Monday, July 20, 2009

EDM 310 Blog Assigments Now Completed

After spending a lot of time in this class I am proud to say I believe I am now a technology literate teacher. No I have not gotten my teacher's ceritifcate yet, but you can be a technology literate teacher without really being a certified teacher. I have now not only learned a lot, but I have also been bale to show others how to use certain aspects learned in this course such as Skype and Google Earth. I hope everyone can take as much away from this class as I did.

Podcast Intro

After listening to the podcasts I can definitly say I never thought it was so much work to be able to know how to find them and know what to listen for. I did like how one of the podcast gave you refrences for others if you wanted more information that made it a lot easier if you were doing an assigment for a project or a paper.

Another podcast showed me how watching a video and actually listening was so much easier than sitting and reading about it. It was not as boring and it kept me "awake". Others seemed to do the same. The podcasts were generally really good teaching strategies and I thought they would be very helpful in the classroom.

I loved how one of the podcasts acutally talked about differnt technology tools and how they could be used in education. This helped show differnt aspects of technology and new improved gadgets that aid in educational learning.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

I found Mr. Pausch to be very thought provoking, understanding, and inspiring. How could one man move so many people?

Mr. Pausch saw teaching as a journey. Though at the end it may not be where you thought you would end up the time you spent on it definitely taught you something about not only the assignment, but yourself. I thought Mr. Pausch was an educator that many of us could only strive to be. He was enthusiastic about education and caring. He understood the path that education was going to be taking over the next few years and embraced it. I think this should be a video not only watched in this course, but also throughout the campus of South Alabama.

What I've learned

I learned mant different things I learned:

Many different aspects of google

How to make a blog

Google Earth- this was my favorite thing to learn about

Skype

Collaborating with others

Twitter- I had a little understanding about it, but now I know a while lot more.

This is not everything I learned. There is so much more that can't be included because it would take way to long to write. I am so appreciative how everything and hope others can take away what I have form this course.

EDM Podcasts 09

After listening to both podcasts there is a lot we could of all done to improve them. It being our first one i thought it went great.

After watching the podcasts I was involved in I thought we could had went more in depth with our questions and responses. We really only touched bases with many topics. There is so much more we could had talked about while dealing with readers/writers and listener/watchers.

After watching Kitty and Nichol's podcast I thought they did a fantastic job by asking the thought provoking questions, but they got way off subject. It was fun to watch where they went with it, but they had said they were going to talk about one thing and switched i think they could had drawn Dr. Strange back in with a topic more on subject.

I did think everything g went good with both and I think after a few more we could all definitely master the technique.

Plus or Minus a Classroom Blog

I read all the blogs published by Kitty Ruzic. She was very good at capturing every essence of the underlying questions of each blog, How can technology help me? There are both pluses and minuses that come along with doing a class blog. In all there seems to be more pluses.

The only realy minus I can think of is that you are required to read certain blogs or podcasts by other people. I think it could be better if you oculd possibly get to choose your own blogs to write about. This would give you the freedom of choice and prove that you can find responsive and thought provoking blogs that deal with technological issues teachers might face.

A plus of doing the blogs is that the students learns how to collaborate with others while also learning that the best work isn't totally done alone that it takes many differnt people with different ideas and thoughts together to come up with many great ideas all dealing with a central thought.

Another really great plus about class blogs is that it introduces many students to what the future will soon be like. It allows them to interact and learn about new ideas that technology has to offer. If also proves to them that, yes, the future is coming and people need to be ready for what it has instore.

The future is moving closer and closer to technology taking over the world and for teachers to be on the know about it now will help our students today be more prosporous and educated about whats to come. This will inturn help everyone.

The Technology Literate Teacher

"What do you have to know, be able to do, and have experienced to be a "technologically literate teacher." These were questions asked to answer after watching the videos or "Next Generation Learning", "Will Richardson", "Networked Student", "PS22 Chorus", and "Viki Davis". After watching them I gained a lot more knowledge about technology literate teachers. I found that you need to know about all the new social networking sites and have an understanding that not giving students an education about technology in the 21st century is academic malpractice.

Teachers should be able to communicate with others on social network sites and they should be able to understand that you should not know everything about technology. The whole point is to learn new things as you are going along. Be able to be teachable. Your students can teach you just as much as you can teach them.

To be technology literate one should experience the Internet. Don't be afraid to push a button. Experience is the best learning tool anyone could have. New experiences come with new knowledge. This knowledge is what will make or break you as a teacher.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Passion part 2

After watching the video that Jarrod Lamshed posted as a sort of sequel to his post "Finding the Passion", I am now even more inspired by what Sir Ken Robinson had to say. He is so right that people loose their creativity and this is due in large part because of the educational system.

To have natural element to do something one must love what they are doing. Just becuase you are good at that can mean there is no passion behind it. One must find the thing that resignates in you. 8 million kids this year were diagnosed with ADHD. Why? I believe in all honestly thses kids are not being challenged enough and by putting them on medicine it is a quick way out. human ability is often buried deep inside people they just need someone or something to help them realize what they are hiding.

Passion for education

After reading Mr. Jarrod Lamshed's post "Finding the Passion" at attheteachersdesk.blogspot.com I became very inspired by his and Sir Ken Robinson's words. Mr. Lamshed made a lot of great points on how he was a sync about passion until he found his own, then he got it. He also talks about how when his students got passionate about their work their effort and excitability went up.

Sir Ken Robinson's video was amazing. I really loved how he Incorporated entertainment with education about the future. Getting an education degree in English myself I never did stop to think about having Shakespeare in my class. It was funny to me how he could bring something up and show how if someone had told Shakespeare to stop writing how our literature would be totally changed as we know it. His main point is that we are supposed to educate children for the future even though we don't even know what the future has in store. by doing this teachers need to be on the cutting edge of technology and learning capabilities. He asks the question, "Why do we not teach dance like we do math?" This is also something I am wondering being a student of music over half my life I know that I couldn't be the person I am today without it. I wonder about the children that are cheated by the system. How can we make it up to them creatively to show them that it is OK to show this side of them.

In the future their are going to be quite a few people that have degrees. What is going to set these people away from everyone else. What is going to be the difference in them? How are these people going to be eligible for jobs more so than the person right next to them. Without creativity and individual thought these people are going to be the same and the job market is going to be less competitive and the economy could slump. It is up to us as educators to enhance children's creativity and still be readily educating them for the future.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Richard E. Miller Videos

After watching all three videos, Mr. Miller had a lot of great ideas and comments made about technology literate teachers and trying to make our students more accessible to these alternative learning methods that are going to be the future of our academic lifestyles.

In the first video Mr. Miller talks about how now is an important time in the academic world. Technology is vastly changing. He talks of incremental change. This is the change from carrying notebooks and pencils to carrying laptops and using word processing. The new workplace is not a desk, but a desktop. By using the Internet documents are now made available forever. You don't have to worry about anything being deleted or cleared. Another incremental change is collaborating and composing with images, film, sound, or anything that is archived. All of these new technologies need to be learned and mastered by teachers everywhere for adequate academics to take place.

In the second video Mr. Miller talks about how material is updated instantly on the web now. He makes mention of Itunes University and how successful it has been with students listening to different lecture around the world. He says that ideas are not individual things and that they belong to culture. He talks about how educators don't need to just teach or use the materials, but they also need to get behind it. I believe everything he says is true. I can see how people can become stingy with their ideas, but they should share them so that others can try to bring their ideas to life. Mr. Miller says all we need is aspiring teachers and a pedagogy to teach by. With those two things we as teachers could being a whole new generation of learning.

The third video talked about how we should be at the cutting edge of learning about technology and using it. We moved to web 2.0 because of how people were beginning to collaborate on social networking sites and on blogs. He talked about how universities have something wikipedia doesn't have. That is a way to institutionalize these practices appropriately and successfully.

Monday, July 6, 2009

iTunes U

Best of iTunes U

On the sited website I found information dealing with what iTunes University is. iTunes University was developed to enable students from all around the world to be connected to different universities. by doing this universities can post audio and visual educational material to the iTunes site and it then become available to anynoe who is searching.

Students can use this site to their advantage by being able to still be caught up in classwork even if they miss a class period. Students can also use it to visit other univerisities they do not attend to see how their courses stack up compared to others. Teachers can use this site to post their lecture on so that students can have access to them even after class is over.

I could see me as a teacher and a student using this technology to try to futher my education. As a teacher i oculd use iTunes University to look in on other teachers and get different ideas from some of their lectures or I could,as a student, use this technology to help me with different assignments including projects and homework by listening or watching different lectures and getting examples from them.