week 8

I thoroughly enjoyed our introduction to working with video in the classroom.  One insight that I gained into working with this medium is that the best way to learn it is by doing it.  Reading about how to record and edit video didn’t really capture what it was like to put together the video.  What I learned a lot about was how to work with someone creatively and how to mediate ideas and then make them real.  It was very cool!  I think it is a great way for students to not only learn the technology but also how to work together on a creative project.  There are some things that I would definitely alter when working with children though!  I would upload the video myself outside of class because I wouldn’t want the children sitting around with nothing to do!  Planning a lesson involving video would be difficult because of the time involved to do this.  My partner and I were focused on getting enough footage of a scene so that we were sure to have plenty to work with in the editing stage.  I didn’t think about the fact that it’s possible to have too much footage!  Our nine minutes of footage took almost 20 minutes to download.  Then our video imported as one big clip, so we had to keep going through the same footage to pull out the couple seconds that we really wanted.  It was pretty frustrating, but we both got pretty quick at cutting the video apart and piecing it together.  I think I would supervise the actual taping stage to be sure my students weren’t recording too much footage.  If possible, I would be sure that all my students’ videos would import as small clips.  I heard Michele say that it might have been certain cameras that were causing the video to import as one big clip.  So maybe that would mean even more planning to test each camera to be sure they were set up the same way.  I think video in the classroom has tremendous potential for teaching content and also social skills.  It will give shy students a chance to branch out and be seen and heard in a way which is not as intimidating as a formal oral presentation.  Creating their own video will make content more memorable and relatable.  As an introductory lesson I might have students conduct interviews with one another to get them used to being on camera.  I would have them work in groups of three so that each would have a chance to be the interviewer, interviewee and cameraperson.  As a more advanced lesson I would have students make a video science project.  This would give them the opportunity to create a video involving several different shots – the set-up, the actual performance of the experiment, and a re-cap explaining what happened and why.  A big potential problem would be that the project may require students to use the equipment outside of school.  A lot of instruction on the appropriate use of the equipment would be absolutely necessary.  It might be possible to set up times throughout the day when the students could perform their experiment in school…again it would be a planning/preparing issue. 

week 7

no blog post this week

week 6

Copyright Law
What surprised me most about copyright law were all the gray areas!  You'd think that something that had its beginnings in the Constitution would have been more clearly defined by now.  Still, in class we discussed examples that went against legal precedent and found that copyright law in the classroom is reduced in some cases to "don't ask don't tell."  I can remember watching Air Bud (a movie about a basketball playing dog) in a  middle school classroom...and it wasn't gym.  So I was surprised by our discussion of movies' relevance to curriculum; that it's not ok to show a movie for entertainment if it can't be justified as part of the curriculum.

I definitely think it's part of my job as a teacher to educate learners on copyright law, not only to protect them from infringing on the rights of others but also to educate them on how to protect their own work.  The NETS-S standards concerning Digital Citizenship (5), especially 5a. advocate and practice safe, legal, and responsible use of information and technology and 5b. exhibit a positive attitude toward using technology that supports collaboration, learning, and productivity, address copyright issues.

Educause Chapter 7
I was not surprised by the breakdown of hours spent on different activities.  I expected to see schoolwork and email at near the top and creating web pages and video near the bottom.  I think, though, as video and web publishing tools become more integrated into education, we might see an increase there.  I was surprised when the chapter got into student preferences.  I expected to see a high preference for IT in the classroom and was relieved to see that students still value person to person instruction. 

week 5

no blog post this week

week 4

Five ways to incorporate Microsoft Excel into my school’s curriculum:

1.        Math

I think it would be a fun idea to do something in Excel with calculating averages, using numbers that the children find in the classroom.  One idea is to have them do some kind of physical activity like jumping jacks and find the average number of jumping jacks that could be performed by an elementary student in a given amount of time.  They could use an Excel spreadsheet to record their data.  I would have them find the average first manually and then teach them how the formulas can be plugged into the spreadsheet to find the same answer.  I like anything that can get the kids up and moving and burning off extra energy.  It would be something they would have to work as a class on too. 

2.       Science

I would use the Excel graphing feature to teach the children about natural science.  I’m thinking something like bird-watching would work here.  We could have a column with all the names of our birds and then just use Excel as a logbook of how often we spot the birds.  Depending on how we enter our data and how we graph it we could show which birds were spotted most often or how often a particular bird was spotted over a certain period of time.   

3.       Reading

So I have to admit that I regretted my decision to try incorporating Excel into every subject when I got to reading.  But I have an idea!  We could do a project in Excel where the students record how many pages of a chapter book they can read in a certain number of minutes.  Each student would have a spreadsheet where they would put the number of minutes they read each night in one column.  The fun part would be experimenting with different situations and how they affect our reading speed.  Each child would do a few nights of quiet reading first to get an average regular reading speed.  We could then do a night where we try to read with the TV on.   Then we could try to read and play a video game at the same time.  Then try to read while talking to a friend on the phone and so on and so forth.  I think I could teach the children something about healthy study habits by showing them in a graph what noise and double tasking does when you’re trying to read!  Plus they’d be learning how to graph data in Excel J 

4.       Social Studies

I would do something similar to the “planet weigh-in” activity but I would compare monetary values.  The class would be learning the names of different currencies and comparing their value to the American dollar.  We would plug formulas into Excel using the American dollar as a base value.  We would have a column of different items and a column of how many dollars they cost.  Then we’d have a column for each of the other currencies we were studying (Euros, Yen, etc.) and we’d have a formula for each that would multiply by whatever fraction of a dollar each of those currencies is. 

5.       I would also pitch Excel as an administrative tool for collecting and analyzing data concerning attendance, grades, test scores and even behavior in the classroom.  If I had a project for my students that had multiple steps involved I would definitely want a way of tracking how far each student was from completion.  Something like this would be easy in Excel because the empty cells would make an incomplete assignment crystal clear. 

And now…once again…Google Docs!

The feature that I love most about Google Docs is the “share” feature!  It keeps students connected to their classmates outside of class and helps them to stay interested because they can see their creations evolving as other students give their input.  It is the perfect tool for the Net Gen because they are all about instant access and communicating to work together.  If children are going to be online then they need to learn to be responsible online.  Using Google Docs is kind of like having your teacher online with you, guiding you to use applications responsibly and to access appropriate sites.  Just as students are collaborating with their classmates they are also collaborating and having dialogue with their teacher; dialogue that wouldn’t happen if the student-teacher relationship was restricted to the classroom.  Plus it cuts out a lot of paper and ink! 

week 3

Social Bookmarking is tagging and cataloging sites for easy retrieval.  As a student I can use Social Bookmarking to create lists of sites that I have used for a particular area of research.  Also, I can search others’ lists for similar sites related to whatever topic I am working on.  In the Educause article “7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking,” it is illustrated that the keywords or tags another user applies to a certain site helps the researcher to direct their focus on more varied paths.  The concept of sharing through Social Bookmarking presents opportunities to more easily and effectively broaden the scope of our online research.  I like the collaborative nature of Social Bookmarking; it takes a lot of the guesswork out of evaluating sites because others have already reviewed them and commented on their quality and relevance.  As a teacher I think I could use Social Bookmarking to help my students identify the kinds of sites that are worthwhile.  In their own use of Social Bookmarking for research they would learn to evaluate the information on a site not only using their own judgment but also the judgments of those that have reviewed the site before them. 

week 2

The readings for this week again alleviated some of my fears about teaching in the Net Generation.  I worried that my students would be so locked into technology that they wouldn’t have time for human contact…boy was I wrong!  It looks like the trend is to use technology to enhance and broaden human contact, which is a relief to me as a budding teacher. 

Technology is a readily available, natural part of daily life for a lot of kids.  It’s inevitable that they will use it to do what they do best – socialize!  The challenge raised in the text again and again throughout our reading is for adults to get on board.  Even though there’s a serious deficit between how kids are living and how they’re learning right now, I think it’s going to start closing up more and more rapidly.    

I was excited to see other students’ perspectives on educational blogging in the “Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0” article.  Blogging is a great way to use technology to re-focus education on the student.  A student-centered education in the Net Generation should be social and community oriented because those are traits that students value. 

It’s neat how easily web resources (like photo-sharing, blogging, podcasting, et cetera) translate into teaching tools.  If I were learning how to teach from a textbook and with paper and pencil I would be learning how to teach kids 10 years ago which wouldn’t amount to much of anything.  Learning to use technology in the classroom is a necessary part of learning to teach and I am excited to learn more!  It’s even fun! 

One thing that I kept noticing in the articles and that struck me as a good point is that students are at risk online.  Sending them to a place where they can access anything and be accessed by anyone is akin to sending them out on the street alone during school.  So I think it’s very important that we teach kids about internet safety and educate their parents as well.  Even if they don’t listen we have to teach it.  When we did our in-class Wordle experiment one of the words my partner offered was “naïve.”  It’s so true!  I get so caught up in how smart and adaptive and innovative and just awesome this generation is and I forget that they are kids!!!  So, teaching internet safety is one thing I would like to learn more about.

And Now… Google Docs

I have mixed feelings about using Google Docs for the Technology Lesson Plans Project.  I love that it makes it easy to share my work and I can definitely see how it would have benefits for group projects.  Most of my problems with it were formatting issues.  I created my document first in Microsoft Word which is where I went wrong I think.  For some reason copying and pasting the entire document didn’t work so I did it in pieces.  Then it ended up looking nothing like my original Word document because the tables from the websites were spaced funny.  Next time I will create the document in Google Docs and see how that works.