project a unique learning experience. They would need to learn to work with adults and professionals meet criteria that is developed by someone other than the teacher, collaborate and learn the video production software, and most importantly, use the knowledge the have acquired about video production to make a quality video.
The only drawback I can see is that this would only benefit the students that take video production as a class. We don’t have the tools and training available to the general staff to enable them to help mentor students to do this kind of a project on their own. So, we wouldn’t be able to use this for the general student body to create videos. The only other application I can think of is the senior project. Perhaps with the widely available training manuals and support documents for programs like iMovie, students could figure out how to do it themselves. My fear with this approach is the lack of training at storyboarding the movie. Like Janet faced in her article, the kids wanted to film, but they didn’t have a clear idea of how to actually film quality materials. Thus, she taught them how to use a storyboard. I don’t know if there is enough readily available materials for us to give to students to teach themselves how to storyboard.
I’m going to take the idea to our technology team in December and ask what they think about the idea.
Blog #2 Hardware - Handhelds
Handhelds
I found this section of our course interesting because I have always wondered what use handhelds could be in a classroom. I was always turned off by the idea of needing different operating systems and software to run them. I was also curious of the potential they carry because of their portability. The most swaying article was the PEP report we read about the usefulness of a handheld. Teachers gave it a big thumbs up, as did students. I wanted to know how they compared to a laptop/tablet and a desktop. The first thing I noticed in the report is that 71% of the teachers said that handhelds were better than desktops for the “flow” of lessons. It sounds reasonable, because we don’t have long start-up times, logging in issues, and other issues to derail my students from their learning objectives. Since my classes are so internet-based, I don’t know if the handheld can view websites like a desktop or laptop can. Thus I am hesitant to try it out. I absolutely see their merit when it comes to science classes. Being able to attach probes and measuring devices and collect data would be awesome. It makes learning come to life and teaches them lab-skills as well as critical thinking. Really, it provides some good 21st century learning at a very low cost. I know you can do the same thing with a usb port on a laptop/desktop with probes from
http://www.vernier.com/, but I like the portability of a handheld.
I also learned that all the data pointed out that elementary and middle schools saw better results with the handhelds than did high schools. I can think of my friend that teaches Photoshop and she would not be able to use the handheld. Most the teachers I know want typing programs, but I’m not sure how well we can do that on a handheld. We could teach the kids to use graffiti, but I think that would be way more tedious and difficult than just having them handwrite their assignments.
The one idea I really liked was geocaching. Reading about the math teacher from Thurston Middle School that taught math using GPS was very interesting. Seeing the process as a “review” assignment with a reward could be very useful to a teacher. Kids answer questions to get the next clue, all the while, looking for the prize. It’s just like the tv show, The Amazing Race. I can see how his kids got really into it. I think my kids would learn a lot about GPS and navigation, as well as the review questions I place at each cache.
In summary, there are many merits to the handheld. Portability, ease of use, and GPS provide it with many quality educational uses. The only drawback is the typing, screen size, web browsing, and high-powered applications like Dreamweaver or Photoshop that a high school needs. I can see us spending the money for a set for the science department, but not in any other areas.
Blog 1 Hardware - Tablets
Education isn’t the filling of a bucket, it’s the lighting of a fire. Can we find a way to use technology effectively to “light the fire”? In my opinion and personal teaching experience, I believe that the Tablet PC may offer us the best hardware resource out there. “Tell me and I'll forget. Teach me and I'll remember. Involve me and I'll learn” reminds us that for knowledge to last, we need to use it. It’s like working with Play Dough, we can watch someone make a car or a person, but we actually learn how to do it when we can put our hands in the Play Dough and make it ourselves. We need learning tools that are just as involving and engaging. Between reading the “Exploring Tablet PCs” article by Lyndon Godsall and my experience teaching with a tablet for the past two years, I have come to believe that Tablets are better learning tools than a regular laptop, desktop, or handheld computer.
A tablet is a laptop computer with an additional ability to use a special pen on the screen of the laptop to write with. With this pen, you can interact with many programs using handwriting. Microsoft OneNote, for example, can put your handwriting into note pages. Physics Illustrator can allow you to use the pen to show forces on an object. Teachers can edit a word document like they would a real document with a red pen. As a math teacher, writing equations is painfully slow with a laptop. Teaching math from a laptop would be near impossible. A tablet allows me to actually write the equation on the screen like I would be able to write it on a board.
I want to include a short quote from the reading that sums up why tablets are better than laptops.
Eleanor Brown, a middle school language arts teacher, said “One of the advantages of a tablet PC is that, like a SmartBoard or a Mimeo, teachers can display materials on a projector, edit and alter these on the screen, and then return to the original material without erasing and rewriting. I teach the same class six times in a day, so this provides an advantage. In addition, I find that keeping students’ attention with the tablet is easier. Because the pen allows me to highlight, circle, and otherwise indicate what I want the students to focus on, they have a visual cue as to what I am concentrating on.”
The tablet allows me to do everything I would on a dry-erase board, but in a digital format. I found that I can quickly provide students with teacher-notes for classes that a student missed because of absences. I have taken it a step further; I use a wireless network and wireless LCD projector to show the screen of my tablet on the wall at the front of my room. Having a program like OneNote allows me to teach math without limitations. I can put in pictures (and edit them with a pen), websites, programs, and other documents for easy access during a lesson. This brings unbelievable depth to the lessons I give as well as providing uninterrupted instruction. There is nothing more distracting for a student as a teacher that is searching for the next part of the lesson. With my ability to store everything I need in one place, as well as write my notes, a tablet pc and OneNote provide me with the tools I need to provide engaging lessons for my students.
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