Class,
Many of you have already done the assignment for this week, so this might be too little, too late. But I have heard from a couple of students that some of the videos are too long, and some of the videos won't allow you to stop and rewind videos so you can reflect during the video like I suggested. I'm sorry on both accounts. I've seen some of the videos, but not all. I'm especially less familiar with the Nets Digital Video Library videos. Granted that this is only a one-credit class, don't spend more than about 2 hours doing the homework this week (that's what they tell us is reasonable). If the videos are longer than 20 minutes or so, don't bother watching the whole thing, or maybe just skim through what you don't see to get the idea. That should leave you enough time to reflect as a group, type up the reflection, get it posted, and deal with any technical issues along the way.
Sorry if this assignment became burdensome to some groups. In class I said the videos would be 15-20 minutes because the ones I had seen were that long. I'm sorry some of the others are longer than that.
Saturday, October 09, 2004
Moving ... but going nowhere (BYU game)
Could anything be more frustrating than losing to 1-4 UNLV at home? I will say this for BYU: they keep the games interesting. Remember the good ol' days when we were up by 30 at halftime? Do we really think we could ever do that with our current offense?
So what I want to know is who greased the pigskin? We really could not hold onto the ball. But take away the turnovers and our offense really did well (except score points -- I'll get to that). Curtis Brown was a monster with his second straight nearly 100-yard rushing game. Beck threw for 350+ yards. So if we gained all those yards, why were we moving the ball but not going anywhere near the endzone all night long? Take away the defensive interception return, and we only scored one touchdown. Against UNLV. Oh yeah, and did I mention they were only 1-4 before tonight?
So here's my question: Why can we move the ball but not score? Is it playcalling? Do we get jittery on third down? Do we get scared inside the 20? Do we have too much confidence in Payne and would rather just let him take care of scoring for us? Is it miscommunication? Miscues? What? Some of you might say turnovers, and tonight that might be true, but we haven't had many turnovers this year, but scoring touchdowns has still been a night-in, night-out problem. Our only real arrow in our quiver is deep to Watkins or Collie. Other than that, we really struggle to get in the endzone.
Thanks for letting me vent. I feel better already. What was your take on the game?
Bring on the basketball season!
So what I want to know is who greased the pigskin? We really could not hold onto the ball. But take away the turnovers and our offense really did well (except score points -- I'll get to that). Curtis Brown was a monster with his second straight nearly 100-yard rushing game. Beck threw for 350+ yards. So if we gained all those yards, why were we moving the ball but not going anywhere near the endzone all night long? Take away the defensive interception return, and we only scored one touchdown. Against UNLV. Oh yeah, and did I mention they were only 1-4 before tonight?
So here's my question: Why can we move the ball but not score? Is it playcalling? Do we get jittery on third down? Do we get scared inside the 20? Do we have too much confidence in Payne and would rather just let him take care of scoring for us? Is it miscommunication? Miscues? What? Some of you might say turnovers, and tonight that might be true, but we haven't had many turnovers this year, but scoring touchdowns has still been a night-in, night-out problem. Our only real arrow in our quiver is deep to Watkins or Collie. Other than that, we really struggle to get in the endzone.
Thanks for letting me vent. I feel better already. What was your take on the game?
Bring on the basketball season!
Friday, October 08, 2004
Wikipedia passes 1 million pages!
A milestone recently for Wikipedia. The online encylopedia that is really just a big wiki now has over 1 million pages. Read more about this at E-School News Online. The best part of all of this is that it is free -- free knowledge to anyone who wants to read it. Isn't that a neat characteristic of the Internet, the ability to chip in together as members of a worldwide community and give each other free access to knowledge.
BTW - Rich Culatta here in the College of Ed helped create a wiki website for worldhistory.com where you can go to a specific date in history and add important events to the timeline. Someone needs to go there and post April 6, 1820!
BTW - Rich Culatta here in the College of Ed helped create a wiki website for worldhistory.com where you can go to a specific date in history and add important events to the timeline. Someone needs to go there and post April 6, 1820!
Best Educational Websiteshttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
The Center for Digital Education just released their awards for the best educational websites of 2004. Go check them out! There are some for students, some for teachers. This goes back to the discussion I started earlier this week about whether you might not need to know web authoring as teachers.
BTW - Look closely and you'll see one of the websites is actually a BLOGSITE!
BTW - Look closely and you'll see one of the websites is actually a BLOGSITE!
Blogs in education
E-School News just published an interesting and lengthy lists of reasons why you would want to maintain a blog as a teacher, reasons why you would want to have your students blog, and reasons why you would want a class blog. There are many good ideas that I think could be applied to many different disciplines to check it out! At the bottom of the page is a link where you can respond to this article and post your own ideas. I encourage y'all to do this! After several weeks of blogging, you should all be able to have some good ideas about how blogs could be used in the right context.
More on Podcasting
Another online article on Podcasting (audio blogging using an IPod). This is really a good example of how blogs can be useful as a learning tool. Podcasting is something so new that it hasn't been written about in anything except internet articles and blogs. Ask around - in fact ask computer geeks who aren't bloggers and they may not even know about it (many of my computer-crazy friends don't). It's growing super fast too: in this article, a guy said the number of hits on a Google search for "podcasting" is growing by leaps and bounds every day (I guess I'm adding this post to that hit list).
Anyway, if we were to wait for the "traditional" way of learning about this new technology, we'd have to wait for some researcher to hear about it, then he'd do a 6-month study about it, then he'd take 6 months to write his article, then the journal would take 6-12 months to review it, accept it and publish it, and then it'd finally get published so we could read it (if we happened to be subscribed to that journal). But with blogging, the technology could be invented today, and maybe we'd know about it tomorrow (if we were subscribed to the right people). When you start using blogging as a way to keep up-to-date on new ideas, you can learn about things really, really fast.
Anyway, if we were to wait for the "traditional" way of learning about this new technology, we'd have to wait for some researcher to hear about it, then he'd do a 6-month study about it, then he'd take 6 months to write his article, then the journal would take 6-12 months to review it, accept it and publish it, and then it'd finally get published so we could read it (if we happened to be subscribed to that journal). But with blogging, the technology could be invented today, and maybe we'd know about it tomorrow (if we were subscribed to the right people). When you start using blogging as a way to keep up-to-date on new ideas, you can learn about things really, really fast.
Turning in group evaluations
Danielle and others have asked how to turn in your group evaluations of this week's assignment. Please email me them, or if you want, hand them to me at class next week. Don't put them on the discussion board because I want you to be honest and not afraid that your groupmates will see what you write!
Go Cougs tonight! Any predictions on the game? A candy bar if anyone nails it. I'm predicting BYU 31, UNLV 10.
Go Cougs tonight! Any predictions on the game? A candy bar if anyone nails it. I'm predicting BYU 31, UNLV 10.
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Web Authoring as an educational technology
Macromedia, the people who make Dreamweaver and Flash, the two best programs for producing websites, have now released a site license for K-6 schools. I read about this in E-School News Online. This means that getting these programs for K-6 schools will be cheaper, so more schools will be able to do it.
We have used blogs and wikis in this class, but we haven't done real web design (we do teach it in the 2-credit class). I did mention to you that if you wanted to do cheap and easy web design, you could download Mozilla Composer for free.
My question is this: How important do you think web design will be in your future teaching? I have talked and surveyed many of my students from the elementary education section of this course, and they usually tell me that they thought the web design part of the course was the most important thing they learned and that they plan to use it as elementary teachers.
What do the secondary teachers think? Do you plan on ever using web design? Would you use it as a teacher? Would you have your students use it in their homework? Is this something that would be valuable to your careers?
Just to get the conversation going, here's what Carla and Sheldon said in their reflection for hte assignment this week:
BTW - if it is something that you are interested in, you could do web design for one of your upcoming class projects ...
We have used blogs and wikis in this class, but we haven't done real web design (we do teach it in the 2-credit class). I did mention to you that if you wanted to do cheap and easy web design, you could download Mozilla Composer for free.
My question is this: How important do you think web design will be in your future teaching? I have talked and surveyed many of my students from the elementary education section of this course, and they usually tell me that they thought the web design part of the course was the most important thing they learned and that they plan to use it as elementary teachers.
What do the secondary teachers think? Do you plan on ever using web design? Would you use it as a teacher? Would you have your students use it in their homework? Is this something that would be valuable to your careers?
Just to get the conversation going, here's what Carla and Sheldon said in their reflection for hte assignment this week:
"A classroom website can be very effective in allowing students to collaborate and share information. We would like to have a classroom website for our classes to publish work on, see updated information, communicate outside of class, and show parents/families/friends what they are doing in class. A website expands classroom learning to a larger scope. "
BTW - if it is something that you are interested in, you could do web design for one of your upcoming class projects ...
Visual Internet Searching?http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
I just read about vivismo.com and Grokker, which are tools that represent internet search results visually by stacking the search results into categories so you can pick the category that best represents what it was you were looking for.
An article by e-school news describes it this way:
An article by e-school news describes it this way:
"Let's say, for example, you're curious about accommodations in France and enter a search for "Paris Hilton."Google recognizes this as a search in the category of "Regional-Europe-Travel and Tourism-Lodging-Hotels" but still produces page after page with links about celebrity socialite Paris Hilton and her exploits. That's because Google's engine ranks pages largely based on how many other sites link to them, sending the most popular pages to the top.
If you run the search on Grokker, however, the resulting circle shows all the possible categories of information the internet offers on a search for "Paris Hilton"--including reviews, maps, and online booking sites for the Hilton hotel in Paris, which are all but buried in the Google rankings. Now you've much more quickly found not what is popular among internet gawkers, but what is genuinely useful to you."
I tried out vivismo.com, and my initial impression was that I liked it. I'm interested in what you guys think. Why don't you try it out and tell me if you think Vivismo or Google would be more useful for your students.
Can't find it on google?
Well, we talked digital resources last week, and Google is an awesome digital resource for teachers or anybody. The next week, I showed the early birds how to use Google more effectively. For those who missed it, here are some URLs.
For better Google searching that gets more specific results, try either:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en or
http://www.google.com/dirhp
There is lots more stuff Google can do, and if you're interested, you might look here.
Anyway, as awesome as Google is, there are times when you still can't find something on Google! What do you do (after shaking and pounding the computer, of course)? Well, you can now go to http://www.cantfindongoogle.com/ and post on the discussion board what it was you couldn't find. Maybe someone will find it and respond to your post. Maybe they won't. Either way, Google gets better by finding out where the bugs are (if they are checking this site, like they should!)
For better Google searching that gets more specific results, try either:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en or
http://www.google.com/dirhp
There is lots more stuff Google can do, and if you're interested, you might look here.
Anyway, as awesome as Google is, there are times when you still can't find something on Google! What do you do (after shaking and pounding the computer, of course)? Well, you can now go to http://www.cantfindongoogle.com/ and post on the discussion board what it was you couldn't find. Maybe someone will find it and respond to your post. Maybe they won't. Either way, Google gets better by finding out where the bugs are (if they are checking this site, like they should!)
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Podcasting and application to foreign language
Well, if you like blogging, and if you like IPods, you'll love Podcasting. You can post audio files, which are sent by rss feeds to all your buddies' computers. They can then download your daily, or weekly, or whatever, audio file into their IPods and listen to it. If you want to read more, here's a news article, and here's Adam Curry's blog, where he posts a daily audio essay.
How cool would that be? Can you imagine getting a daily audio file from, say, lds.org? How about if your professor posted things to you every day? What if your best friend, or boyfriend/spouse, did that? Could this be better than email? What if you could record your voice into your computer, and then send it by rss to your friend's IPod, and they would hear it the next time they plugged their IPod into their computer. Fun!
Will Richardson started talking about some educational possibilities for this technology on his blog:
Let's continue the discussion! How could Podcasting be used to help you teach your subjects? I know IPods are expensive right now, but in a few years they'll be as cheap as $10 walkmans (remember when portable CD players were pricey?). So let's be futuristic and assume our students have IPods or could have them.
In closing, the article says this about Podcasting and why it might take off and get popular:
How cool would that be? Can you imagine getting a daily audio file from, say, lds.org? How about if your professor posted things to you every day? What if your best friend, or boyfriend/spouse, did that? Could this be better than email? What if you could record your voice into your computer, and then send it by rss to your friend's IPod, and they would hear it the next time they plugged their IPod into their computer. Fun!
Will Richardson started talking about some educational possibilities for this technology on his blog:
"..now let's take this into the classroom, huh? Foreign language students can now read their homework responses which automatically get sent via RSS feeds to their teachers who download them to their iPods or other player to listen to them. Or, the teacher creates a daily broadcast that his students download and listen to. Or, each day, one student does an oral reflection on the class that then gets sent around to kids who miss the class."
Let's continue the discussion! How could Podcasting be used to help you teach your subjects? I know IPods are expensive right now, but in a few years they'll be as cheap as $10 walkmans (remember when portable CD players were pricey?). So let's be futuristic and assume our students have IPods or could have them.
In closing, the article says this about Podcasting and why it might take off and get popular:
"But Podcasting -- like blogging -- seems to combine the best of the Internet with the best of traditional media. It's a way for someone to create and distribute a show to 40 people. And it also would allow a media company to distribute audio content to millions."
Podcasting and application to foreign language
Well, if you like blogging, and if you like IPods, you'll love Podcasting. I guess there is a way now to post an audio file, have it feed (through rss, just like our blogs) into other people's computers. They can then download your daily, or weekly, or whatever, audio file into their IPods and listen to it. If you want to read more, here's a news article.
How cool would that be? Can you imagine getting a daily audio file from, say, lds.org? How about if your professor posted things to you every day? What if your best friend, or boyfriend/spouse, did that? Could this be better than email? What if you could record your voice into your computer, and then send it by rss to your friend's IPod, and they would hear it the next time they plugged their IPod into their computer. Fun!
Will Richardson started talking about some educational possibilities for this technology on his blog:
Let's continue this discussion. How could you use this technology in your teaching? Now, I know IPods are expensive and not very many have them. But eventually they will be as cheap as $10 walkmans. So let's think futuristically here.
In closing, the article says this about Podcasting and why it might take off and get popular:
How cool would that be? Can you imagine getting a daily audio file from, say, lds.org? How about if your professor posted things to you every day? What if your best friend, or boyfriend/spouse, did that? Could this be better than email? What if you could record your voice into your computer, and then send it by rss to your friend's IPod, and they would hear it the next time they plugged their IPod into their computer. Fun!
Will Richardson started talking about some educational possibilities for this technology on his blog:
"..now let's take this into the classroom, huh? Foreign language students can now read their homework responses which automatically get sent via RSS feeds to their teachers who download them to their iPods or other player to listen to them. Or, the teacher creates a daily broadcast that his students download and listen to. Or, each day, one student does an oral reflection on the class that then gets sent around to kids who miss the class."
Let's continue this discussion. How could you use this technology in your teaching? Now, I know IPods are expensive and not very many have them. But eventually they will be as cheap as $10 walkmans. So let's think futuristically here.
In closing, the article says this about Podcasting and why it might take off and get popular:
"But Podcasting -- like blogging -- seems to combine the best of the Internet with the best of traditional media. It's a way for someone to create and distribute a show to 40 people. And it also would allow a media company to distribute audio content to millions."
The Eternal Tale
As I mentioned in class, I'll start a story here, and please post your additions to the tale as comments to this post. Other sections might do this as well, and maybe we can have a fun time seeing which class writes the best story!
BTW - I apologize for the lame start -- I'm just going to go with the first idea for a story that comes to my mind. It's up to y'all to make it good!
The Eternal Tale
By IPT 286, Section 5
"Who's that?"
"I don't know, but I think he plays for the football team."
"He is so freakin' hot! I hope he is in my American Heritage class."
Ryan ignored the comments, but he couldn't help but crack a wry smile. Like anybody else, he enjoyed the flattery that often accompanied him around campus. Being a student at BYU is going to rock! he thought to himself So many girls ... so few weekends for dates!
Only 19 years old, Ryan was just beginning his first semester at Brigham Young University. Now two weeks into his newfound freedom as an adult, on his own for the first time, Ryan was enjoying the social scene at BYU. Maybe a little too much, he thought as he grimaced at his Palm Pilot, which beeped to remind him he had a test in a half hour -- a test he hadn't really studied for.
After snagging a gordita from Taco Bell in the Cougareat, Ryan scanned the dining tables to see if he knew anybody with an open chair at their table.
Then he saw her.
And he kept looking.
He couldn't stop.
She was perfect--the most perfect girl he had ever seen. I have to meet her, Ryan thought, because ...
BTW - I apologize for the lame start -- I'm just going to go with the first idea for a story that comes to my mind. It's up to y'all to make it good!
The Eternal Tale
By IPT 286, Section 5
"Who's that?"
"I don't know, but I think he plays for the football team."
"He is so freakin' hot! I hope he is in my American Heritage class."
Ryan ignored the comments, but he couldn't help but crack a wry smile. Like anybody else, he enjoyed the flattery that often accompanied him around campus. Being a student at BYU is going to rock! he thought to himself So many girls ... so few weekends for dates!
Only 19 years old, Ryan was just beginning his first semester at Brigham Young University. Now two weeks into his newfound freedom as an adult, on his own for the first time, Ryan was enjoying the social scene at BYU. Maybe a little too much, he thought as he grimaced at his Palm Pilot, which beeped to remind him he had a test in a half hour -- a test he hadn't really studied for.
After snagging a gordita from Taco Bell in the Cougareat, Ryan scanned the dining tables to see if he knew anybody with an open chair at their table.
Then he saw her.
And he kept looking.
He couldn't stop.
She was perfect--the most perfect girl he had ever seen. I have to meet her, Ryan thought, because ...
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