What if the students had GPS phones?

This just in from the Cool Gadgets department: Nokia has released a new camera phone with GPS capabilities! I'm thrilled because I really need GPS - I can get lost in my own neighborhood. But could this also have educational capabilities? This week we're studying ethics, including technology-based cheating methods and how to combat them. One student wrote on her blog that we should not allow cell phones in class because of the possibility that they could be used for cheating. I think that if it is a day when you're going to have a test, then yeah, you should probably have them put the phones away. But there are good uses for camera phones too, especially if they start to carry GPS capabilities. Imagine sending your students on a science scavenger hunt where they follow GPS coordinates to different examples of plant and animal life and then take pictures of what they find there. That's just one idea, do you have any others?

I believe GPS could be a very powerful addition to the classroom, especially in science. And if the students, or at least some of them, already have the technology, then why not use it?

Are you really blogging?

Midterms have come and gone, and it's time to stoke the blogging fire in the class again. Remember that there are points associated with your blogging. In the past, we've had mandated assignments where students HAD to reflect on what they were learning about educational technologies. This semester I wanted to give you more ownership and freedom by telling you to reflect and blog whenever you wanted, about whatever you wanted, as long you did it.

But many of you aren't doing it! In part because of that, next week there is a required reflection assignment: reflecting on the ethics mini lessons. But you need to do some spontaneous thinking, reflecting, and writing. And short replies to other people's blogs saying, "Yes, I agree with you!" doesn't work! You don't need to blog long, but we want to see that you're thinking, reflecting, and considering different ways technology could be used in your careers.

Blogging is more than just writing about what you think about something. Blogging is synthesis, creation, and regeneration of ideas. You read something on the internet, you quote it, link to it, talk about it, synthesize it into your own context, and rework the idea so that it is now your own. There have been some great examples of this in our class, unfortunately many of them weren't about educational technology but other issues! That's fine too, but let's also talk about class issues.

Here's one example of an excellent blog posted by a student in another section, Lynette Willard.

Using excel in the classroom:
Excel has many uses for teachers as well as students. Teachers can use the program to keep up with grades without using a book or teachers as well as students can mostly use it for organizing data and forming tables, graphs, charts, etc. I found many great websites that gave reasons and examples on how to use it. One website: http://www.forsyth.k12.ga.us/kadkins/strategy.htm#Kindergarten gave ten reasons on why it should be used. They are:
* integrates real life situations with technology.
* increases communication.
* supports many levels.
* engages students in higher level thinking skills.
* supports the principles and standards for school mathematics
* applies to cross curricular activities.
* is a great management tool.
* compliments and enhances instruction.
* is motivational.
* is just plain fun!
It provided ways to use in several different grade levels. One example for Kindergarten/first grade was making a bar graph and a pie chart showing the number and percentages comparing the pets the children have. Excel can be used to organize data from all subjects including math, science, reading, english, and writing. The teacher can make KWL charts, timelines, multiplication review, and checklists among other things. The students can organize pretty much anything into excel. The students could even use it to make a presentation for the class and show the data they found. This can all be done in the classroom or prepared beforehand to show the students a finished product. Excel allows one to continually add information on so it is great for ongoing experiments that may last for weeks, months, or the entire school year. If for some reason a teacher is not very familiar with the excel program there are websites that show how to use excal and answer questions about it. These websites could be an easy way to show the students how to use the program also. I really loves using excel and find it useful when I have a lot of information but want a neater way to have it in my notes or have a way to organize it and make it easier to read and understand. I will definitely use it in my classroom.

Granted, you don't have to write your posts as long as Lynette's but I loved how she read something on the internet, thought about it, and applied it to her own situation. That's when you're doing quality blogging!

Enough of the soapbox. Hope to hear some of your great ideas soon! This class ebbs and flows as far as homework load, so when we have an off week without a lot of homework, let's get blogging! And go Cougs!

A cool way to engage writershttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

How about this as a cool way to engage students in writing in an English class? Flickr is an online photo storage and publishing tool that allows you to easily upload and display photos for all the world to see. It's becoming very popular, and people are posting all sorts of random photos. Now the trend is towards flicktion, which is fiction based on Flickr photos. You just upload a random photo, and students try to write a fictitious story that might explain the photo. Cool idea! To read more, go to an article on weblogg-ed, or check out some fliction pieces here.

By the way, we had a really cool Blogging story started one week, and I'm dying to hear what happens to the hero and the girl of his dreams that he just bloodied accidentally on the way to his test! Let's continue the saga! I'm posting the direct link back to this story, and encourage to continue adding your voices to the tale (and if you haven't read it yet, do -- we've got some creative people in class).

The Eternal Tale link -- http://teach2edify.blogspot.com/2004/10/eternal-tale.html

Educational uses for Podcasting

Remember I've blogged a couple of times about Podcasting, which is the combination of blog technology and mp3 players, like IPods. Well, now there's a blog dedicated to research in Educational Uses of Podcasting and author Steve Sloan offers these preliminary ideas:

In my opinion Podcasting is a great tool:

* for distance learning
* to facilitate self-paced learning
* for remediation of slower learners
* to allow faculty to offer advanced and or highly motivated learners extra content
* for helping students with reading and/or other learning disabilities
* for multi-lingual education
* to provide the ability for educators to feature guest speakers from remote locations
* to allow guest speakers the ability to present once to many sections and classes
* to allow educators to escape the tedium of lecturing
* to offer a richer learning environment

He also talks about a teacher who instead of asking his students to buy a textbook, gave them their textbook in mp3 format that they could download to their IPods. Wow. Wouldn't that be cool!

Here are some more ideas about how I think Podcasting could be valuable in schools. Now, I know what you're saying, "IPods are too expensive. Nobody will have an IPod at my school." Think outside the box! DVD players are now 15 bucks at the bookstore. IPods will get cheaper in future years.

Here are some ideas:
- Foreign language: A daily conversation in the language being learned that students have to listen to. Maybe at key points of the conversation, they record their voices responding to one of the characters. Then they send their recordings by rss to their teachers' IPod for assessing.
- Students taking turns summarizing the day's lesson for the rest of the class to review if they wish
- English Literature students realizing there is more than one way to tell a story (i.e. you don't always have to write good literature, you can speak it too).
- Student presentations recreating events from history (you might not be able to make the French revolution look good on video with a bunch of high schoolers, but maybe you could recreate it well on audio)
- Personal reflection journals that are spoken, instead of written
- Journalism students could learn radio journalism instead of just print journalism, which would give them all more to do anyway (I know, I did journalism in high school and played a lot of tetris)
- Maybe even the yearbook students could create weekly audio "yearbooks" that keep students connected throughout the year instead of just one published book at the end of the year.
etc. etc.

I think there are many more ideas, but I want to hear them from you! Any other ideas?

A copyright/fair use blog!

I just learned that the Association of Educational Communications Technology has a copyright blog that one of their committees maintains. This is a great organization, so this blog might be one to keep an eye on, if you are interested. I think it's new, so I'm not sure how much info is on there right now, but maybe you could take a look!

http://aect.motime.com/

Question about the assignment

Sarah brings up a good question:
"We are also a little confused with the rubric page- are we to have an activity, do we just teach, or do we just have people go to the wiki page and figure it out themselves? It does not explain the assignment clearly"

Here's what I told her:
"Answer: You teach a mini lesson because just showing people your wiki will be boring. The wiki is there because you won't be able to teach everything in seven minutes, so if people want to learn more, they go to your wiki and you have already compiled all of the resources so they can "one-stop shop" so to speak and learn all about the issue at your wiki."

Copyright and Fair Use

First off, if you missed class yesterday, you need to jump on the ball soon and join a group. I talked to Jared today, and Jared, how about being in the Flexible Copyright group? I also emailed a couple of other students. If you haven't heard from me and missed on Monday, email me and then I'll assign you to a group. Do this quickly so your group doesn't do all the work (and get all the points).

By the way! All groups should have their names listed on their group wikis so if a newbie joins your group, he/she can contact you. Remember that you can email anyone in this class through Blackboard.

If you need links to this week's assignment, here they are:
This week's assignment - http://msed.byu.edu/ipt/west/a_Ethics.html
Our class ethics wiki - http://ipt.byu.edu/~wiki/28x/Fall04s3/Technology-RelatedEthicalIssues

Here are some other resources that you might be interested in and that might help you study up on your topics for this week:

My PowerPoint slides on copyright/Fair Use - I used to teach ethics lecture style before we decided to let you teach yourselves as a group. These slides have condensed some of the basic info that we taught down into one presentation

Copyright Jeopardy! - test your knowledge of copyright and fair use by skimming through this jeopardy game.

Article on Technology cheating - good article about how to prevent kids using technology to cheat.

Have fun this week learning about the ethical use of technology!