EDUC 628-Spring-08

I figured out just a few minutes ago that I am only taking baby steps with what I am learning right now, after visiting Traci Prater’s blog, located below.

http://tnprater1006.wordpress.com/

which includes links to her YouTube video

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39Up1f0lmOA

…and her online classroom, and much more interesting things that I think represent a 21 Century Learner.

This stuff is cool.

I have only visited about 10 of my 90 something blogs today, so don’t be offended if I haven’t mentioned others yet.  I am just pecking away at all this knowledge here in my reader.

Stoll compares the knowledge translated by computers, from webpages, to comic books that he read from his Classics Illustrated collection when he was a child.  I don’t read comic books, but thinks that, like comic books, that multimedia writers….”task is to absorb and compress great gobs of information into small, easily digestible on-screen chunks.”

This man really is against multimedia and education, but I don’t think that when he wrote this that blogs existed as they do now, with educational content available on the Internet.

In the chapter CRTs for Tots, he mentions Seymour Papert’s vision on page 62, opposing Papert’s ideas, saying that computers and technology “…isolates us from each other,” 

I do not think computers isolate us from each other at all.  Maybe people spend too much time on the computer, or on the phone, or watching TV, and that this time could be spent reading a book instead.  People can read books too.  Homework assignments, and school assignments can incorporate reading as well as some technology.  I don’t think it is one or the other.  It is both.

In this chapter, Stoll presents computers and technology as something not good for education.  He asserts that with technology that content learning will not happen, or he is just totally against it.  On page 40 he says

” The technical needs of the computer of the computer create a new bureaucratic bumpf of technicians, computer coordinators, and information specialists.  These people tend not to teach, but to fix machines, buff the school’s high-tech image, and promote high-tech pedagogy.”

I think this may be true in some cases now, but probably was more so true when he wrote this book.  I think that technology education can be implemented into a curriculum, while still maintaining learning the content, and that the field of education technology nowadays strives to do so more often than in 2000.

Clay Burell writes in his Beyond School located here the following:

Three weeks after the Diigo stampede, I’ve been concerned that the new trend of putting Diigo annotations on postsinstead of leaving comments in the thread was a negative thing. Only Diigo users would see the conversation, and the post’s comment thread would be left poorer for that.

But after a wild four-hour storm of 74-and-counting comments on my Muhammed Ali post about privileging writing over other communication strands when we grade, it occurs to me that Diigo might come in handy here. There are so many incredibly insightful comments there, and the issue is so relevant to the futures of our students, that I fear the sheer bulk of comments might dissuade new readers from discovering the gold shining here and there.

I visited the Diigo site briefly to see what was up, with the highlighting on the web, etc., and thought I would post here for you tech savvy bloggers, which I am not.

 There is a demo from the Diigo site here which could help figure out how to use it—if you want to use it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvAkTuL02A

I was checking blogs today, and ran across this one where she describes a science lesson where fruit loops can be used.

http://successfulteaching.blogspot.com/2008/04/making-molecules-out-of-froot-loops.html

Seems like something very doable –and fun, while the content can be learned with this hands-on activity. 

From Phaedrus   and his reference to this  blog, where the following was stated:

For example, they studied different approaches at teaching the basic mathematical property of commutativity — that you can switch up the order of elements and still get the same answer, as in 3 + 2 or 2 + 3 equals 5.

Some students learned the concepts using generic symbols. Others were taught with concrete examples such as pictures of measuring cups  filled with liquid, or slices of pizza or tennis balls in a container.

I thought about an example that an instructor gave at a training I went to once about the associative property, and I repeated this, with my own little changes, to see if a student would understand, and this particular student did, which was exciting.

For addition and the associative property, one can tell a story, to pretend that there are three friends a,b, and c—and a can represent Alice,  or whatever name one wants to put in for the scenario, and that b represents Bobby, and c could stand for Cathy.  Well, it could be that all three are friends and that they like to hand around together, but sometimes Alice walks to lunch with Bobby, while Cathy walks behind them because the hallway is so narrow, which would be (a+b) + c, or sometimes Alice walks behind while Bobby and Cathy walk up front together, which would be a + (b+c)—but they all go to lunch together, and the answer will always be the same–a,b,and c–for addition.

In response to the blog below

http://durandus.com/phaedrus/2008/04/25/duh/

 where IDEA and Ratemyprofessor.com are compared at this blog, I have to agree with Cathy Bechtel’s comment because spend some time filling out these forms also.

From the IDEA website, the following was listed as criteria of their test, shown below.

Scores Adjusted for Extraneous Influences
A number of factors have been found to influence student ratings but are beyond the instructor’s control. Adjusted scores provide a mechanism to “level the playing field” for purposes of administrative decisions. We constantly focus our research efforts at refining the process for adjusting scores (Technical Report 12, Research Report 6). At this time, the Diagnostic Form adjusts for five factors

• Student motivation to take the class regardless of who taught it
• Student work habits
• Class size
• Student effort not attributable to the instructor
• Course difficulty not attributable to the instructor

The Short Form adjusts for three factors

• Student motivation to take the class regardless of who taught it
• Student work habits
• Class size

I don’t see anything about students motivation to take a class because of who taught it, because I have actually decided between two instructors before, in the event that I had to choose 1 class- because I already had one of the instructors already.

I had to do a podcast for EDUC 621, and the sofware from Audacity makes it really easy—-to just record yourself and produce it.  The site is located here.

Well, after finding a tutorial on youtube to do a youtube video, I now have one.  I used Camtasia to convert a Powerpoint into a video.  It is my first one, so it is nothing spectacular—-but it’s a start.

Camtasia is located at http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp?CMP=KgoogleCStmhome.

The tutorial I found is located here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpvD7kWglR4.

And my video is located :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKvG9o1H7N0

embedding will be my next accomplishment

I think since we were all looking at this blog and there may have been some confusion—I know I was, that I would post the sharecropping clarification link here that D’arcy Norman wrote.

http://www.darcynorman.net/2008/04/21/sharecropping-clarification/