My MD400 Experience

I signed up for this class expecting to learn about technologies that I had heard about and peripherally experienced but never really understood. I think that expectation was more than met. I feel comfortable using the technologies that we have used for digital imagery, blogs, wikis, digital story creation and podcasting. Am I an expert? No. Will I use them in a classroom if they fit? Absolutely! The scary thing is that what we have learned only scrapes the surface. There is so much more to each of these technologies. So many options for their use that can be explored. Where will I find the time to go into more depth about them? And how quickly will new options replace those we have learned? How many new products will come into the marketplace that just might be perfect for classroom use? I will keep my eyes and ears open to what is going on with technology but my goal will be to look for the technology that best adds value to my teaching style and subject matter and focus on that. If I can accomplish that, I will be happy.
I also came away from this class with an appreciation for how many resources were provided on Jenn Cirino's and the MD400 website. Don't ever take those sites down! Throughout the class I kept going back to them to see what else I might not have explored.
I hope to share what I have learned with teachers that I know. I have talked to them throughout this class and they are excited to learn the basics of some of these tools and find ways to implement them in their classroom. As I say in my Ed Tech Philosophy digital story, educational technology needs to go viral. If we can adopt these things one teacher at a time, we will eventually be able to create that ideal vision of a technology not being a separate thing that gets considered for only a few or only a portion of our curriculum. It will be an integral part of how we teach. (Blog Post 12)

The Computer Delusion

And so it continues....This article made me think of the YouTube video we saw today "Introducing Le Book". Was the book a daunting discovery whose relevance was argued over for years? Is technology in education the greatest invention since TV? The article, written in 1997, states that in a poll taken the prior year "U.S. teachers ranked computer skills and media technology as more "essential" than the study of European history, biology, chemistry, and physics; thank dealing with social problems such as drugs and family breakdown; than learning practical job skills". I have a very hard time believing that today the poll would result in the same conclusion. I think that we can acknowledge technology is changing so rapidly today that learning one set of skills may only last for 5 years. Workers today need to be able to learn on their own and adapt to change. If we are not teaching our students those skills, we are doing them a disservice as they enter the business world. We live in the world that requires some basic understanding of how computers function, even if it is only how to search the Internet using a web browser, create a word processing document and read email. Aside from positions that require in depth knowledge of computer languages or design, I have found that in my many years in business as long as you had an aptitude to learn and understood how a keyboard functioned, you could be taught to use any computer application. When I hired non-technical people I always looked for those, as did someone in the article, for those that had 'an ability to speak, write, and comprehend".
This article also talks about the teacher's role in technology and the problem that schools face when trying to implement it. School districts often end up with a variety of technology that is spread across the district and which is difficult to support due to lack of resource and funding. Similar problems existed in 1997 and will continue to exist until there is a fundamental shift how education is funded and well grounded research that shows the role that technology should play. Even today I think there is a lack of agreement in the overall role technology should play district wide. It is left to the teachers to determine how best to implement technology in the curriculum. There are pockets of excellence in many places but I wonder just how far we have actually come. One of my favorite quotes in this article is by Larry Cuban of Stanford University. He says "Schooling is not about information. It's getting kids to think about information. It's about understanding and knowledge and wisdom." (Blog Post 11)

Thoughts on Digital Stories

The digital story is such a simple concept. Create a story, take digital photos to illustrate the story, load them into an application that will allow you to record an audio narration, add some music and create an output that is playable on any computer. The steps are basically simple but the creativity and range of emotions that can be expressed by this process were amazing and unexpected. I found Good Grief and Dachau to be poignant and thought provoking. The Birds Visit Barcelona, Jenn's History of the Mafia and Vivian's story about how a student can tackle a Civil War Historical Biography project related information in a very easy and understandable way.
What's Going On Out There? by Kate was just heartwarming. Paul the Octopus and Christine's War between the Squares and the Rectangles were outright funny. I could see the learning value in each of these and the potential for digital story possibilities in the classroom just increased exponentially. I wish I had this option for expression when I was in school. I can't wait until everyone's is loaded on their website for viewing.

Wordle

I just love word clouds. I got a bit carried away trying to find things from which to create that word cloud, playing with layout and colors and then trying to save it. The PC fought me all the way when it came to saving the Wordle output. I found the MAC much easier. I was able to write it to a file that I imported directly into iPhoto. I then cropped the picture and exported it as a jpeg. I have used a couple of these on my website. This is a fun way for students to see how written works can be interpreted without benefit of a human interpretation. Wordle just sees words and not emotion. It would be interesting to have a class read a poem, discuss its meaning and then feed it into Wordle and see if they agree with the resulting artwork. It might also be fun to have students create their own version of the word cloud from a piece of literature. What great conversation might be sparked from those presentations!

Reflections on Class

I am enjoying this Intro to Ed Tech class as much as I had hoped I would but I am overwhelmed by the number of technology resources that are available to use in the classroom. It is a challenge to master any technology, hardware or software, so the number of options that we can explore as teachers is tremendous. I think that you basically just have to find one area in which technology will be a value add and then dive in and figure out what tools might help you achieve that goal. You can't do all of these things but it is great to be exposed to them all. I just hope that we will have enough time to explore what we have seen on the Resources page. I also hope we might have time to brainstorm with others in the class about how they might use the technology. I can see how it might be applied by reading their blogs but it would also be nice to devote a bit of class time to exploring ideas together.

One thing that I find difficult so far is marrying the technology to mathematics. You would think that technology and math go hand in hand but it seems so much easier to find application for other subject areas. I think that you have to think outside the box a bit to figure out how to fit technology into the class. Can you use a blog as a math journal? That would be different. How can digital picture be incorporated into a lesson? Where might digital storytelling be used? These may or may not find a home in a math classroom but I at least now will always be thinking of their potential use when I think about a math topic.

One last note is that I hope there is a way to stay connected or become connected with students who have gone through this class. Some of their websites are still up and running. It would be informative to see how former students are using what they learned in this class. What successes have they had? Have they found other resources that might be helpful to us? What challenges have they had? I would love to know.

Copyright Implications for Educators

How often have you created a PowerPoint with an accompanying song? Have you searched the Internet for content for a lesson? Do you try to use current references to movies, music, TV, books or magazines that make your teaching more relevant or engaging to your students? Have you thought about copyright law as you do any of these things? If you have not, you should. As technology has made access, copying, downloading and sharing easier than ever, it has also brought with it the need to think about the legalities of what is being done. It used to be that we only had to worry about students copying from each other, passing off someone else's paper as their own or using information found in articles or books without properly footnoting them. Now we seriously need to consider whether what we are doing falls within the guidelines of Fair Use.
The four factors that are used to determine Fair Use are:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
2. the nature of the copyrighted work
   
3. the amount and substantially of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
   
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

I found it difficult to understand these factors initially. It took many readings of reference articles to begin to make sense of them. I found two articles in particular that explained the dilemma about copyright laws and Fair Use well:
Stanford University:Copyright and Fair Use Overview
Education World: The Educators Guide to Copyright and Fair Use

I think that Fair Use and copyright law is one topic that we need to become comfortable with as educators so that we can make the right choices when it comes to materials that we use, projects that we assign to students and ways that we share or tell them to share their completed works. We need to understand what can and cannot be done so we can go to our schools and intelligently explain why we should not continue to make copies of books instead of purchasing them. We need to be able to explain these rules to our students because although this generation of You Tubers and technology savvy consumers may know how to share, mix, copy, edit and produce content on a variety of subjects, they have little real understanding of copyright law and Fair Use. Teaching the proper guidelines for creating this type of content is no different than teaching what constitutes plagiarism. Mashups are such a part of the culture today that there is no excuse for not knowing what can or cannot be included without permission. (Blog Post 7)

UDL - Reflection

Universal Design for Learning is a concept for classroom instruction that we all strive to achieve. It is a seamless blending of curriculum materials and methods that balances what is being taught with a student's capacity and ability to learn. Technology, particularly digital media, becomes an integral part of curriculum materials, not an add-on that is targeted at specific students. This new media has the flexibility to allow teachers to create content which can be diseminated in multiple ways to students - audio, text, visual. The burden for creating this environment lies with creative and hopefully well-supported teachers who can see beyond the paper textbook and understand the potential of incorporating new and alternative methods of accessing information into a lesson in order to provide all students with a chance to learn. It is all about flexiblity, access and options. (Post 5b)