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.

My Favorite Web 2.0 Tools -- Session 3 -- Part Two

So, Web 2.0 is a term for the movement of applications from the personal computer onto the web.  Many of the applications that people use today are available for free in a web based format.

I chose for my personal productivity tool to look at Delicious.com.  This is a Yahoo product that keeps your bookmarks online so that, instead of bookmarking websites on your personal browser you bookmark them on Delicious.  You can then log into your delicious account from any computer and have access to your bookmarks.  In addition, this tool is designed for you to share your bookmark lists with your friends.  It refers to itself as a social bookmark site.  I'm horrible at remembering URL's and this is the ideal solution for me.  I have already signed up for an account.  This can increase my productivity because I can do research from any computer and, without an email, mark the pages that I found for later use.  It can increase my students productivity if they all have accounts they can do research and share resources with each other simply by bookmarking pages.

I chose Tokbox as my screen recorder selection because I thought it looked pretty neat.  It has a free video conferencing feature where up to 20 people can join, talk, text chat, and share videos and photos all at the same time.  You can also use it to send a free video message of up to 10 minutes.  I can use this to collaborate remotely with colleagues or I could even video conference in a sick student from home to class.  Any reason that a group of people might have to work together on the phone, any sort of meeting, could be done using this tool. 

So, that's my take on Web 2.0 at this point.  On an tangential point, a good science fiction book that starts with a near future look at the impact of cloud computing is Accelerando by Charles Stross.  I can see the near future that he envisions being upon us in the next 10-20 years.  The end of the book gets well out into hard sci-fi, so if you're not a fan it's probably not for you.

Until later!

Google Forms -- Session 3 assignment

Google forms is a google product that allows users to create an embeddable multi-question form that can be used for a variety of purposes.  Data collected from this form is fed directly into a google "sheet" where the information can be manipulated just like any spreadsheet of data.  Google forms have data entry formats that include text, paragraph text, multiple choice, check boxes, choose from a list, scale, and grid.

This tool could be used in a variety of ways to enhance teaching.  Examples include using it as a survey to find out more about your students or homework could even be done this way.  Actually, with paragraph text entries, the information for this assignment could have been collected there.

My learning curve for this tool was initially straight up.  It was not very intuitive when you select "Form" from the drop down tab in google documents and you get what appears to be a google sheet.  Once we found the "Edit Form" command in the menu it was incredibly easy to figure out.  The only other thing that wasn't immediately apparent had more to go do with how the blog editor works than google forms.  To embed the form into a blogger.com blog, you have to select the "Edit HTML" tab at the top-right of the editor and then paste in the information that google forms gives you under "Form - embed form in a webpage".  If you just want to put in a link to the live form you can do that, instead, which is a little more straight forward and would be very simple to do on any webpage.

As a group, honestly, we didn't do very much together.  We individually looked at the tool and made a couple questions.  Mine were the monty python references.  I also figured out how to do the linking and embedding.

So, here is the URL for the form with all the data.  Here is the link to the "live form".  Below is what the form looks like embedded into a blog.

Thanks for reading!