Week 12 Blog

Digital storytelling is a way to present classroom materials using media supplementing the normal literature. For example, if I were to teach a lesson on Hamlet, I could take a scene, and talk about the specifics, use a youtube clip to show a scene from one of the movies, powerpoint broken down into each player's part, and audio clips using the authentic British accent.

Mathematics can certainly be tough to learn, especially when the student is more artistically inclined, as I am. The book recommends teachers use graphing calculators to help students learn more efficiently. I know graphing calculators certainly helped me learn slope, and other mathy stuff.

We can't learn how to do something until we do it. We've always heard this. My PE teacher in elementary school told my class, "You can't learn to play football from watching football. You learn to play football from playing football."  Granted, students may know more about a specific subject from watching a TV episode about the specific subject, they won't know it through and through.

Crismond, D., Howland, J., Jonassen, D., Marra, R. M.  (2008).  Meaningful Learning With Technology. Upper Saddle, New Jersey: Pearson.

Podcasting

When I first received my iPod, I wasn't quite sure what a podcast was. However, I found a fun podcast by a married couple about my favorite TV show at the time, Gilmore Girls. I've learned a few things about podcasts from this lesson. For one, you don't have to have an iPod to listen to a podcast. Another, anyone can create a podcast. Also, I've learned that I can always have a podcast ready for my students if I, for some reason or another, happen to have to miss a class. Podcasts are an excellent way to preserve class time.

Podcasting is similar to other Web 2.0 applications in that everyone can view them. Not only your students or fellow teachers will be able to get some good out of them. However, podcasting is different form other Web 2.0 applications in that podcasts are audible, not visible.

I do own an iPod...but I don't think I would use this in my own classroom. To me, it sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Students are bound to not listen to them when they need to, and they will use the podcasts as an excuse to tell their parents or constituents that there "was no assignment for today."

Social Bookmarking and Students

As someone who number one, doesn't think it is responsible to burden high school or middle school students with online components to class, especially since some of these students don't have internet, or even home computers yet, and number two, and number two, loves time away from the constraints of technology, I believe I will not subject my students to online class components.

I like the idea of social bookmarking. I think it's actually a genius idea, but only with teachers. I think the sharing of lesson plans between teachers in a specific high school, or school district, or area is a great way to even out education in the area, and help teachers come up with ideas. I don't think students would glean as much from this activity as a teacher would. The only way to insure all students were able to get to a computer was if you had a field trip to the school computer lab. Even then, you'd have to make sure no other classes have the lab that day, and it would take up an entire day of your week. Why would you waste an entire day of discussion or lecture? I personally think it is a bad idea.

Tapped In sounds a lot like the online home schooling program I've heard a lot of people participate in. I think this method works beautifully for these home schooled kids. And by the same token, I think it would not work well in a normal public school setting. I think that kids should be exposed to either fully online classes, or fully sit down classes. This overlap could potentially be detrimental to the normal high school student.

Information found at: http://tappedin.org/tappedin/web/newsletter/2009/july.jsp#learnhub

Assessments and ePortfolios

We can all remember sitting in school waiting for the bell to ring to signal the end of class. Why were these classes boring? Because we never knew how we were doing in the class. Jonassen contends that to better our experience not only as students, but future teachers, we should give assessments. These show how meaningful the material learned was to the students, and how much they retained.

Jonassen also talks about ePortfolios. His opinion of these compilations of pictures, personal works, personal credits, and perhaps multimedia like videos, is that these are not only the wave of the future; the stuff people will use for years and years to come, but that they are helpful resources now. Everyone has internet access (unless they are in a situation like mine this week, wherein I didn't have internet), and can more easily access your portfolio as opposed to a hard paper copy, which can only be passed around by hand or mail.

ePortfolios may be one of the most helpful tools to a student. It can ease tension stemming from the student's own self consciousness, and supress resulted fears.

Jonassen, D. (2008). Meaningful learning with technology (pp. 218, 220). Upper Saddle, NJ: Pearson.

OnlineClass

Ideas are important. People don't have bang-up, awesome ideas all the time. It is important to copyright if you have an idea you think is original. If you don't copyright that specific idea, you may have others take your idea, copyright it for themselves, and not give you credit. The idea will technically not even be yours any more. I heard that Elvis did this. He heard a good song by a woman called "Bearcat," and fashioned his song "Hound Dog" after it. "Hound Dog" had the same melody, accompanying harmony, and even the same lyrics (but instead of saying the person was a "Bearcat" he called him a "Hound Dog").

Cybersafety refers to people not putting too much personal information (addresses, phone numbers, credit card information, etc.) or photos for the world to see on the WWW.

I did not learn anything new. Most of us have been blogging since the internet came out. Sure, internet safety and copyright laws are good to know, but "cybersafety" is really just common sense, and "copyright infringement" is talked about every semester in school.