So.. we come to the end of my Educational Technology class, and here is my final blog for the class.
It was honestly a delight, and a bit of a surprise. Most early technology classes have the reputation of being blow offs for anyone a little tech-savvy. My wife took the edu tech class at Prairie State years ago and told me that she basically had to show up to pass. It's not the type of class I like to take, so I kind of dreaded it. I mean, I'm paying to get an education.. not to show up. So I was pleasantly surprised when I found out how Kim ran her class. I count myself as fairly tech savvy, but Prof. Heintz interested me enough in the assignments and technology presented to us that I found myself trying to find new ways to do stuff I already knew about. The professor really new her stuff and honestly seemed interested in it, so that enthusiasm really made it more exciting for everyone.
The only real downside in the class was that it didn't (couldn't) contain enough. Due to monetary and temporal constraints we just couldn't fit all the great tools with potential in education. We talked about how cool the Smart Board is, but without a working board, it was really only theoretical. How could we know if it's user friendly without getting a chance to use one? In addition, there was just a lot of stuff we could only touch on. Things that the prof. admitted she was breezing through.
So, though difficult at times, it was a great class and I learned quite a bit. It was especially challenging to fit everything into our individual genres (some assignments more than others), but it was fun too.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
WebQuests (class)
So, over the past couple weeks the class has been working on a WebQuest. Mine's pretty good I think.
There's an issue I have with WebQuests though, and that's that I don't really understand what really makes a WebQuest special, and therefore worthy of its own individual classification. Maybe I'm not doing it right after all, but I know I'm following the examples given and found in class anyway. Honestly, my big problem with the WebQuest is that I can't really differentiate between the 'Quest and a normal lesson plan other than a WebQuest, by definition, has to use the internet (unless you look at some of the 'Quests we saw in class), and a normal lesson plan has no such restriction.
All in all, I don't really see the point of the strict format of the 'Quest, or really it's efficient use in the classroom. This isn't something I couldn't do just as easily, if not easier, in many other formats. As I know from the teachers around me, a teacher's time is precious, and I honestly just think it could be used better than putting together parts of a unit in this format.
Maybe I'm wrong.. Maybe it's more useful than I see.. Maybe my subjects of English and Art just aren't the most compatible with the WebQuest... We'll see.
There's an issue I have with WebQuests though, and that's that I don't really understand what really makes a WebQuest special, and therefore worthy of its own individual classification. Maybe I'm not doing it right after all, but I know I'm following the examples given and found in class anyway. Honestly, my big problem with the WebQuest is that I can't really differentiate between the 'Quest and a normal lesson plan other than a WebQuest, by definition, has to use the internet (unless you look at some of the 'Quests we saw in class), and a normal lesson plan has no such restriction.
All in all, I don't really see the point of the strict format of the 'Quest, or really it's efficient use in the classroom. This isn't something I couldn't do just as easily, if not easier, in many other formats. As I know from the teachers around me, a teacher's time is precious, and I honestly just think it could be used better than putting together parts of a unit in this format.
Maybe I'm wrong.. Maybe it's more useful than I see.. Maybe my subjects of English and Art just aren't the most compatible with the WebQuest... We'll see.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Class Presentations (Class)
So last week we presented our stuffies in class. My partner and I did Robert Gagne's 9 events of Instruction.... I don't know... The topic was already fairly well known to me, so researching it wasn't that exciting. Putting the Power Point together was fun, as always, and it was interesting researching Robert Gagne. Some of the pictures I found were fun.. like the one of him and his wife fishing. I guess I don't really understand this "6x6" rule though... I mean, Really? The title being staggered between two lines makes it harder to read? We need to separate thoughts because a bullet is one word too long? Doesn't make sense to me...
Some of the other powerpoints had some good stuff though. I've always wondered what a smartboard actually was. I keep hearing about them, but was never clear on what it actually was, so that was definately a good one.
Some of the other powerpoints had some good stuff though. I've always wondered what a smartboard actually was. I keep hearing about them, but was never clear on what it actually was, so that was definately a good one.
Monday, September 28, 2009
To Save the Soul (Class)
Just to get it out there.. this is a blog on copyrights. Are copyrights fair? Yes and no. Honestly, I believe that the copyright is a product of greed brought upon by capitalism, but that's just speaking in black and white. In a perfect world, we wouldn't need copyrights.. but then, in a perfect world we wouldn't need a lot of things.
Copyrights exist for the noble cause of protecting the copyrighted material's creator from idea theft. In this fashion, it makes perfect sense, but it must be seen that their only importance is in the financial world. That I believe is their flaw. Normally, the artist's purpose in creating a work is to share it. Why then this protection against sharing if not money?
Now artists deserve money just like anyone else, and no one should be able to take advantage of that. Where I see the failure in copyright is in uses that do not include money. I believe that as an artist, as soon as you create a physical work of art, you have decided to share it with the world.
So.. who knows? Do we need copyrights? Don't we? We probably do. It's right along the lines of don't steal cars and don't mug people.
Also... the time limit on a copyright makes no sense...
Copyrights exist for the noble cause of protecting the copyrighted material's creator from idea theft. In this fashion, it makes perfect sense, but it must be seen that their only importance is in the financial world. That I believe is their flaw. Normally, the artist's purpose in creating a work is to share it. Why then this protection against sharing if not money?
Now artists deserve money just like anyone else, and no one should be able to take advantage of that. Where I see the failure in copyright is in uses that do not include money. I believe that as an artist, as soon as you create a physical work of art, you have decided to share it with the world.
So.. who knows? Do we need copyrights? Don't we? We probably do. It's right along the lines of don't steal cars and don't mug people.
Also... the time limit on a copyright makes no sense...
Thursday, September 3, 2009
CLASS: Website Evaluation
So, in hunting the wide universe of the web in search of useful educational websites, one is sure to find a LOT of unuseable garbage. However, depending upon your individual strength in the art of search-fu, it is surprising to learn that the odds of landing an actually useful site are not that bad. I'd actually give it about even odds.
Something I learned pretty quickly is that is is much much easier to find useful and engaging sites for younger kids than it is once they become teenagers and beyond. In my humble opinion, it seems like half the sites forget about the idea of trying to actually be engaging at all, and are instead simply a list of facts and writing, and the other half forgo their usefulness to focus on being engaging.
I wanted to stay somewhere near my preferred age group in the site eval assignment (which is secondary ed), and was very discouraged by the bland sites that I found.
On the other hand, it was hard not to run into great sites for younger kids (Elementry and such).
I ended up with evals of JSTOR (which is great, but bland as stale toast), and Wikipedia (which is not so great, and a little less bland.. maybe like low sodium baked potato chips...).
About the eval form: I was actually discouraged to learn there was a character limit for the little comment window @ the bottom of the form. Thibbbt....
Something I learned pretty quickly is that is is much much easier to find useful and engaging sites for younger kids than it is once they become teenagers and beyond. In my humble opinion, it seems like half the sites forget about the idea of trying to actually be engaging at all, and are instead simply a list of facts and writing, and the other half forgo their usefulness to focus on being engaging.
I wanted to stay somewhere near my preferred age group in the site eval assignment (which is secondary ed), and was very discouraged by the bland sites that I found.
On the other hand, it was hard not to run into great sites for younger kids (Elementry and such).
I ended up with evals of JSTOR (which is great, but bland as stale toast), and Wikipedia (which is not so great, and a little less bland.. maybe like low sodium baked potato chips...).
About the eval form: I was actually discouraged to learn there was a character limit for the little comment window @ the bottom of the form. Thibbbt....
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