BWP Chapter 9

Social networks are plain and simple to me as places you can meet people to stay connected.  A few of the popular sites that I have had contact with before this class and even before this chapter were MySpace and Facebook.  I use those sites for ways to connect with extended family and friends from high school and junior college.  I opened a MySpace account because it is easily customizable to show your character.  Another reason I opened a MySpace because at the time Facebook was still a eligible college networking site where you needed a valid school email address to join.  I only learned about another networking site before, Twitter, with everyone talking about tweets and Facebook making adaptions to their original format to mirror Twitter.  Ning is still a site that is rather new to me.  Ning is basically as customizable as a blank website where a teacher can develop it with posting personal profiles, photos, video links, groups, discussions, and blogs.
Before reading this chapter, I never really thought of any of these social networking sites being a tool I would use in my classroom, much less not knowing all of these (Ning) existed.  I could see using Facebook as a way to connect with fellow teachers in my school, in my state, in my content area, and stay connected with the people who went through the education program with me in college.  I guess because of hearing all the professional athletes using Twitter to make a joke of themselves I just found Twitter a public way to create a story.  I never really put thought into using Facebook/Twitter as a way to give students links on related content to class or even forwarding classroom/school news to parents and teachers alike.

BWP Chapter 8

Chapter 8 covers various ways to present materials through audio and visual means through your computer or other devices.  Originally when I heard the term podcast, I seriously thought that it was something that can be only played on an ipod and nothing else.  The chapter not only points out that a podcast is more than just an audio file that can be played on anything that can play an mp3 audio file.  I knew that a podcast was basically an informational audio file prior to reading the chapter because my favorite baseball team Chicago Cubs announcers have been doing podcasts for the last season and a half so I have become aware what it is about.  The video features talked about in the chapter of screencasts and streaming video were rather simple not only by name and popularity.  Screencasts are simple to figure out just by the name that it would be a telecast basically of what is on your computer screen.  Before reading the checking the chapter I really wasn't sure of how it worked, much less what can be used to make a screencast an effective school tool.  A couple tools that I feel are popular for not only home, but also school use are youtube and even live streaming audio.  Many of my colleagues use youtube as a way to show samples of lessons they are presentations they're doing basically being the lead example of how youtube can be used in schools.  I use youtube to post videos of events I have attended that I would like to share with the public.  I listen to live streaming audio shows of music that my friends have produced and put on their respective outlets.  When it comes to live streaming video, there are outlets like the sample of ustream from the book where you could use in class for news students can use.  Other outlets I have seen are Stickam and Justin.tv.  Some television networks offer tape-delayed video on their sites while some even offer live feeds of their news casts.

BWP Chapter 7

Chapter 7, Fun With Flickr highlights the positives and advantages of using a media sourse like Flickr to post, edit, customize, and label pictures for use with the students or parents.  I am more inept with a similar program photobucket to post and share pictures for others to see or use.  As the chapter points out that Flickr can use a RSS feed to give me as a teacher a way to tag a topic and if someone posts a picture with that topic, I'll know about it.  I think that would be way easier than just going ahead and using  a search site like Google to constantly try to find a picture on a topic.  I really like the option to be able to tag portions of the photos and give a description through text for viewers to understand what is going on in the picture.  I would find that helpful describing what was done on a field trip to explain to incoming students, fellow staff members, and other teachers inquiring about the field trip location.  Not only can you post/view pictures but also video to describe what was going on.  That also can be done on describing pictures taken on lessons in the classroom.  As a future teacher, this chapter really opened my eyes to using visual media like Flickr to show my parents different aspects that they can't see on a daily basis.

BWP Chapter 6

Chapter 6 The Social Web: Learning Together showcases the new ways of communicating and sharing between people over the Internet.  After being prefaced in the chapters before about wikis and RSS feeds, the chapter starts off with ironically a combination of the two in Twitter.  Twitter is essentially a free RSS feed that people can get information about other people and their interests.  Before reading this chapter and discussing the topic I really had no use for Twitter over Facebook.  I would only use Twitter as a way to post assignments for my students and to keep parents updated on in class tasks.  Facebook started out with short ways to communicate much like dry-erase boards on doors in college dorms with ability to show pictures and I would not want to use that as a educational resource over Twitter which can use pictures but is more based on the limited 'microblogging' Twitter offers.  Another feature of this chapter was the topic of social bookmarking.  I really never thought anything like social bookmarking was around.  I was one of the people prior to using Delicious in class that if I didn't have the bookmark from my laptop to my disposal I would have to search and hope I found the right site.  I will more than likely retain my Delicious account after completing it for the assignment because it is way easier than to just transfer favorites from machine to machine as you toss out computers.

BWP Chapters 4

Chapter 4 is simply titled Wikis and talking about its nuances.  When I heard the term wiki tossed around in this and another of my classes, the first thing I thought about is wikipedia.  I couldn't figure out why we needed to make a wikipedia page but of course that was all my knowledge of anything termed wiki.  I found it rather interesting that in the chapter it said that a purposefully incorrect post on a wikipedia page was corrected and edited to become correct in a matter of hours.  I never thought that a wiki was like a blog version of a live encyclopedia when it comes down to wikipedia.  Oddly enough the chapter points out that people find wikipedia to be the most accurate encyclopedias.  Some other people are more skeptical because of the ability to easily edit posts.  But much like encyclopedias, wikipedia is made up mostly of siting sources.  Wikis are more that just known as wikipedia, but in the classroom teachers and students can create a wiki to list their knowledge on a topic related to a task in class.

BWP Chapters 1-3

Reading the beginning of chapter one I really had to laugh that the beginning of the Internet started back when I was only five-years-old back in 1989.  Not to mention that Internet became simpler when I was in the second grade.  I found that interesting because we didn't get our first computer in our house until 1995 because my older sister could use the resource in high school.  I want to say that we got our first dial-up Internet connection under two years later.  Of course then Internet was much slower and I didn't consider it a teaching/learning resource because it was faster to just page through books than crawl on the Internet.  Not to mention I didn't know what a blog, wiki, or podcast was and even when I heard about them I imagined tech nerds with their glasses, pocket protectors, and DOS manuals.
One thing that I found helpful in the chapter was the fact that it provided tips on what is a good website and what is not for research.  I always thought that the .com sights were not effective and the sites like .gov were.  I'm glad I know that a little better now.  I found it interesting to use blogging for many concepts of in-class work and providing ideas, for instance, the AP Calculus class the book used as an example.  The teacher can post ideas about the new chapter to give the students something to prelude/reflect on.  Of course, that is very much similar to what I am currently doing for this class.  Of course for younger students it is best to go through what is expected on the weblog and even the security settings.  It would even be smart to keep parents and administrators in the loop about what is going on and expectations of the blog.

Rethinking Chapter 9

Chapter 9 talks about how technologies that children use are usually not understood by their parents.  One of the technologies that they mention is the video game Madden football.  If I told my parents that I was playing Madden on Super Nintendo, Playstation, and Playstation 2 while I was in middle and high school as homework, they would've taken the systems and hid them in a closet.  Believe it or not, but I actually used Madden and football in general to help become faster in my multiples of 7 to do better on my times tests when I was younger.  One of my friends mentioned how the sevens are just like scoring touchdowns.  So then the next time I played the video game I was more aware of the score and became faster on my seven multples.  Of course growing up as technology has increased from being like a one dimentional video to being two dimentional and now even three dimentional video.  Many of the games can be used as simulations for missions like the new video game Call of Duty Black Ops.  Between the systems of Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii there are many games that can be used to help aid in curriculums, even physical education with the latest advances in all three systems.  Not only video games, but also just watching tv has been benefical to academics believe it or not.  As the book pointed out that people can watch their favorite shows and then post on fan sites or blogs related on the shows.  That is where the students practice their writing skills and interpersonal skills.  With these various skills it leaves the schools in a place where they can impliment technology inovations as a suppliment in education or be replaced by more progressive schooling.

Exit Slip 11/18/10

Well, today's class started out with going over the grade updates and I found out my cool tools screencast bombed.  The outline I decided to use wasn't very effective because as I transitioned between points I used the "uhms".
Discusssion plus/Delta on Chapter 10.
One positive we used in our presentation was right away we broke into a jigsaw discussion groups.  The group made serious effort to make colors and shapes to divide the groups.  A related delta to using the jigsaw is to actually call it a jigsaw discussion to improve our terminology vocabulary.  The group did a positive job using multiple tools like the interactive whiteboard and using the document camera instead of focusing on one tool.  A delta is to watch the "uhms" again, which I find to be a problem with myself.  Another positive that they went over the directions prior to moving into the groups to avoid confusion and getting off task.  They also had good movement roaming between the group but a change would be to coordinate it differently so once one instructor leaves the group another doesn't arrive.

I found the media search rather fun when it came down to finding items to get one of the five topics of an online video, a podcast, a SMART Notebook lesson, a Scratch project, and an online game.  I found it kind of fun to do a quick search.  A lot of the material I searched to begin was just to get the ball rolling and that I wanted to get at least three, but instead I got four.  My topic that I would like to teach is mathematics in the Elementary or more likely the Middle School level.  I found it interesting that I found a person who posted youtube videos of homeschooling mathematics.

Contemporary Issues Podcast

I think to start off this podcast one issue I had was trying not to narrarate the article although I am sure I have been docked already for that.  I also wasn't sure if my article was long enough for the podcast to be effective.  I really liked the topic because our chapters have talked about how schools could use the faster updating internet as a tool over books in the classroom.  I think creating and sharing a podcast for our peers just gets us ready and more prepared to use the technology to communicate to others in our field.  Probably the largest thing I liked about the podcat was that I was able to edit out and change parts of it without having to start from scratch.

Lawmakers eye use of mobile technology in schools

"Did I do that?" ~ Family Matters Courtesy of moviewavs.com
Breaking glass ~ CD.textfiles.com http://www.cd.textfiles.com/
Theme Music:  Go Buy A Boat by Matt Rosinski (used from cd)

Exit Slip 11/11

We started class going over what is due in last week's Screencasts.  There was a bit of time to go over SWOT analysis and change screencast since Dr. Boyer was finally able to go ahead and start going through his collection of screencasts submitted.
Next we broke into our presentation/discussion about chapter 9 in Rethinking Education. I think our group breakup was kinda nice and different because it was a random, predetermined list so there was no way to try to formulate a group so you can determine one person to talk.  I really wasn't sure what to do when it came to answering our group question.  The using of the sketch page was a good idea but it did not work as planned.  I wasn't sure how well the conversations would have been in the instant message setup of sketch.  The sketch did actually fall into the ideals of the chapter by how people use social networking and becoming used to not doing face to face conversations.

Screencast Reflection

Cool Tools Screencast of Google Maps

New Screencast

When it came down to starting my Cool Tools Screencast I picked Google Maps because it was something I was familiar with because I like using it to find proximity of locations I travel to in order to find out what is near it in order to keep from getting lost.  So a lot of my preparatory work was done way in advance of starting my recording.  I spend probably a half an hour playing with all the tools on the website to become familiar with them to avoid issues while recording.  The recording of my screencast probably took me close to two and a half hours.  Between issues with my computer and Jing and my poor timing the Screencast took longer than I expected.  At time when I was recording I would try to pause and resume only to find out a couple times it didn't pause.  That was rather frustrating but I chalk that one up to my five-year-old computer.  Also I really wanted to do a basic overview of the tools, which I scraped that idea since it took me way over the time limit.  So then when I recorded it I used the basic, more classroom resourceful tools.  I originally wanted to show how easy it was to customize directions, but found it irrelevant when I needed to fit my time requirement.
I find that doing a screencast can really aid in teaching your students when you are unable to be there to aid them.  I feel that if I wanted to make a substitute teacher's life simple that they could play a screencast of my taught lesson and supplement to it instead of trying to just construct the lesson from the lesson plans.

Exit Slip 11/4

To start today off I realized that I am a moron and wrote down the wrong due day for the cool tools screencast and put Friday (11/5).  I kept trying my microphone plug-in on my aging Dell computer but since the old Mac microphone isn't working I'll need to snag a microphone and do both screencast and podcast.

Today's chapter presentation on chapter 8 the presentation was "graded" on the following positive aspects of how the selected speaker of the presenters was at a designed random selection, they even tied the relationships of the main themes, and finally used the Venn diagram to tie themes together.  Some of the changes are that the Venn diagram be split up a little better and when filling in the group information to do something other than write with he marker like typing.  Another issue that came up with the presentation was that the groups were split up without going over the process first.  I won't deny that I was a little confused at first on what exactly our group needed to do to get our discussion started.

I am really freaking out about my Annotative Bibliography because I seriously overlooked it on the C-Contract and put myself very far behind the rest of the class on that assignment as I was looking to doing my screencast and podcast.  I will just complete the screencast and podcast prior to fixing my Annotative Bibliography issue.

Rethinking Chapter 8

As I am reading chapter 8 I am constantly being reminded of the teaching strategies I am learning in my Ed 302 class where we go over instructional strategies that are not the standardized or "reading to a worksheet" homework assignments but to enhance literacy through practice of reading and writing.  As this semester has rolled on I found that a complete overhaul of education to technology would be something that would take a lot of money and time before the takeover would possibly happen.  As the book states that right now America is really focusing on standardizing their testing in order to be able to keep up with the rest of the world.  Even watching President Obama's speech Wednesday where he acknowledged the democrats got killed in the elections he even stated that now America has to retain money in education in order to keep our students on pace with the rest of the world with the growing global economy becoming an issue.  Back to my point, the generic skills certifications would allow the students and teachers to use the technology available to adapt to each student case and become successful in which field they choose.  With the students creating a portfolio one could say it is much like the School of Education department here in UWSP where students would need to make a portfolio in order to graduate therefore it must be completed in order to receive their certification/diploma.
As this chapter rolls on it reminds me of chapter 6 were we talk bout parents selecting what the students need to learn.  One major difference is that the parents wouldn't be selecting topics for their children to take over the family farm, but guide their children to studying topics that they notice their children are interested in.  Using myself for and example I would be geared to learning about physical activity and sport.  Which oddly enough, I agree with what the book said about adapting games like Sims, SWAT 4 and World of Warcraft as tools to better meet content goals in problem solving and leadership skills.  Ironically enough I would like to think that my coaching, dealing with adversity, and problem solving comes from dealing with various tactical issues that arise from playing games like Madden where you deal with unforeseeable issues like injuries where you have to adapt to them.  Also, a couple years ago our coaching staff used either Madden or NCAA Football to show our quarterback what the defensive coverages looked like.  I won't lie that it was an unorthodox way of teaching it but it was effective.

Group Presentation Thoughts

I really enjoyed being the sacrificial lamb when it came down to presenting the book chapters in the lab section one.  My group presented chapter 2 from the Rethinking book.  We decided to jump at the first group to attempt in order to kind of 'get it out of the way' and avoid being overshadowed by an unbeatable presentation from a preceding group.  There was a couple times leading up to our presentation for the chapter that we worried about presenting Chapter one.  Once we stopped worrying about how we were gonna align our work we met with Dr. Boyer with our ideas.  I felt that our meeting with Dr. Boyer really helped solidify our thoughts and backed the direction we were heading since no other group has modeled the discussions before.  One problem we had was finding time to meet after that original meeting to practice our lesson.  Jim started the Prezi and granted us all access to the project which was nice so we were able to toss information on there without meeting with a partial group.  One big problem was that in the last 24 hours our Prezi fluxed in the amount of pages and changed in order due to some conflicts of interest in our group.  The difficult part of our project was that we did not connect in the same programs which left one group member as a mediator, but also left me out of the 11th hour discussions when the slide order conflict arose.

When it came down to our presentation of the chapter I believe it went very well considering we went over the slide order minutes before class started because they were changed that close to class.  I believed our flow went well in our presentation.  We might not have moved around as much but wanted to point out our slides that were in the section we selected for ourselves.  I really focused on the video games that were out there in my grade schools when I was growing up and how they were like a simple stepping stone to what our chapter was focusing on.  I knew that I could zoom in on the pictures I had on my Prezi slide, but when I was aligning them on the slide on my computer I zoomed in and due to an issue with my computer it didn't retract immediately.  So then I was afraid of doing that during my presentation and embarrassing myself.  When I spoke of course I had in the back of my mind the thought of not saying the "ums", "likes", and "what nots" but of course I caught myself saying them.  I feel that I used my coaching voice and was able to project my voice well, but know that sometimes I get a increasing speed in my speech and become tough to understand.  I felt really proud after watching a couple other presentations that we were trendsetters with our presentation model.

I liked doing the project assignment because then it helps us teachers actually teach before being tossed into the classroom during our practicum.  Not only do we get to teach, but then we have discussions about the chapter which help us understand if we interpreted the chapter the same as our peers.  Probably the best part of the presentation is that we are able to get feedback from our peers and instructor on what they did and didn't like in the way we brought fourth our material.  When we get out in the field we usually won't get constructive criticism from our students on what they did and didn't like on our classroom presentations.