Storyboards for e-learning

This is a good presentation on developing storyboards for e-learning modules. For the most, it adheres to e-learning principles, with the noted exception of the redundancy principle. I do detest having someone read the on screen text aloud...

Windows Live "Space"

In attempting to set up a personal web page via Windows Live, I have reached a level of frustration. The module are difficult to move and the layout will not stay as I select. On top of this, every time I try to reset the layout, it literally eats whatever module I have put in the frame right of center! My, My....I'll keep trying, but I'd really like to set this up for  my portfolio!

What an interesting ride...

I have been very impressed with the wide variety of products offered by the members of the class. The wikis were very professionally done,  there were some very useful blogs created and many were very innovative in the design. I thought the presentation housed online was pretty nifty and will likely use that idea in the future. My favorite by far was Pipes and the companion listing, which escapes my mind at the moment, but is safely tucked away in my Diigo bookmarks. I have a fixation with anything organizational in nature. :-)

Thank EVERYONE for making this such an interactive class  - very supportive and quite interesting! Hope to work with those continuing in the graduate pursuit and wish the best to those who are nearing the end of their academic journey. 

Google Wave

It was somewhat of a surprise that Google pulled the plug on the Wave after what I thought was such a short period of time. It has been a bit over a year, hardly long enough for most to learn about the application, but in the 2.0 world I guess that is long enough. The beta testing on Microsoft Office 2010 seemed almost as long...it makes you wonder just exactly what the indicators  are for success of a new application. If it had been up to me, Facebook would never have been a success, because I refused to get on board with it until January 2009 and never did much more than create a profile and add some favorite metal bands to Myspace. IT all just leaves me scratching my head....

What I have learned in this class...

The most surprising thing I have learned is that even though I have worked in and around "Web 2.0" for the last three years of my career, it is WAY bigger than I had even imagined. There is an academic side of it that I never considered and much beyond the scope of this course. In my readings for the social media paper, I came across a fairly extensive amount of research from  the learning theory direction, psychological direction, and social science perspective, including anthropological research! (The anthropological research was quite interesting, by the way.)


The most practical things I learned  were the many different ways that these tools could be applied, in a scope far beyond any I had considered in my perspective as a K-8 classroom teacher. It was pretty humbling, but reconfirmed what I had espoused to my students: This is way too big  and changing far too rapidly for any of us to become an expert on it - we all have to learn from each other. 


I rely on usage of shared materials quite heavily in my profession as a teacher and have learned of several additional resources that will be of use to me in both fields. My production of learning resource has been limited to creation of educational technology instruction, including Microsoft Office applications.


I have had the opportunity to meet several interesting people in the class and have really enjoyed the varying perspectives presented. If it makes you think about alternate perspectives, it's a good thing! Sometimes we all have a tendency to get tunnel vision about a topic, based on our own paradigms, so all the variations have been great practice in seeing things from a potential client's perspective.

Interesting statistics on 2.0

I would like to post a couple of TeacherTube videos I have used in my Computer Applications classes. They present some fascinating statistics about the advent and advancement of technology. 
I had a dual purpose in presenting them to eighth graders. The first was to impress upon them the necessity of expanding their technology usage beyond social media. The second, more obvious reason, was to have them compare styles of three to five presentations and discuss what worked and what didn't when constructing a powerful presentation. They noticed differences in graphical representations, background music, speed of transitions, etc., and noted these in their rubrics and subsequent analyses. It was never necessary to give them a list of "Thou Shalts" when they created their own.
They were quite taken aback at the information presented, although the original presentations were based on statistics from 2006. I think you may find some of them quite alarming. I have chosen  their second favorite because the pace made the information more digestible, and the most recent because the stats are more current.


You do not need to create an account, but you will have to suffer through a message form their sponsors - I will post both links in the body of this post and the general link is clickable from the Title.


Student's Second Choice


Most Recent

Finally figured out the editing pf previous posts!

Isn't THAT special??!! (Now that I know most of you are my age, I'm sure you'll get the Church Lady reference) Especially in the last week of the class. lol - BUT, as many of us have noted and Vanessa has pointed out, this is just a jumping off point, an exposure class. I think I will try to keep this up, or at least move over to my more informal blog that I had abandoned.

Additional Tools you may enjoy

As I was surfing through some of my Diigo Bookmarks to contribute to Jennifer's Diigo group, I ran across this site that all of you may enjoy :)
http://www.go2web20.net/

Week Five

Once again , there was interesting reading this week! It seemed to go very quickly, perhaps because of the tie in with teenagers - I have them and teach them. MOST of the time I really enjoy them :-)
I managed to spend much more time reading through the discussion board this week and am getting comfortable chiming in on others' postings. We are developing a sense of familiarity with one another at this point and ease of communication. There is a growing sense of humor on the board that has me looking forward to reading and responding to the posts. It seems many of us are just hitting our stride in this class and are already bemoaning the upcoming last week. 
I am still working on developing a regular pace for online classes - I don't tend to be a regimented person, but think I may need to sit down with an e-calendar and schedule the events of the syllabus into it! :-( This class has gotten me into some pretty good habits, but it has also given me my fair share of moments of "Oh Gees!" I find myself getting off on tangents with some of the topics. This week was Bryan's podcast with Shirky. He specifically mentioned that he hadn't been active on Facebook in over a year - so I had to look him up. Lol. He is the E.F. Hutton of social media! I didn't read a fraction of what there is out there about him, yet spent nearly six hours reading interviews, articles and reviews of his new book. He is very well respected in the field and I suppose that shouldn't surprise me, since he authored the chosen textbook for the course. I think the surprise came from the fact that his book was such an easy read compared to most textbooks...

It all depends on the end result!

Personally, I don’t mind putting documents or how-tos out there, because I tend to be more technologically literate that most in my peer groups. I wouldn’t have learned much of what I have, if it weren’t for the kindness of my peers, and tutorials put out there by others. There really is a sense of giving back, in those situations.

Professionally, it is a different story. In the public education world, nothing is original. We have all “borrowed” parts or entire lessons from others. There is a strong sense of not reinventing the wheel. Most teachers are very generous souls (they certainly aren’t in it for the money) and helpful by nature. However, if I were in a higher institution of learning, the pressure to publish might color my willingness to share so readily. I would be very hesitant to put anything out there that could be “scooped” by another researcher, as it seems there is so much riding on all papers being unique. There are situations where you can gain from making your ideas public, such as repositories like Merlot and The Orange Grove. Publishing things there can add to your reputation, especially when the peer reviews are favorable and you are a regular contributor of highly rated material.

As a former staff trainer, I must confess to being somewhat chafed by putting long hours into course on the BlackBoard site for Innovative Learning, only to have them claimed by the school system as their property to copy and distribute, oftentimes with no credit to the author! All the rules are different in public education, it seems…

Dazzled with Brilliance, or baffled with....

I judge the value of information I find on the web primarily through credentialing the person or organization posting the information. If there isn’t some sort of information available, I may search them on the web, depending on why I need the information. I also check the date of the posting or last update to the page, to see how current it is. For trending topics, this is pretty important to me; but for more historical topics I am a bit less discerning. I don’t really expect a page on the Battle of Bunker Hill to be updated on a regular basis.

In person, it is a little different. The credentialing aspect still applies, but I think it is a little easier to be baffled with ummmm…. I have a tendency in real life not to challenge an individual unless I am very sure the facts are different. I will listen to what they have to say and then check it against other sources at a later time, if it is of high importance to me. In that way, both means of gathering information is similar, anytime something doesn’t ring true I always check other sources.

An aggregation of mostly 2.0 tools

This, again, is intended for k-12 audiences, but demonstrates the wide variety of tools that are out there! Perhaps you'll find something useful to you. :-)

For News Junkies

Newsmap  is customizable view of what's trending right this second in the world. It can be sorted by country that it is trending in and topic. Color coding and shading tell you exactly how current it is and how popular. It is worth checking out, if only for curiosity's sake.


Topix is interesting because it customizes your news feed based on your current IP address. You can change the newsfeed by entering a different zip code. Great for when you're traveling, checking up on your hometown or those of friends and relatives. 

Diigo

My Diigo account, should anyone care to share. Mine covers a variety of topics, but focuses on technology integration and painting. The vast majority of the tech ed is centered on k-12 education, but could be applied to other arenas.


Cannot locate an edit function, although I could swear I saw one. Will follow up with a post that includes the other website I mentioned in the weekly prompt. 

A collaborative wiki could have a few different uses in the public school system. I think it would be useful for administration to use to communicate with the staff. Announcements could be made and referred back to, policy or schedule changes could be posted, committees could have a spot to report their proceedings. The responsibility to read could be placed on the staff and readership could be limited to current employees and not visible to the general public. There is a heightened awareness, however, of the sunshine laws and due apprehension regarding posting anything in writing. That might limit the effectiveness.

As a technology integration specialist, a wiki could have been a very useful place to develop a clearing house for general directions and tips on any given software or hardware. If one could encourage regular visitation, it would be very useful to other educators if those who are tech savvy could post ways in which they utilize the various technologies in their classrooms - almost like a virtual brainstorming area.

As a classroom teacher of technology, the wiki could function in much the same way - as new applications are introduced, students could post ideas for usage, tips and links to sites they have found they contain more information. This would also work well for varying social issues I very surreptitiously insert into their assignments. The blogging they do - although many of them fought it, much like they do any assignment. I required what came to be known as the Monday Blog, where they were to write about their weekends. This was initially to cut down on the wasted classtime on Monday where everyone wants to share their happenings with me or the rest of the world. Even though this was supposed to be a fun way for them to communicate with their classmates, as soon as it became classwork, the excuses not to write began. "I didn't do nothin's" were to blame in most instances. I am a firm believer in taking away excuses, so I provided them with links to topix.com, tweentribune and newsmap (which is really cool, btw) and told them they had the option of posting about trending topics locally or globally. Amazingly, nobody ever posted on a current event and their weekends became much more action packed.

The design challenges would be few, teaching teachers to utilize either might take some arm twisting. Convincing the county to unblock the sites would be a challenge because they feel that anything we need to do online should be accomplished via the Schoolwires web hosting services they overpaid for (to make it easier for teachers to maintain a webpage, but ease was not the issue). Tying anything into learning the webpage application compounds the resistance. Another implementation issue would be getting people into the habit of checking the wiki or blog on a daily basis. Finally, I will reiterate the hesitancy of anyone who works for the state to publish much of anything sue to subjection to Sunshine Laws. There shouldn't be anything posted to either that should not see the light of day, but there is a fear of repercussion.

A user initiated effort could work here, for technology how tos that faculty, staff and students utilize after hours. One major implementation issue would remain - we still have a high population of teachers who are intimidated by others finding out what they don't know, especially a student.

Linked In?

Anyone else here on linked in? What other social networking tools do you use? Which do you find more useful and for what purposes?

YaY! Here it is Monday of week 4 and I am finally getting into the routine of this whole thing. I have read and posted on almost everyone's blogs today and have settled on my produsage tool.

Well, this has been an interesting week, to say the least! Finally completed my reading of the textbook and got that all caught up. Part of that involved having my thirteen year old read chapters 6 and 7 to me as I drove between Valdosta and Wildwood. She really was interested in how Wikipedia came to be and I'm sure that knowledge will be used against her teachers next year (politely, of course). We allow students to consult Wikipedia and we do all the time, yet we do not accept it as a valid resource in the learning community. The good thing is, we can link off of it to more valid resources. I should have had her read the rest of it to me! But, I did get it completed.

Spent some time checking in on Twitter to see if it appealed to me any more this week than it did last, but it did not.

I read the articles from the course library, and as a classroom teacher, I tend to automatically relate these to the k-12 arena. Being a teacher of computer applications, these were very useful articles, but the discussion threads tend to make me want to get up on my soapbox a bit. Being a former tech trainer for teachers, it makes me want to get up on my soapbox a LOT. I am very frustrated by those who refuse to see the usefulness of technology in education. This is not limited by the teachers age or generation, but by philosophy. It is kind of one of those things where you can lead a horse to water....

I played around with second life a little bit more, but have soooo much to learn there. Any experts here?

I have settled on the concept of using Google Wave for my project, based around creating a wave on ideas for using it in training and education. I think there is something I must be missing with it. It seems so novel when there are three or four users, but we had a group of twenty trying to create a Master Digital Educator project on it a few months ago and it seemed hard to follow. I'd like to get other thoughts and suggestions on it. I can only invite a few, so I am going to have to ask those invited to invite three more from the class. This should be interesting...

Better Late than Never?

Well, this week was an interesting experience. I had to take my mother to visit a last remaining aunt who was not doing well in southern Ohio. The family urgency is just another part of life. The interesting part is the effects of the differences in availability of technology. The uncle we stayed with lives on a small farm not too very far from Chesapeake. They have only dial up service and at this point in my life, I suppose I am a bit spoiled. I haven't dealt with dial up in over ten years. It is not only inconvenient, it is almost painful to endure! On top of this, it ties up the phone line, which is a no-no when many in the family still rely on telephone communication to distribute news. But wait, you say - with a data cable, anyone's cell phone can become a modem (which I became aware of when staying with my mother for a few months earlier this year). AT&T will happily add 5 gigs of data transfer to my cell phone package for a "mere" sixty dollars a month, effective immediately. Great plan - internet access anywhere, even in the car! Except for the fact that there is about two places in the house where you have ONE bar of signal...

I really take for granted the availability of technology available to me in Florida...now off to pack for my move to Tally ;-)

Week One EME6635

What have been your prior experiences with Web 2.0 technologies?

I have had a fairly varied experience with Web 2.0 technologies. For the most part, these experiences have been limited to those utilized in the school settings. In other words, free and not blocked in our county. I was also able to use ThinkQuest, despite the fact it is not condoned by our district. I learned and used a lot of different things like VoiceThread, YouTube, etc., that are blocked, but have excellent educational potential. I have attended the Florida Educational Technology Conference for the last three years and highly recommend it to anyone who gets the opportunity. I have also participated in the Florida Digital Educator certification for the last two summers to gain experience in both the PC and Mac platforms. I have also facilitated the implementation of the Enhancing Education Through Technology II grant, as well as mentoring the Action Research component of the grant.

Do you consider yourself a leader or follower in this realm, or something else altogether? Why?

I consider myself both a leader and follower, as I know a fairly decent amount about the Web 2.0 technologies. I spent two years as a technology trainer for the Lake County School district and the last year working toward obtaining my Master Digital Educator certification through the Florida Center for Instructional Technology. I will always be a follower, because the technology changes at such a rate that there will always be much, much more to learn – a new application of an existing technology or a new application altogether.

Also, discuss what you hope to get out of this class.

I hope to get a more well-rounded and current experience of Web 2.0 technologies, they change so quickly that I find it necessary. I have made some attempts at second life, and need MUCH more work with that!