Technology for education

The technology we have studied and explored in the past week has many implications for use in the classroom. One online web activity for instance was Flickr, as part of my p.e. course I regularly take digital pictures of activities(interestingly-the camera was the result of the donors choose option discussed in an earlier email from Scott), print them out and post them on a bulletin board for public viewing. I could just as easily upload these photo's and allow my students to view all the photo's online. In regards to the blog site, I could use blogging or twitter to provide my students with schedules, updates to training or other student driven needs that they could access during off hours. This might save a few phone calls to my home etc. The Face-book student-teacher issue is a sensitive matter but the use of a Face-book fan page may have applications in a school environment. At this point, I do not have enough knowledge about this application to form an educated comment on the fan page. I really like the idea of student created podcasts to demonstrate knowledge mastery in health and p.e. All of our students have laptops and getting them to create podcasts to demonstrate higher level thinking would definitely be a quantum leap over the basic fact recall summative testing done quite often in p.e. Lastly, having each student create an RSS feed on health and p.e. sites could open their eyes to new concepts that they could explore on their own. For instance, the N.Y.Times has a physical education section that explores many concepts within our discipline that I find interesting and I am sure a segment of my students would also find this educational. In conclusion, my eyes and energy has been redirected by the potential that exists to use technology and help the students use their intellect for more than videos and games. These do serve a purpose, but only as filler and not as content.

Web 2.0

This site is just as good if not better than the RSS feeds that we looked at in this lesson. Now that I have an RSS site, I linked onto a health site for new feeds. The interaction between these sites using addresses is simple. My children have used Pandora for music which is a great site but seeing Last as the top web 2.0 music site was intriguing. I asked my daughter about this site and she said they used this site in Europe where Pandora did not exist. The world gets smaller every day.

Google Docs

Now this is a cool site. The details and explanations are overwhelming but so are the options. The family budget site was extremely user friendly and plugging in a few numbers allowed you to see exactly what was happening to your income. The fact that this information is available for free on the web is excellent for people that live in the Internet world. Based on what I see on this site, much of the work we do in school such as spreadsheets, budgets etc. could just as easily be completed on this site. It is simply amazing how much and how easily information can change hands. I am pleased they are slowing down the oil leak in the gulf also, thanks to my RSS feed!

RSS Feeds

I just completed the task of installing and setting up my blog-lines account. It is simply amazing how easy the task was to complete. The only issue I had was when I moved to our class blog site and used the link to add the RSS it always asked me to sign in one more time. There must be an easier method and I will find it as I continue to investigate this site.
On a practical note, I can see why this is much easier having information sent to you rather than you go looking for information. This is like "executive summary" for Internet surfers. Good stuff.

Flickr

Greetings to my classmates at Fresno Pacific. This is a live shot out of my classroom window looking into Canada. This technology is unbelievable and its amazing how it is all interrelated! TMG

microblogging

I asked my children and their friends ( all recent college grads) about the concept of microblogging. They all use it in the form of facebook but twitter, etc. were not things they use on a regular basis. They all stated they would use the tools if they were a course requirement! Aside from that use, cell phones and facebook are their communication choices!

Social Media Articles-3

editorial: Examining Social Software in Teacher Education

This article is timely in that the two previous articles discussed were related to the students and the underlining question was how do current administrators, teachers and support staff use social media effectively? This article delves into how future teachers are educated to use the very technology they are using to promote learning and teaching in their future occupations. Pointing out the role of social software as an environment that supports scaffolding in learning, active participation of the student, an environment to publish artifacts of their learning and lastly a virtual learning community is really what this course is all about. This article helps one understand how we can use social media in our profession and guide students away from "poor decision making" in posting photos in sites such facebook.