EDUC520: April 2009

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

New Tech Standards & Requirements

I think it is fantastic that technology is now part of the Oregon Diploma: 2012 essential skills. Just as colleges and employers of high school students expect a minimum standard of ability concerning reading, writing, and math, so to should they be able to expect a minimum standard of technological ability from graduates. I also think that graduates deserve to receive technology training that prepares them for learning, living, and working within our society.

One of the ideas I have for implementing a technology strategy for developing Creativity, Innovation, Communication, and Collaboration is developing a class blog. Elementary school students can participate in the development and maintenance of a class blog.

Students can be involved in the designing of the layout of the blog, take pictures for the blog, participate in deciding what class work they would like displayed on the blog and, students can share all of this with their parents at home. Younger students can actually watch on a screen in the classroom as I add pictures, classwork, and make comments to the blog.

Older elementary students can actually create projects and add them to the blog. For instance, in my son's class we are going to tape student's biography presentations on tokbox.com and embed them to the class blog. Students will then be asked to visit the site in pairs, choose three biographies to read and make comments to each them. I should point out that this project could not be carried out completely with the school's computers. The school's computers do not have web cams. The teacher and I plan to use our laptops so we can make the project happen, but I'm starting to see that there may be problems with lack of technological equipment available to students.

For research, information fluency, critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making, I can think of many activities using active links. Allowing students to explore the Internet for solutions to questions like, how do I safely get rid of termites in my home? This question can challenge students to learn about termites, learn about termite habitat, decide what "safe" means, come up with solutions, and determine if the solutions are legitimate. This project could be done in small groups providing students the opportunity to think, problem solve, and make decisions as a group.

I also think it is important for students to learn to develop power point presentations. Researched information can be put in a power point presentation which can include pictures and active links. Elementary students cam also learn to use dictionary.com which offers not only word definitions but language translations and a thesaurus. As we have mentioned in our class before, technology can be easily implemented into lesson plans throughout the curriculum if we decide to make the effort. Because kids seem to be drawn to technology, I think technology can be easily merged with all of the Oregon Diploma essential skills.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Analyzing Student Datat in a Spreadsheet

The data indicates that all students have improved their test scores or increased their knowledge of the content. The student growth line of Kathrine is very interesting. She started out with the lowest test score of 120 and then shot up to 180. She then dropped back down to a test score of 160 and then back up to 180. Most students consistently increased their test scores. Kathrine's score seems to fluctuate. What is causing the fluctuations in her growth chart?

I had some trouble hiding data, so I followed Barry's advice and copy/paste the data on a seperate sheet so I could create a chart with the scores lower than 192. I think the Excel program is ok. I don't have alot of experience with Excel but I do think the Excel program on Google Docs creates a bit of busy work. We should be able to hide data so a chart can be created with the data we have showing. Also, I'm not sure about the publishing section. I posted my chart earlier today and when I later went to edit the post, my chart was gone. It could be my computer because it has had problems functioning in Google Docs today.

Analizing Student Data in a Spreadsheet

Comments on Multimedia Presentation-4Shared

Well, I'd like to say that our Presentation was fun and easy to create but we had many technical problems which caused us to spend hours coming up with a final project. Our original idea was to use ScreenToaster.com so that we could make a video of us using 4Shared while we were talking. We could not get the sound to work so we recorded the project with no sound and then recorded our presentation to Tokbox.com with sound. It is hard to see what we are pointing at but the conversation is good and I think helpful to someone who wants to try 4Share out.

4Shared has some nice features. Sharing documents and photos were relatively easy to do. I posted my Husband's welding projects on my virtual hard drive. When we first moved to Salem, Steve was applying for lots of jobs and they wanted to see his work. It would have been helpful to be able to have included a link to 4Shared with his photos downloaded with his resume. I like the fact that information can be stored "in space" rather than on a persons hard drive. The feature that I liked the most was their emailing process. It was extremely simple to use and I liked the format in which it was sent. I didn't particularly like the "search engine". Since files sometimes have numbers or funny names, it's hard to find files on a particular subject like, lesson plans. I also found that I couldn't download half the files I tried - that could be because of VISTA. The music download also seemed fairly easy. There was a forum section where I was able to find discussions on particular topics. That might be fun to look into further.

Below our 4Shared Presentation Post are two Posts in which I used 4Shared. Please take a look so you can see what 4Shared looks like when you use it.