Final EdTech Course Post

Thanks to everyone for the entertaining and educational course!  Please find a summary of my work and how it relates to the critical assessments on this Google doc.

2010 OTEN Inspiration Conference

I attended the 2010 OTEN Inspiration Conference at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.  I found it to be interesting.  You can find a link to my comments here if the Yodio embedding below does not work properly for you.







Overall, I thought it was a very useful conference.  I attended "World of Warcraft:  Social constructivism in a virtual world and applications to the real world" and "Visual Learning with Concept Maps".  I thought both presentations were interesting and the presentation about concept maps had a lot of very useful information.  I was a little disappointed in the depth of knowledge that the presenter had about the concept mapping programs that he was presenting to us.  I asked fairly simple questions about ways that the maps could be distributed and he was unable to answer them about any of the programs. 

As unimpressed as I think I've sounded to this point, I do want to emphasize that the concept of this conference is incredibly important.  Educators need many ways and many forums to stay current and share educational applications of the rapidly expanding realm of web based computing.  My hope is that, as the OTEN conference continues to grow and evolve that it can become something great and a real source of inspiration and knowledge for the educational community.

Until later...

New Tech Standards & Requirements

The new technology standards and requirements are simply a way to verbalize that students need to finish high school technologically literate.  They need to understand the implications of digital technology as it relates to society as well as be fluent in the use of digital technology.  Digital technology has taken such a central role in our society, especially with how common cell phones and mobile internet have become that educating our students without addressing digital technology and its applications could be considered negligent.

Looking around the classroom that I'll be student teaching in, bringing technology into the classroom will be very difficult.  There are only two student computers in the room so any work will have to be done by scheduling time in the computer lab.  I am loathe to plan anything without talking to my students about their access to computer and internet resources. 

That being said, in the best case scenario, I would use such tools as Google sheets for online group data collection so that each student could have larger data sets for students to analyze.  This would tie into Standard 2, Communication and Collaboration, Standard 4, Critical thinking, Problem solving and Decision making, and Standard 6, Technology Operations and Concepts.  This would be framed in the classroom as a group lab exercise where the group would collect and compile the data on a shared sheet.  After that the class would then copy the data into new sheets and analyze the data individually. 

I'm confident that, as I get into the classroom and become more familiar with how much access I have to computer resources I'll come up with more ideas, but that's all I've got for the moment.

Multi-media Project

I did a short little bit about Delicious.com using Screenr.  I tried to use screentoaster but had trouble with starting and stopping the recording.  I think there was some setting that was wrong on my computer that was goofing things up.  Screenr was very easy to use and the only downside was that I had to sign up for a Twitter account to be able to make use of it.  I think these kind of tools would work well for very quick applications but going through websites was a little awkward because I had to wait for the new pages to load.

Analyzing Student Data in a Spreadsheet

Below is the spreadsheet assignment for Google sheets using the imaginary student data.  Figuring out how to embed the sheet was more difficult that I thought it would be but the actual act of embedding was very simple.  It was just a matter of finding how to get the HTML code to be able to copy it.  Just FYI, if you go to the "share" tab in the upper right hand corner of the Google sheet, click on the down arrow get the drop down menu, and select publish as a webpage.  In the new window, where it says "Get link to the published data" there is a drop down menu that initially says "Webpage".  Click on that menu and select "HTML to embed in a page", copy the information that shows up below and paste that into your blog under the "Edit HTML" tab if you are using Blogger.  After that, everything seemed to work fine

As for manipulating the data in Google sheets, it worked very similar to Excel which I am very familiar with.  It appears to me that there is a sort function that I can use to sort the information but I have not yet figured out how to use it.  Manually sorting the data, which is what I did, is fine for small data sets like this but for very large sets that would be a very time consuming task.

As for the specific data, most of the below average students showed slow and steady gains through all five tests.  The chart clearly identifies three students (Queen, Walter, and Renee) as significantly lagging behind the other students and as a teacher I would try to figure out why this was the case.  It could be something about how I was teaching or it could be some other external factor that I was not aware of but the visual representation of the graph makes it clear that something is going on.  Additionally, the graph also shows that there is very inconsistent performance by Katherine which would be good to look into.

As a teacher, I think that graphing out all of the students scores over time, perhaps in groups of 10-15 so as not to obscure trends, so that I can look for patterns in student scores with relation to the teaching tools that I use so that I can be sure that I am effectively teaching to my students' strengths to maximize their learning.