Teach 2 Edify

The Edu-Blogger: Connections versus relationships

2009-07-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

The Edu-Blogger: Connections versus relationships

What a great post! Just testing out the link feature.

Goodbye and good luck!

2005-01-06T09:06:00.000-07:00

Our final in IPT 286 was so crazy with all of you presenting in different rooms, that I didn't really get a chance to say goodbye and thank you for what you have taught me this semester and for your participation in the class. I then tried to email everybody, but all of your emails have been purged from my Blackboard course (which is weird - that's never happened before. BTW, that's one reason we did blogs this semester instead of Blackboard discussions, because at the end of the semester, all of the knowledge we've accumulated in a Bb discussion is lost and locked away).

Anyway, so the only way I can communicate with you is to post something on my blog and hope you are still using your aggregators. So consider this my final goodbye! Thank you for being my students, and for your thoughts, ideas, and good work. I love teaching because I learn so much from my students, and this last semester was another example of this. I hope you also found our class useful to you.

I would like to stay in contact with any of you who are interested in doing so. I'm still subscribed to your blogs, and will still read your thoughts and posts, if you continue to do this. If you have questions, you can always ask me and I'll try to help you. I'll also be posting frequently on my blog, because for me blogging has become an essential part of my learning. However, I won't be posting on this blog anymore--this blog is more for my teaching, and I'm not teaching this semester. All of my blogging will now happen on my other blog, which is at http://edu-blogger.blogspot.com. This, for now, is where I think, and write my thoughts. I feel a lot like Robert Millett, who said (roughly) that he writes so he can learn something. That's (roughly) why I blog. On my Edu-blogger blog, I post on many subjects related to my graduate field of study, but many times I talk about educational technology issues, so you may still want to subscribe to it and read it occasionally. I hope you do -- and I hope you drop me a comment if you have one!

See y'all later, and have a great teaching career!

Edublog award winners!

2004-12-13T09:06:00.000-07:00

The results are in! Here are the best edublogs of 2004! Go check them out!

http://incsub.org/awards/index.php

You heard it first at T2E

2004-12-13T09:01:00.000-07:00

More confirmation that Internet Explorer is bad news. This article reports that Penn State has discouraged everyone on campus from using IE. They suggest using ... Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, or something else to protect against viruses and poor internet security.

What should we learn from this as teachers? Using what everyone else uses is not always smart. Just because IE is popular doesn't mean we should be using it. I know teachers have a lot they need to be concerned with, but staying up to date on the technology and what works best should be one of these.

Final takeaways from the class

2004-12-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

Shauna, in another section, left her final "rules of thumb" for using technology effectively.

1) Technology should enhance the lesson plan.
2) There will be a learning curve when you first teach a technology. Don't be bothered by that if you feel that in the long run that technology will be beneficial.
3) Technology will fail sometimes. Keep backups of files and have backup ideas on what your students can do if the technology is rendered useless at any given time.
4) It's important to keep up to date on technology. Don't be afraid to try new technologies, but make sure you try them out on your own before you bring them into the classroom.

If any of you would like to leave your final "rules of thumb" or main suggestions for good technology integration, please leave them as a comment here! I'd love to hear these and what else you learned this semester that was most useful.

Home Ec idea

2004-12-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

Jessica had this idea for using PowerPoint in Home Ec that she wanted to share. Since she's not a Home Ec major, none of the home ec girls would see her idea, so I'm posting it here. It's a good one, and actually we've had a couple of Home Ec teachers do similar ideas for their lesson plans -- so here's a confirmation that your idea was a good one!

Now I know that I'm not a home economics teacher but I do teach a cooking class at BYU in the Home and Family Living department. Lately I have been playing around with powerpoint and I came up with this wonderful idea for a class project using powerpoint. It's a technology cookbook. You could separate the class into groups and have them choose a particular category to come up with recipes to contribute to a class cookbook. An example could be: a poultry section, casseroles, family meals, kids recipes, etc. They can be totally creative. Then each person in the group needs to come up with a recipe that they have made or that is a family recipe and the group can create their own powerpoint slides for that category. Then at the end of the semester the students could choose one recipe from their category and make it for the class. When each group does this they could present their section of the cookbook with their recipe and the class can have a huge potluck dinner. The teacher could take all of the slides and create cookbooks for each person in the class with every groups categories in it. It would be fun and educational for the students while implementing technology into their presentation and learning

Upcoming final: This is fun!

2004-12-11T08:23:00.000-07:00

All right, I know "fun" and "final" aren't allowed in the same subject line, but we did the final for Dr. Allen's IPT 286 students yesterday, and it went really well (at least I thought so, and so did many of the students). Some students from our class also presented that day, and Roxana blogged about it:

"I liked the way that we did the final. I was a little nervous before I went in, but then it turned out not to be so bad. I liked telling about what I had learned about technology even if it was just power point. Plus I really liked seeing what the other students did. When they showed it as their presentation it didn't seem so impossible to do. It gave me a little bet of comfort that I might be able to do some of the things that they did as well. It was a good way to do a final, especially since that is what we'd been learning about."

So, don't let it stress you out, and I look forward to seeing all of your projects! Here are some lessons learned and suggestions from the groups that went Friday:
- Even if you're scheduled for 6 p.m. or 6:30 p.m., come at 5:30 if you can. Many of the groups went faster than we expected, and it was disappointing to have them come late and only get to see a couple of people present. So if you can, ignore the schedule and everyone come at 5:30. If your group doesn't get done in two hours, you're free to go if you wish after two hours anyway.

- Follow the schedule posted on the door of each classroom. Just go in the order that everyone is listed there.

- If you're in the microteaching rooms, we'll be recording you, but not to evaluate you (that wouldn't be fair anyway because we're not recording those downstairs). It's more to evaluate US and how well this type of a final went so we can improve it for next year.

- When it's your turn to teach/present, please write your name on the whiteboard. I know ya (even though I still get some names wrong, I do know most of you), but Dr. Allen doesn't. Having your name on the whiteboard helps her know who you are so we can tell if we're getting behind the schedule (which shouldn't be a problem anyway)

- Ab0ut 15-20 minutes per person

See you all there!

A SAD delivery

2004-12-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

Molly expresses well some of the consternation we all feel at times with teachers who use PowerPoint ineffectively,
"I don't understand why teachers always make the classic black-and-white PowerPoints with a dash of a picture here and there. Everytime a teacher pulls up one of these presentations, it is my key signal to zone out."

Don't be this kind of teacher! I totally agree with Molly--don't give signals to your students to "zone out." A SAD (Stand And Deliver) style of teaching will often do that.

Ha! Ha! The difference between generations

2004-12-08T13:54:00.000-07:00

Funny comic over at Will's blog about the difference between how our parents get news, and how many students get their news (i.e. through blogs, the internet). Go check it out!

http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2004/12/01#a2919

BTW- BYU often blocks Will's blog and I don't know why! It's safe, and I've sent a request to BYU to unblock it.

More examples of educational uses of blogs

2004-12-08T13:39:00.000-07:00

In case you like blogging and think it has potential in YOUR classroom but don't know how to do it, here are some examples of good educational weblogs, compiled by Will Richardson:

Galileo Web--The starting point for exporation of Pat's school site. I've highlighted a couple below, but spend some time clicking through the "Tech Integration Links" in the left column. Really well done stuff.

Developing Writers--This is a great example at Pat's school of how to use a Weblog to provide articulation materials for teachers. I wish my school would jump on this idea more, have Expository Composition teachers, for example, create a site that provides instructional materials, rubrics and models for the different essay genres they teach.

Ms. Chiang--Teaching Chinese with a blog. Nice example of class portal and materials/homework archive. More examples here.

The National Writing Project Blog Project also lists some educational uses of Weblogs on various levels. (See the "Tour of WP Blogs" in the left column.) Some highlights:

The Sequoia Sentinel--The homepage for the Sequoia School site.

IHMS 103--A beautiful middle school site with lots of student writing and feedback. We use this model at our school as well.

Hidden Histories-- A collaborative blog between two sixth grade classrooms 300 miles apart.

East Side Bloggers--High school bloggers in every grade. Try the "sort by students" drop down to get the scope of what they're doing.

Eating the elephant (and other thoughts)

2004-12-07T14:23:00.000-07:00

There have been a few interesting posts the last couple of days that I'd like to highlight. The first is from the "overwhelmed" category, I think. Hayley mentions that

"I have been wondering about what I am going to do as a teacher. Though I do know a lot about technology, there is a lot that I am unsure about. I am worried about using technology only for the sake of using it. I am not necessarily a technology minded person, but I do know that technology is a very important teaching tool for my students. I am just trying to think about more that I can do in my English Classes"

To Hayley and others feeling this way -- don't worry and don't be overwhelmed! Rome wasn't conquered in a day! Elephants aren't eaten in one bite! (and on, and on, insert your favorite cliche here). Seriously, you don't need to become a master at every technology to be successful. Rather, first recognize that technology IS valuable, and then make a decision each summer as you look ahead to your school year to ponder what educational technologies might help your new students. The technologies you use may change from year to year, and maybe you'll only learn one or two new technologies each year -- but if they are good ones, those tools will still be valuable.

Roxana has a thoughtful post about our discussion of Christ as the perfect teacher. She says that

"I thought that it was interesting that in class today we talked about Christ as the perfect example of a perfect teacher and why. He was the teacher that I would like to be. He taught the people simply and built upon their previous knowledge so that they could follow along. He taught line upon line, precept upon precept. I will not be able to expect that all my students will be able to understand everything at the same time. I will need to take my teaching at a pace that they can follow and build on their past knowledge.

He was also a very patient teacher. This is also something that I will need to do in order to become a good teacher. A lot of times the people that he taught didn't understand what he said, but he didn't yell at them or tell them they should've been paying attention. He just loved them and tried to teach them again. I need to be patient with the students that don't understand what I teach right away. I need to have patience and continue to try and teach them.

It is also important for me to love all my students. Christ loved everyone, even those who messed up and he didn't hold it against them. I need to do the same thing. Even if a student drives me crazy I can't hold it against them for the rest of the semester or always think of that student as the difficult one. I need to love that student anyways.
These are just different thoughts that I had about the discussion that we had in class today."

Jill continues with her thoughts on this discussion:

"I really enjoyed our discussion in class yesterday. I researched it a little more deeply and here are some of my thoughts:
"What manner of teachers ought we to be?" If we are to become like Christ and to be successful teachers, we must emulate him as a teacher and as our savior. Some qualities of a Master Teacher are:
Faith- We must have faith in ourselves, that we can accomplish our ideals with a lot of work and some divine assistance. We also must have faith in our students. All too often, students and people in general rise (or fall) to the level of expectation placed on them. It is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we show our students that we expect great things of them, they will be more willing to do so, and develop faith in themselves.
Virtue - It can become a teacher's greatest ally and source of strength. Christ was virtuous in every sense of the word. A virtuous teacher is kind, true to their purpose, loyal to themself and their students, will not permit wrong, seeks after the "virtuous, lovely, of good report, and praiseworthy", is respectful (and respected). Though we cannot teach the gospel in our classrooms, we can be an example of what we believe and thus create a spirit of learning and unity that will bless.
Knowledge - The Savior has a perfect knowledge of everything he teaches. We should also "seek learning even by study and also by faith". Teachers must be ever learning in both spiritual and secular matters in order to be effective. It is always comforting to me to remember, "blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness . . ."
Temperance and Patience - I'm sure there will be days when we feel like our classes are in utter chaos and the walls are falling down around us. Temperance and patience lend the composure and calm that we will need to know that things will work out. If we keep working at it and plead for the Lord's help, things will be ok. Temperance and patience also help us to remain focused on our goals and what is most important. Perhaps the most important help that these virtues confer is to be patient and understanding of others and their faults.
Kindness and Charity - Christ taught that we should love all men - even the annoying, the difficult, and the contentuous ones. "Charity seeketh not her own", but rather the greater good and edification of others. This is at the very heart of the work and calling of a teacher.
Teaching is difficult, and even painful at times, but I think, that if we seek to be a Master Teacher, even as the Master is, it will be the most joyous work of all. "

Lindsay said

"I have learned a lot in all my classes but I feel like I have learned a lot in my technology class. I was thinking what I had learned after class today and I realized that I really have learned a lot about technology and how to intergrate it into my classroom. ... I hope that I have the accessibility to technology when I am a teacher."

I know a lot of you are worried about accessibility and wonder, "Yes, this is all good, but will I really have technology in my school?" Maybe, maybe not. I just interviewed a first-year student who graduated from BYU and is in Kansas. His first school had nothing, absolutely nothing. He is now transfering to a school that has lots of technology opportunities and is even issuing him a laptop. I think most of your schools will be in-between these extremes, but technology will be much more prevalent in the coming years so even if you don't have many computers and such yet, you may soon.

Great posts all!

Tying up some loose ends

2004-12-06T17:52:00.000-07:00

Well class, I told you I would post some things for you so here they are!

Here's the Final Presentation Schedule
Here's the Final Presentation Rubric that you'll be evaluated on

Based on some conflicts with some students' schedules, I made a few changes to the presentation schedule. It might have affected when you present. For example, if someone ahead of you was moved to a different day, you might be presenting earlier than you thought.

Here's the changes:
Languages
Alise Paterno will now present second after Elaine Doty presents at 5:30. Mary Miller is after Alise. They are in the computer lab, which has Photoshop for Elaine's presentation

Science
Benjamin Sheldon will be presenting on Friday, December 10th, at about 3:20 p.m. in room 274. He will need to be there from 3-5 p.m. Matt Zmolek is presenting Monday, the 13th, at about 6:10 p.m. in room 274 and will need to be there from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Rachel Fugal will be presenting on Friday, December 10th at about 5:40 p.m. in room 275 and will need to be there from 4-6 p.m.

Resources shown in class
Here are the links that we showed and talked about in class today:
Homemade PowerPoint Games
Skype (Internet telephone)
Google Scholar
Live Journal
WikiNews

Also, I apologize for the mess that was trying to figure out how to upload things to my server at the end of class. That was more hassle than I anticipated and I wasn't as prepared as I thought I was ("Bad Llama!" :-). Just to reassure you, I did get the files from Lindsay Baccus, Caroline Lund, Carla Goodman, and Elise Freeman, Memorie Durfee, as well as those of you who were on Macs and posted on my server directly. I expect the rest will be on Blackboard, on the discussion board, right?

Important note about grades
I spent some time today going back and making sure everything is graded. The gradebook is updated! Please everyone check your grades and if something is missing, and if you did the work, send it to me by email so I can grade it. If not, I assume that what the gradebook says is correct. I will also try to hurry and grade the examples in the next few days so you can check your grade on that as well.

Be sure to send me your blogging posts to grade ASAP so I can grade those as well. Thanks!

Evaluating blogs vs. discussion boards

2004-12-03T10:03:00.000-07:00

There is a big trend in education towards "blended" learning or "hybrid" learning where some of the learning happens in class and some of it happens online. Our class this semester has been one example. My personal belief as a teacher is that students learn by reflecting, participating, and talking about what they are thinking. I knew not everyone would get a chance to talk in class, so I encouraged us all to blog our thoughts instead to each other.

But there are other ways of promoting online learning, of course, with wikis, discussion boards, virtual classrooms, chatting, etc. One big debate I've heard a lot is why all the fuss about blogs? Many feel blogs are just like discussion boards. In fact, someone in our class made the same comment at the beginning of the year. I promised we'd talk more about it someday.

Today's that day! Now that you've had the time to get used to blogging, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this: How are blogs different than discussion boards?

Lee LeFever has continued the discussion on his blog about the differences between weblogs and discussion boards. He has some really good ideas about why these may, in fact, be different ways of collaborating online.

As a class, let's consider this. Check out his table:

Do you agree or disagree with his ideas?
Don't worry about saying what you think I want to hear, because what I want to hear are your real thoughts! Let's talk about this as teachers -- What are the strengths/weaknesses of each? When would you use either in your classroom? When would you want to use either as a student?

Vote for the best Edublogs!

2004-12-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

This is kind of fun! Go to http://incsub.org/awards/index.php and you can nominate an educational weblog that you like for this year's edublog awards. Then you can vote, and, what I'm most excited for, see who the best ones are and add them to your aggregators. The deadline for nominations is today, and there were several nominated that I've read before and think are useful.

Finding educational blogs

2004-12-02T19:36:00.000-07:00

Anne Davis has a couple of articles you might find interesting. In one, she quotes reports that Blog is the "Word of the Year" according to Merriam-Webster.

And you heard it first in IPT 286 :-)

She also posts a list of educational weblog search engines to help edubloggers like yourselves find useful blogs. check them out! Here they are:

Educational Weblogs

EdBlogger Praxis

Manila Education Weblog Portal

Movable Type Education Weblog Portal

Radio Education Weblog Portal

TypePad Education Weblog Portal

Introducing ... Google Scholar!

2004-11-30T23:33:00.000-07:00

Roxana said on her blog,
"Maybe (I don't know if they already do) but they should have a way to go and search and only get information that is acredited. Instead of getting a huge long list and half the stuff is junk"

I responded that just last week a new search engine was released that may do just what Roxana wants it to do -- or at least somewhat. It's called Google Scholar, and it allows students for free to search for research articles and scholarly publications available on the internet. I love it, but my only concern is that there are a lot of good, reliable sources of information on the internet that are not research journal-based. So those probably won't show up in Google Scholar. But it's at least another useful resource.

Check it out at scholar.google.com

Post your lesson plans on Blackboard!

2004-11-30T23:10:00.000-07:00

Hello all! A couple of students have posted their lesson plans on their blogs, which was fine for giving me the idea of your lesson, but could you please post it under the appropriate forum in Blackboard? It just helps us to not let some students fall through the cracks if all of the lesson plans are in the same place and we can grade them all at the same time.

Thanks!

Grading your class participation

2004-11-26T16:57:00.000-07:00

Well, it's nearing the end of the semester (don't get teary-eyed, now :-) and it's time to grade the student participation part of your grades. Remember, if you read the assignment at http://msed.byu.edu/ipt/west/a_participation.html you are being given 50 points for participating in the online, out-of-class part of this course. That means your blogging and comments on other people's blogs. To quote from the assignment page:

"To get all 50 points, you must be actively participating in the discussions by posting your own thoughts on your blog and be commenting on the blogs of other students. There is no firm number of posts that you need to do, but you should plan on contributing at least around 7-10 thoughtful posts and/or comments this semester. By thoughtful, we mean critical, thorough, reflective, and instructive."

Here's how we're going to do this. Please email me an email titled "My best reflective posts" or something like that, and in the body of the email give me the URLs to the SEVEN best posts that you have written this semester that showed you reflecting on class topics.. I'm only requiring you to send me seven posts instead of 10 because I know it might be a pain to have to track down all of the posts that you have written this semester. Send me your seven best ones, and I'll assume you did some other posts as well. A post can be:
- something you wrote on your blog
- a comment you wrote on somebody else's blog
- a comment you wrote responding to somebody's comment on your blog.

A reminder about what does NOT count as a post:
- Turning in homework (i.e., your blog post about your lesson idea does not count as a reflective post, it was a required way of submitting your homework -- it was not reflective.)
- However, a couple of times this year I specifically required you to reflect about a class topic. For example, I asked you to reflect about our ethics activities. That counts as one of your reflective posts because you were reflecting on what we learned about class. The required posts that will count towards your seven are: 1) Intro to Technology integration assignment (when you reflected about how your teachers used technology; 2) Best use of technology in your major assignment (when you reflected on the best technologies used in your discipline); and 3) Ethics reflection
- Posts about non-class topics. Some of the best writing this semester was about politics, love lives, etc. While highly entertaining, these had nothing to do with class and so they don't count as reflective posts!

Do you see the criteria? A post counts towards your seven if it was reflecting on class topics or topics connected with the use of technology in education.

If you're wondering, "How in the world do I remember where I posted stuff?" remember that it probably won't be too hard to find your posts. Look on your blog first. Then think if you posted something on my blog and use the search engine at the top of my blog to find the post that you commented on (although the search engine part doesn't work as well as I would like). Finally, look at your blogging buddies' blogs if you remember posting something there.

Here's how you send me the URLs: Once you find one of your good posts, click on the "comments" button underneath it. This will take you to a page that has only that post and it's comments, and nothing else. Look at the URL bar in the browser (where you type in web addresses). This is the "direct link" to this specific post. Copy and paste this URL into your email to me. This way I get an email with direct links to your five best posts and I will be able to read them and evaluate how reflective you've been this semester!

Good luck tracking down your posts and please email them to me before Finals Week. And thanks for all your wonderful thoughts!

Other great ideas!

2004-11-26T10:33:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure if I wanted to start linking to some of the great lesson ideas because you will get to share many of your ideas as part of the final presentation. But oh well, I couldn't resist!

Amy decided to let her students choose between two technologies for presenting what they learned, but she has thought through each project and given guidelines so it will be a good learning experience either way.

Joe decided to use iMovie for a persuasive writing assignment. Why is that significant? Most people think of persuasive writing as an essay, speech, or something like that. But aren't you often more persuaded by a good movie where you can SEE evidence, rather than just hear talk about it? This is a good example of picking the right technology for the project. Doing a persuasive piece with ppt just wouldn't have the same emotional punch as a movie. And writing a good script for a movie can still incorporate literary elements, as Joe shows.

Jill's going to use the Internet, digital cameras, Photoshop and either iMovie or ppt to have students make virtual museums of ecosystems near where they live.

By the way, Jill has a really cool idea for a post called "Take a penny, leave a penny" where she left some random ideas for using technologies in different lesson plans. She's left them there for anyone stuck needing a good idea. Hopefully you'll go to her blog and also "leave a penny" or leave a good idea for her as well!

Carla has a good idea for biology

"Students will each be given a small tube containing “body fluid” which has previously been prepared—most will contain nothing, but one or two will contain an antibody that represents SARS. The students will “sneeze” on each other (mix and share fluid) three different times to simulate day-to-day interactions, keeping record of who they exchange with. A short lesson on how ELISA works will follow. Students will then perform an ELISA test to see if they have “SARS.” Finally, students will use deduction to determine who started the epidemic."

The ELISA test is some kind of laboratory equipment that helps test fluids. What I like about this lesson idea is that it is up-to-date and applicable to our world and what's happening NOW. So students learn biology doing something that applies to their lives -- cool! This would also be a good idea for a Health lesson -- in fact when Carla gets out in the schools she should collaborate with a Health teacher on this one.

Check out what your classmates are doing!

2004-11-26T09:58:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm grading your final project lesson ideas right now, still not able to move very quickly after yesterday's feast ... and there are many good ideas again. One idea, in particular, really stands out, and I thought I'd share! Hayley and Savanna (an English teacher and a History teacher) are collaborating on a project where students learn about the Civil Rights movement, read a Civil Rights novel, and create an iMovie documentary that will be fun and that will satisfy standards in BOTH subjects. How cool is this? The students will learn more by doing it more effectively, the project will be cross-disciplinary, they'll have fun doing their homework for a change, and making the iMovie project will be less work because it will count as homework for two classes.

How cool is that? Way to go!

Here's their blogs about their idea:

http://earthchild.blogspot.com/2004/11/lesson-plan-overview.html
http://www.savannasue.blogspot.com/

If you wanted to learn desktop publishing ...

2004-11-18T13:03:00.000-07:00

One cool technology with lots of educational possibilities is Adobe InDesign. This program allows you to make sweet posters, pamphlets, books, cards, ANYTHING! It's very powerful. I'd consider teaching it to you but I think we have only one copy in the McKay lab :-(.

So instead, if you want to learn it, you'll have to teach yourself. Here's a great way to do this! Go to this link:

http://weblog.edupodder.com/2004/11/i-podcast-class.html

And download the powerpoint and the audiofile. You can listen to the audio while you flip through the powerpoint (another cool way to use podcasting technology, by the way).

Wait! I can hear the pessimism already! "But Rick, InDesign is expensive and we won't have it in our school." Well, you're right, you probably won't have it in your school, except maybe just one or two copies. But you will probably have similar programs, like Microsoft Publisher, which does pretty much the same thing but not as well as InDesign. That's the trick with technologies, they really make up a bunch of "classes." You have the "desktop publishing class" and the "photo manipulation class" (like Photoshop), the "drawing tool" class (like Illustrator), the "spreadsheet class" (like Excel) and the "presentation class" like PowerPoint, and lots of others. Once you learn one tool, you can pretty much use any of the tools in its class because they work the same way. So, no, you might not have InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator at your school, but learning these tools will definitely help you take advantage of the programs that you WILL have.

Great ethics posts

2004-11-16T22:24:00.000-07:00

Here are some great thoughts from your classmates on our ethics mini lessons:

J'Nette

"There are alot of programs available for teachers to help detect students that find these easy ways to cheat hardwork.
I liked the idea of having broader questioned assignments. Rather than marking a bubble sheet they could explain the knowledge they have learned. They have a chance to defend their reasoning and it gives the teacher a better perspective of where they could improve on their teaching."

Bonnie

"It really hit me after the various lessons on ethics how important information is in our society today. there are so many devices and technologies made specifically to find, transmit and store information. It is the whole basis of our society. So it makes sense that there are so many different laws protecting information. I'm sure none of us ever consider going into a store and taking something without buying it, but many of us don't even bat an eye at stealing information, ideas, music, software, etc. It is so easy to get sometimes that it doesn't seem like stealing at all. Many of these types of things are a lot more valuable than things one might steal from a store."

I agree! Ideas may be the most valuable thing someone owns! We shouldn't break copyright just because we're worried about getting sued (who cares about that?), we should be ethical just because it's right.

Matt talks about a way to prevent cheating -- use creative and nontraditional forms of assessment!

"Another thing that can be done is to get rid of traditional tests and replace them with some other type of evaluation. group or individual projects can easily be made to show learning of a unit's concepts. for example, instead of taking a test on cells- what is mitochondria for? and what does the nucleus do?- a project could be to compare a cell and something familiar to the student (idea from marta adair). the student compares the cell and its contents to the postal service: the post office is the nucleus because it takes in all the new information (out-going letters) and processes what has to be done to get them to their correct destinations. the mitochondria is represented by money. in order for the cell (postal service) to work, it needs a sorce of energy (money). this allows the students to be creative and work together in generating concrete anchors to abstract concepts. this will help them remember what exactly the nucleus does instead of remembering that the answer was"

Interesting post from Jonathan about how much we should be involved in protecting students. There's a real ethical dilemma for you! How do we balance professionalism with our moral responsibility to help students become decent people? A quote from Jonathan:

"In my classes, this semester, I have been told that I should not try to play a role in my future students' personal lives and that I am not there to be a friend. I respect such opinions of my professors and naiive student teachers. Well, I don't see how one can't be a friend and a confidant to the students. They spnd most of their adolescence in classrooms with teachers. Whether people like it or not, teachers often have greater influences on kids than parents and are the people who they spend most of their time with until they graduate."

Here's a great question from Jared - I encourage you to go to his blog and discuss it!

"There is a film that really has facilitated some of my thinking. The movie is The Emporer's Club. In the film, Kevin Klein is a teacher at a private school. He finds out that his student that he liked a lot was cheating in an academic competition. For various reasons, he lets the cheating pass. Then, many years later, he comes to discover that this former student, now an important figure in society, still resorts to cheating for personal gain. How responsible was Kevin Klein's character? How responsible are we, as teachers, for the honesty of our students? Let me know what you think."

Why students should publish

2004-11-16T16:04:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have wondered why the big deal in this class with the web (blogs, wikis, etc.). Part of it is that I feel it is very important for students to be public about their work. Written reports that go straight to the teacher and nobody else serves nobody. If we're going to put the work into learning something, shouldn't that knowledge be shared with as many people as possible?

But that's only part of it. I also feel that the more students must show their work publicly, the better that work will be. As David Wiley said recently at the AECT conference I attended, "open peer review always improves quality IF you actually care what other people think about you." There's some healthy debate at Dave's blog about whether this is true, so read it if you are interested. I, for one, agree with this statement and feel that it is usually (maybe not always) true. I know I have been much more careful and thoughtful about what I put on my blog since I learned several of my peers and others are reading it.

This is partly the purpose for blogs and wikis - free publishing! Students can publish their thoughts and feedback in a public arena. Will Richardson had a thought recently about this that every technology tool should have a publish feature. Wouldn't that be cool if a student could make an iMovie, and then publish it to the web? Or make an Excel spreadsheet, or Publisher document, or Photoshop file, or ANYTHING and then publish to the web and all of our aggregators would notify us that this student has something new for us to look at, and we can all look at it and learn, and then we could give feedback, and we'd all be better because of this exchange ...

Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I do think it'd be cool!

2004-11-16T15:55:00.000-07:00

2004-11-13T11:02:00.000-07:00

Here's a great thought from Sheldon about why flexible copyright is important:

"I believe that all knowledge comes from previously discovered knowledge, unless it is revealed truth then it comes from God when and how He sees fit in His loving kindness to us. I could see many good uses of such a program. Give an idea and let others advance it, then you can see what they did and improve it more yourself."

As I understand it, that's really one of the key reasons for the flexible copyright push--the idea that for society to progress in knowledge we need to share what we already know so we can learn more ... together. I make something, you make it better, and we all benefit. It's really a cool, unselfish and humble way of looking at things. As Sheldon says, nobody really creates new knowledge anyway -- it always comes from bits and pieces of pre-existing knowledge. Interesting that the hebrew word for "creation" really means something more along the lines of "organize." That's really what creation is -- reorganizing old stuff to make something new.

I'll finish my post with another cool quote from Sheldon about what all of this ethics talk is about anyway:

"I think that all these things mainly comes down to protection of rights. Someone who has an idea should receive credit for it (for instance my great grandfather actually developed the geiger counter but then Geiger stole it and patented it), you should be able to share your ideas, you have the right to access public information, and it is a right to be protected from unwanted material, viruses scam artists and such. I think the most useful thing to me was just to make me aware of all of these different issues. I had never really thought of exactly what copyright is or what I can legally use etc."

Techno Cheating - Be prepared, but don't fear

2004-11-12T15:54:00.000-07:00

Great comment from Erin about our techno cheating discussions:

"One subject that seems to be the focus of many of the blogs is the issue of cheating. Perhaps we sound pessimistic, but I think that being prepared is key to being a good instructor. "If [we] are prepared [we] shall not fear."

I think she's right! If we are well-prepared as teachers, we won't need to worry about students getting away with too much. I read an article about this where the author concluded that the best way to prevent students from cheating -- whether with technology or otherwise -- is to know your students. If you know them well enough, you'll know what work is theirs and what work isn't.

I do think technology might mean we need to assess differently in the past. For example, you can go to Google Answers (I showed you the early birds this a while back) and for the for the right price get any answer you want from smart researchers who'll do the work for you. Well that kind of destroys the validity of send-home tests, huh? The proliferation of English papers online also hurts the validity of student papers on generic, popular topics.

But maybe that just means we need to test differently, or different kinds of knowledge than we've done before.

Just something to think about!

Look at you go!

2004-11-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

Hey class, more kudos in order. Try googling "Technology Integration Wiki" and see what comes up at the top!

There's more to blogging than text ...

2004-11-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

Blogs don't just have to share written ideas, they can also share visual ideas. There are blog engines that help people start photo blogs, just like we've used Blogger for text blogging. I've also talked a lot about Podcasting, which is audio blogging, and now here's a post on video blogs. To quote:

"Not too long ago Slashdot featured a post about photoblogs. It claimed that photoblogging is the next big thing, but really it has been around a while (notice how lots of folks posted a link to their photoblogs!). I think the next big thing will be VideoBlogging. Many have seen Peter Jackson's cool King Kong Video Blog, but you don't need whole a camera crew to blog using video."

If this interests you, find out about some of the photo blog, podcasting, and video blog tools out there and posts them as comments to this post so we can look into this more!

Students band together for fair copyright law

2004-11-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

An interesting article from Wired magazine about students fighting abuse of copyright law by promoting more use of flexible copyright law and open source alternatives.

One of the really cool aspects of flexible copyright law is that it gives more freedom for teachers to let students learn by RML: Rip, Mix and Learn. Basically this process means a student rips a copy of something, mixes it to give it their own spin, and learns tons through this process of remixing and creation.

An example from the article:
"Pavlosky and other Free Culture leaders are finding clever ways to illustrate the importance of copyright in their daily lives with projects like Undead Art, which challenges students to remix the cult classic Night of the Living Dead, now in the public domain, and turn it into something new -- like a zombie techno video or comic short."

While I'm not a fan of Night of the Living Dead, I am a fan of this idea. Instead of having students learn about writing, or art, or music, have them create. For example, have them rework a famous mystery story into a romance, and learn about both styles of writing in the process. Or have them learn about Roman culture by remixing a popular song so it reflects typical B.C. Roman culture. Or have them learn science by recreating classic experiments with modern twists.

Don't YOU learn more by doing? So will your students. And flexible copyright lets us legally use more of the media available out there for these kinds of projects.

Great resources for making good webpages

2004-11-10T08:42:00.000-07:00

Many of you have indicated that you think web design could be a very important skill for you as teachers. Well, Dr. Allen, who teaches another section of IPT 286, posted some great resources on her blog. These sites can help you know how to make web pages work, and how to make them look fantastic.

Design Websites

Here are a few websites that either demonstrate or teach (or both) good design principles:

http://www.lynda.com - an awesome site with all the latest tips and links to training companies and free resources, (tips on color, inspirational web sites (look in lower right hand side for the free resources info)

http://www.mundidesign.com - a site that teaches design principles (with interactive models), shows good examples of Flash interface design, and provides you with a change to try out different color schemes in a web page context

http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html - this online app lets you set colors while automatically generating related color schemes

http://www.webbyawards.com - a site that you can see all kinds of different sites that have won the "webby award" for good design
http://coolhomepages.com - the website that hosts the most effectively designed websites on-line (financial, Flash, educational, fun, corporate, etc.)

http://ucda.com/
http://www.graphic-design.com/
http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/
http://www.commarts.com/
http://www.lorrainepress.com/QandA.htm
http://www.elementkjournals.com/

Math CD-ROM you might check out!

2004-11-09T17:11:00.000-07:00

If any of you are interested in teaching math, Mike Handy from another section recommended a new software called ModuMath. Don't know much about it, except that he liked it!

Why learning about ethics is important

2004-11-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

From Lindsay:
This assigment has kind of grown on me. Earlier today I was thinking about how great it is that we are learning how are student cheat, what we can and cannot show in the classroom and other ethics issues. We are essentially getting the upperhand. I know many teachers who start teaching and no clue about how big of a problem cheating is. Let's face it, not all students or all people in the world are honest. When we out in the real world teaching I think we will be somewhat prepared.

Thanks Lindsay! Hopefully most of you feel this way. Ethics is sometimes dry and boring to learn ... but very important, especially since students look up to teachers as role models. If we don't show them that ethics is important, who will?

Update on what's due this week

2004-11-08T17:19:00.000-07:00

Class! I told ya in class this week that the only thing due this week was your blog post about the ethics mini lessons. However, I said last week that I wouldn't grade the wiki pages until next Monday, just in case you needed extra time to tie up loose ends. Don't worry and fret over the wiki pages if they're done, however! I just thought some groups may not have had time last week to do everything they wanted to with the wiki pages.

Speaking collectively, and not necessarily individually (does that sound familiar?), the wiki pages looked really good. Learning about ethics is never really pleasant because it's kind of a boring topic. But I hope this was somewhat enjoyable and useful. It appears that you really got down to the meat of the issues on your wikis, and that's what we wanted -- so good job!

BTW - if you wanted that URL that I gave today in class for the interactive virtual world, it's at tappedin.org.
It really is quite a cool and useful tool for networking with other teachers with similar interests as yourself.

Blogs names a "must have" educational technology

2004-11-08T08:23:00.000-07:00

Interesting! Nobody knew about weblogs a year or two ago, now an article in E-school News named blogging one of their "must have" educational technologies. Here's a quote from the article:

"Rolfes also touched on the growing importance of comprehensive student information systems used to track and monitor student progress, as well as the use of blogs as an increasingly popular tool for building stronger school communities--spurring much-needed communication among students, parents, and educators."

This would be a really interesting discussion for our class! What do you think are the "must have" and "must learn" technologies for teachers? If IPT 286 was only a one-credit class (grin), what one or two technologies do you think should be taught because they would be valuable to ANY teacher, no matter what their subject matter expertise is?

Speak up! I hope to hear your ideas on this one (even if you're from another section)! Be sure to give rationale for your ideas. "I think Excel is a must have because ..." etc.

Protecting yourself from Phishing scams

2004-11-08T08:11:00.000-07:00

Well, since one of the groups is studying internet security this week, I thought this article might be appropriate that I found today about how to protect yourself from phishing scams. If you've never seen one, phishing is when a scam artist sends you an email that looks like it's from Ebay, Amazon, your bank, or something else, and asks you to click on a URL and go to the website to verify your information. You click on the URL, it takes you to a website that looks exactly like the real one, you enter your financial information into the website, and the scam artist has you. It can be nearly impossible to tell the real thing from the fake thing, so the general advice is don't click on any URL that comes in an email. Your bank knows you're smart enough to remember how to find their website yourself, so they won't give you the url in an email.

Why are we studying about this stuff this week anyway? Why is it YOUR responsibility to know about viruses, scams, internet security, etc., and why is it YOUR responsibility to teach your students? For starters, if you are taking them to the computer lab, you need to teach your students how to not mess up the school's computers with viruses. If they are swapping files with each other as they collaborate on projects, they need to not be swapping viruses with their peers. If they are supposed to do homework at home, they need to know how to not mess up their home computers. Anytime we do something on the Internet, we need to be educated about how to do it safely. The problem with the Internet is that scammers are changing their methods every week, so that's why as teachers we need to keep ourselves up to date about scams and how to protect ourselves.

And by the way, did I ever mention that blogs are a GREAT way of keeping up to date on what the latest scam/protective method is? :-)

What if the students had GPS phones?

2004-11-06T10:35:00.000-07:00

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?

2004-11-04T14:10:00.000-07:00

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

2004-11-04T11:49:00.000-07:00

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

2004-11-04T10:53:00.000-07:00

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!

2004-11-03T21:49:00.000-07:00

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

2004-11-03T08:59:00.000-07:00

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

2004-11-02T20:35:00.000-07:00

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!

2004-10-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

Here's another good thought from this week's lesson plans ... from Mary:
"You learn better by doing and creating, or being interactive, than in any other way."

Remember the focus!

2004-10-29T20:48:00.000-07:00

I'm grading your lesson plans, and have been pleased with some of the really creative ideas you've had! One thing I have noticed, however, is most of you are listing things like "make a powerpoint," or "make a website," etc. as your learning outcomes. Is that really what your purpose for the lesson is? I hope not! Your purpose should be to teach science, math, history, or something, and the technology should be a resource, not a learning outcome. I know that it's easy to lose that focus in our class because we talk about technology so much, but we should always keep it in context. Remember the "mindtools" article?

Anyway, I'm not really docking points for it, so don't worry - but I do hope that for the rest of the semester, you can always remember that technology is a possible means to a learning end ... not the end itself.

On another note, Erin had this interesting post about class management:
"One of the biggest challenges with using technology in the classroom is keeping the students on task and out of sites they shouldn’t be looking at. (I subbed in a high school technology class this spring and was shocked by the amount of time the students spent doing anything except their assigned work. The Instant Messaged each other, emailed their friends, checked out movie and song websites and played computer games. I am not entirely sure how to combat that however, I am sure that the teacher CANNOT sit behind his/her desk and trust the students to stay on task. The allure to get off task is far too high if they are left to themselves!) "

Weblog technology for kids

2004-10-29T20:30:00.000-07:00

A new technology, Kidzblog, has an easy to use, and fun to watch interface to encourage elementary kids to blog. For parents and teachers, there are security features to protect the kids. How cool is all this? Can you imagine a class of fourth graders expressing opinions, analyzing stuff they've learned, and telling stories through blogs? What a great way to motivate kids to write! Check out the technology -- it looks fun!

Important announcement - put names on homework!

2004-10-27T16:03:00.000-07:00

Hey class,
One thing that will help Alyssa and I immensly when we are grading your stuff is if you would PLEASE PUT YOUR NAMES ON YOUR HOMEWORK. This is especially important when you are posting your homework on your blog. Many of you do not have your names on your blog, so when we are grading, we know that "ILuvElmo.blogspot.com" did the homework, but who is "ILuvElmo" anyway? Same thing with emails, make sure you always put your name on the email if it's not in your email address. If you are worried about putting your first and last name on your blog for the whole world to see, then sign all your homework posts with your first name and last initial, or something like that.

A better idea is to probably just to put your name in the paragraph at the top of your blog that explains your blog. This paragraph shows up in our aggregators so we'll know who you are. You can rewrite this part of your blog by going to Blogger and going to your "settings".

Congrats! Our class is referenced by a major blogger

2004-10-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

Congratulations class! Will Richardson pointed all of his readers towards our IPT 286 class wiki as a good example of using wikis in education. This is very exciting because Will's blog, weblogg-ed.com is one of THE most widely read education blogs out there. Great job!

I have a question for you: Does knowing you have the possibility of being seen and read by anybody out there influence how you write in your blogs or wikis? Does it matter? Does knowing this about your audience shape your ideas and what you write?

BTW-we're going back to the wiki in a week for the Ethics assignment, and who knows who will be reading!

Applying Mindtools across many disciplines

2004-10-18T06:59:00.000-07:00

A few students have blogged their frustrations that there don't seem to be many technologies applicable to their specific fields (such as history, language learning, home ec, etc.). Remember that there are subject-specific technologies, like geometer sketchpad, that only work for one subject. There are also Mindtools (remember our article we read at the beginning of the year by David Jonassen, still available on Blackboard--you can also search for "mindtools" on Google and gets lots of stuff). Mindtools are great because they support higher-level learning in any subject. They are subject-independent; they are merely learning tools. Examples of these types of technologies are Excel, Concept-mapping tools, web authoring, desktop publishing tools (like Publisher and InDesign), and others.

Here are two other content-independent technologies that with creativity can be used for many different disciplines:

One is Muds and Moos and MUVEs. They sound weird, I know, but they can be useful. These are virtual online worlds, where students "enter" a place and can interact with different objects in the room. Think Legend of Zelda, except with an instructional instead of entertainment purpose. I'll bet there are some out there built around Roman society where students could "experience" life in Roman society ... virtually. I've also been to a Shakespeare one that pretends to let you experience Shakespearean England.

I've also seen a very well-developed virtual world used to teach environmental issues and social studies. The students go on an expedition and enter "Atlantis," where a young lady of Atlantis pleads with the students to help her save her nation. They are suffering from a burgeoning population, corrupt governments, and many of the same social and environmental issues that we deal with. The students have to solve the problems in "Atlantis" and they can see the results on the screen of their decisions. This helps them understand how policy and culture affect our own world.

A second useful tool that can be creatively applied to many disciplines is computer-supported collaboration. This is stuff like blogs, wikis, discussion boards, instant messenging, etc. With these technologies, you can hold "debates" with "political philosophers" through online communication. Or, you can help students communicate with real or pretend "authorities" on a certain subject. For example, I heard of one teacher who asked a Literature professor from the University to pretend to be "Shakespeare" in a chat room, and her high school lit students asked "Will" questions about his life and writings. You could do a similar thing with famous people in any discipline--just find someone who really knows the person to pretend to be the person. The kids know it's just pretend, but it's still a fun and different way to learn about somebody.

What other ideas do you have of "subject-independent" technologies that could easily be used for many different subjects?

I will be there Monday, but I'll be there late

2004-10-13T14:38:00.000-07:00

Hello class,
If you remember, we're not holding class on Monday. However, I said I'd be there to help students with questions on their projects. I am now ammending that to say that I will be there ... late. One of THE landmark, HUGE people in my field is coming to BYU to speak to my department, so I'll be listening to him on Monday (he's also a BYU alumni - cool!). He's presenting from 2:30-4:30, so I will come after that and get to the McKay Lab sometime before 5 p.m. I can then stay an hour or whatever is necessary to answer any questions and offer help.

So I will be there on Monday, but I make no promises until 5 p.m.!

Blogs go political - Catch the local story!http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

2004-10-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

A lot of people are talking about how bloggers have influenced the political scene this week. It was bloggers that kept Howard Dean's campaign alive. It was bloggers that blew the cover on Dan Rather and CBS's story using false documents about Pres. Bush. A student from Dr. Allen's class linked to a story about how impactful bloggers have been this year. In our own class, Jared and Caroline have been doing some political blogging, in fact it sometimes has gotten a little heated! And blogs can get that way, for better or worse--but discussion is important and blogging may be just one more way to discuss ideas.

In case you are interested, KSL radio is airing a story on Friday morning about this issue. It will probably be on their website later that day (and did I mention you can add an RSS feed for KSL to your aggregators?) :-)

Wrapping up class today

2004-10-11T21:15:00.000-07:00

Like promised, here are some URLs and other tidbits that I mentioned in class and promised to put on my blog.

1. The URL to the Office of Information Technology Workshops is http://www.it.byu.edu. Click on "training" and then "courses by date."

2. Remember that everyone this week is supposed to blog and discuss the following question: "What technologies do you feel will be most valuable to your specific teaching goals, how confident do you feel in these technologies, and what kinds of lesson plans, learning activities, etc. would you use these technologies for?"

3. The direct link to this week's assignment is here. If you want to check the assignments for next week, and the week after, it may give you a better idea of where to go with your project. This week the homework is light, so start learning the technology you have to learn for this project. Don't save it to the last week or you'll be hating life!

4. Remember to zip me off an email as you start to come up with an idea and check with me to see if it's an appropriate technology (especially those of you that are not required to learn a specific technology). You can email me at rw@byu.edu.

5. If after class today you still think web design is your thang, and you want to learn more, here are some resources for you:

A good place for tutorials on Composer and other programs — http://www.fgcu.edu/support/
A good site on web design, from a graphic artist perspective — http://mundidesign.com/home.html
Another good site on web design — http://www.people.memphis.edu/~kjob/wbi/Index.html

There are, I'm sure, many much better websites on web design and many better tutorials for Composer. Do a search on Google and you'll find lots. Let me know if you find one you really like and I'll add it to my blogroll.

Are the videos too long?

2004-10-09T12:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Moving ... but going nowhere (BYU game)

2004-10-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

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!

Wikipedia passes 1 million pages!

2004-10-08T22:07:00.000-07:00

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!

Best Educational Websiteshttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

2004-10-08T22:03:00.000-07:00

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!

Blogs in education

2004-10-08T21:58:00.000-07:00

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

2004-10-08T13:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Turning in group evaluations

2004-10-08T12:19:00.000-07:00

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.

Web Authoring as an educational technology

2004-10-06T18:32:00.000-07:00

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:

"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

2004-10-06T18:25:00.000-07:00

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:

"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?

2004-10-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

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!)

Podcasting and application to foreign language

2004-10-05T14:48:00.001-07:00

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:

"..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

2004-10-05T14:48:00.000-07:00

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:

"..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

2004-10-05T13:52:00.000-07:00

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 ...

Educational technology in conference

2004-10-02T12:56:00.000-07:00

O.K., so it's a little cliched by now. Every professor at BYU asks you to watch conference and look for evidence of ____________ (whatever your class topic is about). For me, my professor wants me to watch conference and look for evidence of evaluation.

Well, I know it's cliche but I'm going to ask you to do the same thing with our class. What things did you notice that might apply to technology in education? I just watched Elder Miller talk about Neal A. Maxwell's counsel about how to bring peace. Do you remember how he had images and video clips of Elder Maxwell play while he was talking? Do you also remember how he showed a clip of Elder Marion Romney when he read a quote from Elder Romney? I don't know about you, but didn't that help his message stick in your memory a little better? Didn't it make it more enjoyable to listen to him and easier to be engaged in what he was teaching? I also was thinking it would be even better if when the leaders of the Church quoted a former prophet, if they actually played the audio clip of that leader talking. That way we could have heard Elder Romney's actual voice. I know there are time constraints, but it's just a thought.

In what other ways does the Church use educational technologies to help teach the gospel message (there are many, so you should be able to think of several). I look forward to hearing your ideas!

Home Economics resources

2004-09-30T16:06:00.000-07:00

Shauna Jackson, another IPT TA, is going to start doing searches for useful stuff for teachers of different disciplines. She'll do a different discipline each week. I'll link to her posts whenever she does this, so you can benefit from her research. This week, she focused on home economics and found the following:

Family and Consumer Science Wiki

A website full of useful links

From Cornell University, a website about the history of Home Economics

Transparent technologies

2004-09-30T15:51:00.000-07:00

There's one topic I wanted to bring up sometime this semester. It's the idea of "transparent technologies." To illustrate, I'll quote a comment to one of my posts about Jared's question of "whether technology is helping or hurting" (which, by the way, is a topic I think we could all think a little more on. If you need to do some posting for participation points, you might consider reflecting on this topic).

Anyway, a student responded with a great comment, and part of her comment was that:

"I totally agree with Jared that blogging and communication through computers escalates the amount of time spent away from others in a conference or socializing setting. I find myself falling into this trap. It is easier for me to write an email to my friends than to call them on the phone"

Did you catch the "transparent technology?" She said computers keep us from socializing face to face, and then she gives the example of emailing instead of calling someone on the phone. But isn't using a phone a technology? Talking on the phone isn't socializing face to face, but we think it is. We all feel this way, I'm sure, to some degree. Why is this so? Why is email, blogs, or discussion boards a "new," "radical," and "unnatural" way of talking to each other when phones aren't? Either way, we're not actually face to face.

The point I'm making is that after a technology has been around long enough that we have all adopted it, it becomes transparent. That means we don't even notice it's there. Many people don't even consider audiotapes or videotapes a technology anymore, and teachers don't have any hesitation using these technologies, but they won't touch computers (sometimes). But someday, the new technologies of today -- like wikis, for example -- will become transparent too.

As technologies get more and more transparent, it's easier to use them in the classroom because you don't have to teach the students how to use them. For example, all students know how to take a picture, so using cameras would be an easy technology to use. While I'm a huge fan of new and exciting technologies, we shouldn't ignore the transparent technologies that might be easier to use and could still be effective.

That said, I've told some of you that I want your wikis to be about "new" technologies. Transparent technologies are great, but we already know all about them. In your group projects the rest of this semester, focus on learning new technologies that may become transparent to the younger generation very quickly, maybe even by the time you graduate and start teaching ...

Images in your wiki

2004-09-29T16:10:00.000-07:00

One student asked me how to post images in a wiki. I thought others might have the same question, so I'll tell y'all. You just right click (pc) or control+click (apple) on a picture and copy the picture's URL. Then you paste the URL into the wiki. So you're really not putting the picture in the wiki, you're putting the picture's web address in the wiki, and the wiki is smart enough to do the rest. A very few pictures have not showed up. If this happens to you, just pick a different picture.

You'll notice on the wiki assignment page, that you need to have an image on each page. I was really hoping everyone would do a screenshot of the technology they are talking about, especially if you're doing a description page. Seeing just explains things better than telling. However, I forgot that you would need to somehow get the screenshot on the internet so you could then put it in the wiki! You could do this, of course, by putting your screenshot on your BYU U-drive space (the part of your U-drive reserved for website stuff), and then it would be on the internet and you could link to it in your wiki.

But I haven't expected you to use your U-drives or anything like that. So disregard my strong counsel to use screenshots and just use any images you can get off the internet that will help us see what the technology is that you are describing.

However, if some of you WANT to put your pictures on the U-drive and then put them in a wiki, it'd be cool. Once you knew how to put picture on your U-drive you'd be able to put pictures in your blog too. Here's a tutorial to help you do it (it's not hard) and the lab assistants in the McKay building are very good and could probably help you with this.

The NEW Internet

2004-09-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

Well, we all know how cool the Internet is and you all just found some great resources to help your teaching.

But what if a new Internet came out that was even better? So much better, in fact, that it's creators say it will revolutionize the way we do everything --just like the original internet did?

Well, it's happening. It's called Internet2, or the Semantic Web. I really don't understand it completely myself, but it uses a new language called XML instead of HTML, and the basic idea is this: Right now computers can search through webpages and find words, but they don't know what they mean. For example, If you search for Civil War, Google will find webpages that say Civil War alot. But what if the computer knew what you meant by Civil War, knew what kinds of pages you wanted, and what other words are related to Civil War? What if the computer knew what words meant and how they relate to other ideas? "Semantics" basically means "the meaning of words and symbols."

Anyway, like I said, I don't understand how they're going to make it work exactly, but I know that they are really excited about it. If you want to learn more about this, read this interview with Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Internet. You can also look up Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web in Wikipedia.

If you can catch the vision of what Berners-Lee is trying to do, what kinds of opportunities could this present in education? How would this impact research and learning and access to information?

More on laptops in schools

2004-09-28T08:17:00.000-07:00

Well, you all probably think I am pushing for every kid to have a laptop. I'm not. In fact, I don't believe that giving every student a laptop is necessarily a good thing nor would it automatically improve learning. But laptops in schools is a hot issue right now, and one you will probably encounter sometime as teachers. I thought you might want to read this article from e-School News on the subject about a school doing away with paper textbooks. They claim that over time it will actually be cheaper to give out laptops:

"Instead of spending hundreds of dollars per student on individual textbooks, which have become increasingly difficult to update given the ever-changing world of state standards, district administrators opted to put the money toward laptops so the curriculum could be modernized digitally alongside evolving requirements, at little or no additional cost.

Lee said the technology should help provide a more relevant curriculum while preparing students for the central role technology likely will play in their lives after graduation."

Like Rich Culatta said recently, my thoughts are, why all the fuss about laptops? There are lots of other technologies that can be very powerful. In fact, many of you are learning about them as you write your wiki pages.

What do you guys think? What technology do you think could have the greatest, most general across all subjects, impact on a school? If your principal asked you what technology he should purchase for everyone to use, what would you say?

BTW- you might consider signing up for e-School News because it's free!

A Smurfin' bad ending on the blue turf

2004-09-24T22:58:00.000-07:00

OHHHH BUMMER! I just listened to the end of the BSU/BYU game. Can you believe it? Matt Payne, the epitome of dependability, our team's MVP. Who would've thought. I hope he's not too hard on himself, because he's still the best kicker in the nation, in my opinion.

Well, after the Notre Dame game, I asked whether you thought the game was a positive or a negative. I'm going to do the same for this game. What do you think, is it going to be a good thing or bad thing for BYU?

The good:
- Best game BYU played all year
- No turnovers, low penalties, few mistakes
- BYU has an offense again!
- Watkins and Collie, you can't guard both and they're both runnin' down the sidelines!
- Beck plays two full games and it finally looks like we have a BYU quarterback again. Is this a return of the legendary Y signal callers?
- The defense snuffed one of the nation's elite offenses

The bad:
- A big blow to Matt Payne's confidence?
- A loss is a loss - we're now 1-3 and facing a big challenge if we want to go to a bowl game
- Is this a big blow to team morale?

It seemed like the game had so many positives. But I know that when I play a game of some sort, and only lose by a point or two, it hurts WAY worse than a blowout because you get so emotionally tied to the game that when it doesn't pan out, it really kills you. Do you think this game will boost Cougar morale or destroy them just before we start conference?

What was your take on the game, Cougar faithful?

Back to the well ... (laptops on campus debate)

2004-09-24T22:28:00.000-07:00

Well, one of our best blogging discussions this semester was about whether a school should/could require students to have a technology device, like a laptop. Rich Culatta on his blog made the point that there are many other mobile devices besides laptops. For example, PDAs. Many people already have them, and it wouldn't be too expensive for a school to buy a few more to check out to students. I've often wondered why PDAs aren't used a little more in schools. With all the money we fork out for computers, why not use some of that money to buy 20 PDAs? If you go to Palm's website, you'll find a wealth of ideas about how to use PDAs in education. I also saw a presentation at the SITE conference last year where they sent students on a virtual excavacation with PDAs. The PDAs acted as a map to tell students where to go, and then they collected data and entered the data in the PDAs and then made decisions about the data.

Anyway, I digress. Rich says he believes the real issue shouldn't be whether we should require a certain technology, but whether or not a certain technology would improve education. If it does, we should use it. In his words:

"This is another issue that may seem like a minor wording change, but I think it's an important paradigm shift. It's also a perfect example of the backwards thinking that we do so often in educational settings. Find the best way to teach [period]. If that requires mobile devices, then students will get them. If it requires a mechanical pencil, they will get them. If it requires a paintbrush, they will get them. To be cliché, cure the problem, don't just try to treat the solution. If the cure means that students will be walking around with Blackberry devices (which I think it may) then so be it."

I agree with Rich that we often "look beyond the mark" and don't realize what we're really all about as teachers: finding the best way to teach. But I think we also need to be sensitive to the students' situations. I may feel that a certain technology improves learning, but if it's too expensive for some of my students, then I disadvantage the poorer students. So I think it's a balance. The solution, I think, is an obvious one but one that is often overlooked: use the technology that students already have! For example, most students use instant messenger--in fact most of you said on the pre-class survey that you do. So why don't we find ways to use instant messenging in education? The students already have the technology, so let's use it. Another example is cell phones. Everybody has them! So why don't we find a way to use them for an educational purpose?

Some other examples of technologies that students probably already have or know how to use:
blogs (outside of Utah, blogs are popular, believe it or not)
digital cameras,
Word (there are tons of things you can do with Word besides just type a letter)

Examples of technologies that students may not know about, but are free so they could all have them if we wanted them to:
Drawing programs
Imovie
Online simulations and virtual tours
Transana, Anvil, and Annotape are free video-analysis programs

Okay, I can't think of any others because Matt Payne just missed the final kick and I'm now in mourning! :-(. So help me out! What technologies are already in the hands of students (or could be) that we could take advantage of?

Blogs in social studies

2004-09-24T22:20:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm a loser without cable, so I'm listening to this very exciting BYU football game and blogging on my computer.

My colleague in my department and another IPT 286 instructor, Rich Culatta, blogged today about how he is reading the newspapers less and is instead getting his news from blogs and wikis. While he admits that these sources are not necessarily always accurate, they do have the benefit of being to the point and directly from the source. For example, if you want to know about the situation in Iraq, would you rather read a newspaper reporter's spin on it, or read about it from an Iraqi who is blogging about what is happening in his backyard?

This makes me think that blogging could be a powerful tool in a social studies or foreign culture class. Instead of just reading about Spain, or Palestine, why not have your students find kids their age in those countries, and then read their blogs? Learn about the people FROM the people, not from a third-party source.

Anyway, in case you wanted to check them out, Rich posted a few blogs from Iraq. I want to look them up when I get a chance.

* Iraqi Blogs (BBC)
* US Soldier Blogs (CNN)
* Convention Blogs (CNN)

Putting it all together!

2004-09-24T12:21:00.000-07:00

Well, now you all know how to blog, and you've all learned a little bit about searching for effective digital resources.

Now let's see you put them together!

Up until this point, the majority of the blogging in this class has been reflective in nature--students are talking about things I mention on my blog or in class. That's excellent, and that's one of the things we hoped you would do on your blog. However, blogging can be really powerful when you start to synthesize things you learn on the internet, push and stretch your own ideas, and create new theories. The blogging model goes something like this:

1. Find good ideas and sources on the internet
2. Synthesize what you are learning by referring to multiple internet sources
3. Create your own knowledge by rephrasing what it is you have learned
4. Post your new knowledge on your blog.
5. Then others start the process over again by reading what you wrote, synthesizing it, creating their own new knowledge, and posting it on their blog. And the conversation rolls on and on and on.

I challenge you to do this! Find ideas related to your teaching emphasis (it it's about using technology in your teaching emphasis, even better), think about these ideas, and post them so your blogging buddies can read and learn too. If you find a source that's especially good, put it on your blogroll (now that you know how to do it).

USB drives -- the next fashion statement

2004-09-23T20:47:00.000-07:00

Okay, this has nothing to do with class, except that you were all required to purchase USB drives. I had to laugh when I read this on Slashdot (a flash or thumb drive is the same as a USB drive):

"In some cases, flash drives have suddenly become so commonplace that, as with cellphones, their owners are adding fashion touches [DNA must be on file to read] to lend them a personal identity." Apparently, the most important thing about thumb drives is not that they are cheap, fast, durable, easy to use or hold a lot of data, but that wearing one around your neck identifies you as one of the techno-congniscenti, especially if you personalize it with stickers."

So there you go! USB drives are chic now. Who would ever have thought that wearing your homework around your neck could be in style?

Do something fun and new for your wiki pages!

2004-09-23T20:35:00.000-07:00

Over the next two weeks you are going to have an opportunity as groups to learn about two technologies so you can write wiki pages about them. Part of the reason why we created this assignment was so you could see the breadth of technologies available for your specific discipline after it was all done, and so you could have the opportunity to learn a new technology.

I've seen some groups plan to do wiki pages on the Internet, movies, even magnets. Yes, these are all technologies -- but everybody already knows about them! The wiki is meant to be a collection of descriptions about technologies that aren't as well known ... so that we can teach other and give each other new ideas.

I STRONGLY suggest that when you're deciding what wiki pages to do as a group, that you don't do something easy or lame like the Internet. Talk as a group about what technologies are used in your field, technologies that maybe you don't know very well but would like to. Then you can study these technologies as you write wiki pages about them. If you have no clue what technologies might be good for your field of study, then ask your professors, practicing teachers, etc. As a last resort, you can brainstorm with me. I can maybe offer some ideas, but I'm not going to know your specific field of study as well as your professors would.

Have fun! And be bold and branch out--let's explore some technologies that may be unfamiliar!

Is blogging helping or hurting?

2004-09-23T10:41:00.000-07:00

Jared brings up a good question on his blog about computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). He specifically is talking about CSCL, but others have made the same argument about other forms of CSCL, such as discussion boards, instant messenging, even email. He said:

"Now don't get me wrong. I have really enjoyed my blogging experience. But I can't help but question, in a classroom setting, does blogging unify the class, or separate it? Let me qualify that question. We are in an age where communication is easier than it has ever been. We can follow the news in myriad mediums. We can send and recieve emails rather than wait for days or months to receive snail mail. But it seems to me that technology leads to a downgrade in communication rather than an upgrade. We spend time every week sitting at a computer communicating in writing precisely so we don't have to sit down in person with people who walk around all day on our same campus! We say, "isn't this convenient that I can get all the benefits of talking to Danielle without ever really having to talk to Danielle?" ... It seems that technology is doing more to separate us from the world and from eachother than it is doing to unite us."

I responded to Jared by saying:

"Really good comment, Jared. This debate is hot in educational technology research right now. Some people argue that technology increases collaboration and interaction, some argue it doesn't. I think a key is, does the computer-supported collaboration replace face-to-face interaction? If so, then it might not be a good choice. However, does it add interaction that wouldn't be there otherwise? For example, if the choice was no interaction because we don't have time (or whatever our excuse is), or interaction through the Internet, which is better?

Another example, I'm interacting with teachers from Australia and England right now on a project. They met me through my blog, and we are collaborating by working together on a wiki, discussion board, and through email to accomplish a project. I'd never talk to these people for real, so being able to communicate through the Internet is helpful. But I agree that emailing my wife or close friends here at BYU is less effective than actually talking to them."

I'd like to hear from some of the rest of you about this. People make a similar argument about what technology may or may not be doing to our writing. Some people say it makes us worse writers because we get lazy and use spell checker instead of really learning to spell, and we use weird internet lingo like "R U going 2 go?". Others argue that technology is helping us become better writers, or at least more frequent writers, because EVERYBODY seems to be emailing, instant messenging or blogging these days, whereas they used to not do any writing at all unless for school.

So back to the original point Jared brought up: Is technology helping or hindering?

Reminder on the blogrolls assignment

2004-09-23T09:48:00.000-07:00

Memory wrote to me this about the blogrolls assignment:

"For some reason the Blogrolls (and a few of the other links) link on the assignment page isn't working. I tried to check the rubric to make sure I had completed all of the requirements for the assignment, but I couldn't get to it! (It was working in class, so I'm not sure what has changed.)"

I've fixed that now, so it should work--thanks Memory!

By the way, I checked the assignment and remembered that part of the assignment is to also put your blogging buddies' blog URLs on your blogroll. This should be a snap, because once you've figured out how to put a link in a blogroll, it's not hard to just put a few more. Just copy the code, and change the URL. Anyway, we did this so that if me or Alyssa ever go to your blog, we'll be able to easily know who else is in your blogging group and we could go to their blogs easily because they will be linked to yours.

SO DON'T FORGET TO ADD YOUR BLOGGING BUDDIES TO YOUR BLOGROLL!

In case you need it, here's the link to the blogroll tutorial again.

Answering some questions

2004-09-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

I met with a few students yesterday, and thought I might answer a few questions that they had here on my blog in case anyone else had the same question.

Remember that each group does two wiki pages -- and ALL members of the group work on each page. You only have to outline what you want to do this week. You actually make the wiki pages next week. For these page, you can do 2 description pages (describing a technology, like Inspiration) or two integration pages (describing how to use Inspiration in a class), or one of each.

Some students worried that all the pages were taken up for what they wanted to do. To clarify, only one group can do a description page on a technology. For example, if someone else is explaining Excel, what it is, and so forth--why would you want to do that? There's only so much you can say. However, there are hundreds of different ways to apply Excel to school situations. So there could be hundreds of Excel Integration pages. If someone is already doing an Excel integration page, and you want to, just make a new link to a new page and do it!

Remember that if you don't understand wikis (for example, you don't know what I was talking about when I said, "make a new page"), then go to the wiki sandbox and learn! Here's the link to the sandbox: http://ipt.byu.edu/~wiki/28x/Main/WikiSandbox

Go there and at the bottom of the screen are some brief directions on how to write and create in wiki. I'll give only one tip here. If, when you're typing, you mash two words together, like this: "RickWest," it will create a new page and link to that page. It's that easy!

Ask and ye shall receive ...

2004-09-22T00:04:00.000-07:00

Remember how a week ago the question was brought up in class why when you read something in Bloglines, it disappears when you go back there? I explained that this is a good feature to keep only new, unread stuff in your aggregator so you don't fill it up with a bunch of old stuff. But I agree there are times when you want to save something for later, and not have it immediately disappear when you log out.

Now you can do something about it.

Bloglines just introduced a new feature tonight that you should be able to read about the next time you log into Bloglines. To quote them:

"When reading your feeds, at the bottom of each entry is a checkbox labeled Keep New. Check it and that entry is marked unread, and will stay that way until you uncheck the box. This is useful for entries that you decide you don't have time to read right now, but that you don't want to save in your Clippings folder. You can also use the mark all new link that appears at the top of each feed in the right pane when reading subscriptions to reset all the currently displayed items to unread."

So if you check this box, it will not erase a post you want to go back and reread later. Too cool! That's what I love about Bloglines. There are many different brands of aggregators out there, but Bloglines is continually trying to fix things to make their customers happy.

Your homework groups

2004-09-21T13:54:00.000-07:00

One of the crazy curveballs I threw at you this week (once again, apologies for introducing so many new things this week) were new groups. Let me explain:

- You have blogging groups to share ideas. You did one homework assignment in blogging groups, this was the Intro to Tech Integration assignment. You will do no more homework assignments in your blogging groups. You should still read each other's blogs and comment to each other, but you will not be doing homework together.

- You have homework groups. Many of the assignments in this class are group-based projects. We do this because we know many of the assignments can be complicated, and the groups are there to share the workload and help each other out so that you are not so overwhelmed. We also agree with Vygotsky, Leve, Wenger, Engestrom, and other learning theorists who believe you learn more effectively in social situations. We have learned by experience that groups of 2-4 work best. It is important to work well in your group and to communicate often because you will do several assignments together.

Here are your homework groups for the rest of the semester. I really hate my naming scheme, and I'm sure you do to. If you want to have a unique name for your group, rather than "Science 2.1" then tell me what you want to call yourselves. I've had some fun groups in my classes before, from the Spongebobs to the Gryffindors.

Homework Groups

Dance
Megan A./Nicole K./Elaine T.
Science 2.1
Memorie D./Sarah E./Rosie
Science 2.2
Carla Goodman/Benjamin Sheldon
Science 3
Jill S./Matthew Z./J'Nette N./Rachel F.
English 4.1
Jonathan B./Hayley B./Elisa Findlay
English 4.2
Joseph G./Camille M./Natalie C.
English 5.1
Tiffany M./Thomas Jared R./Danielle S.
English 5.2
Bonnie S./Caroline U./Fran Masino
History/Social Sciences/Geography (HSG) 6.1
Molly B./Jeremy J./Lindsay B.
HSG 6.2
Amy E./Savanna W./Emily D.
Languages
Roxana L./Mary M./Alise P./Elaine D.
Health/Home Ec/Family and Consumer Sciences (HHF) 8.1
Lindsay B./Jamie C./Rachelle D./Jessica M
HHF 8.2
Sarah B./Erin C./Elisa F.

This week's assignments

2004-09-20T17:16:00.000-07:00

Whew! Today was definitely a cognitive overload day. I could tell it on your faces, and I'll definitely be adjusting the schedule for the future. Sorry about that everyone--what was I thinking introducing html AND wikis in the same week?

The consolation to you should be that while the cognitive load is very heavy this week (i.e. there is a big learning curve this week for what we're doing), the actual workload is light. The assignments really are easy. So spend your homework time trying to figure out how to work a Wiki and how to do your blogrolls (if you haven't).

To summarize, there are two things due this week. I won't describe the assignments in detail because we've described them in detail on the assignment pages. If you have questions, however, write them as comments here and I will answer them within 24 hours.

Due this week:
1) Blogrolls — Post your digital resources to your blogrolls so your blogging buddies can see the sources you've found. The purpose of this assignment is also to get your feet briefly wet in HTML: what it looks like and how to write in this language. You should have done most of this in class.

2) Outline your wiki pages — Learn how to wiki, what the wiki language is (which is different from html), and decide as a group what wiki pages you will do. This is described, again, in much more detail on the assignment page. The important thing that I think lacked in many groups today is you didn't coordinate when you would meet, or call, or email, or whatever to set this up. You have to somehow communicate as a group and decide what wiki pages you want to do, and outline them very briefly on our class wiki website.

BTW- Many of you, it seemed, did not even look at the assignment page for the intro to technology integration assignment. How come? We basically gave you the specifics on how to do the assignment and get your points. We do that each week, so I encourage you to follow the rubric and you will probably have fewer questions and more points.

Double BTW — I have office hours but nobody ever comes! I can visit with students Mondays from noon to 2 p.m. or Wednesdays from noon to 2 p.m. All I ask is that you email me beforehand and then I'll meet you in the computer lab. If those times don't work, suggest another day and I'll meet you then, if I can. I want to help you this week because I know there was a lot of confusion, so just email me or post a question on my blog and I'll help you, if I can.

What good technology integration is

2004-09-20T13:17:00.000-07:00

Thank you all for your insightful ideas about what constitutes good technology integration that you posted last week. We are grading the intro to technology integration assignment still, but here is my list of Principles for Good Technology Integration, gleaned from all of your postings (yes, I read everybody's "rules"). This might be worth clipping and saving and then pulling out to remind yourself every summer before you charge into a new school year.

I've linked to each blog that provided the idea. If none of your ideas are listed here, don't be disappointed. Many people had the same good idea, but I only linked to one student, just because it was easier.

Principles for Good Technology Integration

About the digital resources assignment

2004-09-17T12:06:00.000-07:00

At least one student wondered whether you were supposed to turn in your homework this week as a posting on your blog. You know, that probably would have been a good idea ... if I had thought of it! In past semesters we have always had students turn the assignment into Blackboard, and I guess I just didn't think about changing that. Maybe next time I will.

But for THIS WEEK'S ASSIGNMENT, turn it into blackboard, just so that everyone does the same thing and we're uniform. Here's how:

Go to the assignment page if you haven't yet.

Download the template.

When you've filled out the template, post it in Blackboard under the "digital resources" assignment. It may be near the bottom until I get a chance to move it to the top.

Any questions? Post them as comments to this post.

How technology can help the disabled

2004-09-17T08:35:00.000-07:00

We spend most of the time in class talking about how technology can help regular learners, but there will probably come a time when you will have a disabled student of some sort in your class, whether that disability is physical or even a learning disability. There are many kinds of technology that assist the disabled to do many of the things we take for granted. These are often called "assistive technologies." I heard about one such technology today. It's called a Nouse, and it's like a computer mouse but is steered by your nose and eyelids. This is of course very useful for people who can't use their hands. There are other technologies too, and I even heard about an email program for special needs students, who normally can't type or sometimes read. In this program, they select pictures--kind of like emoticons -- to express what they are feeling at the moment, and they push a button to email these pictures to another person. I had another student last semester who created a simple learning game using PowerPoint that teaches letters to severely mentally handicapped students.

About students with learning disabilities. I have a hunch, but I'd need to do some research to see if this has been tested, that students with ADD or ADHD difficulties might do better with technology assignments than regular assignments. I have had some personal difficulties with my attention span and I've found that having a laptop with me in class gives me something to do with my hands ... and I actually learn a lot more from my professors. I used to sleep in almost all of my classes, and teachers probably thought I was being disrespectful, but I couldn't help it. Now I work on my laptop, and it helps me stay awake and listen better.

I won't talk much about assistive technology in this class because we're more focused on other things. But you should be aware of the possibilities and if you ever have a student with special needs, there might be a way some kind of technology could help you teach that student.

Is student agency a good thing?

2004-09-17T08:20:00.000-07:00

Hmmm, there's been some good posts today. I'll pick out one that some of you may be interested in. Rosie refers to a report by KSL that there is a new charter school in Salt Lake that gives students complete freedom and agency to choose their educational experience. They decide what subjects to study, and how to study them.

Rosie was unsure of what to think about this and said:

"I have mixed feelings. I think that it is good to give students the opprotunity to send time on things that they enjoy and to allow them to learn the things that interest them. However, its kind of scary too. No structure at all could lead to a lack of learning."

I also have mixed feelings, however I think there should be more freedom than there is now in public education. Rosie critiques this new charter school by saying that "These student may end up not learning anything because they don't feel like it." But to be honest, these students won't learn much in traditional schools either if they don't feel like it. I guess that's one plus for more student agency and choice: people tend to learn when they are motivated, and they are motivated when they are learning things that are important to them. So why not give students some more freedom? Let them have a little more leeway to choose what they want to learn, and they might be more self-motivated and be better students.

Now, after saying that, I do agree with Rosie that some structure is good, and we do have to encourage students to get a well-rounded education, or else they'll learn a lot of one thing and not much of anything else. But perhaps a little more choice and agency than is currently allowed in schools would be a good thing?

Now to tie this to technology. I believe technology can give students that freedom to explore, experiment, participate, and choose topics of study. What do you think? How could technology give students some of that freedom?

An option for digital resources assignment

2004-09-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

BTW- Here's an option for the digital resources assignment, even though it doesn't talk about it on the assignment page: You can count an educational weblog or an rss/atom feed as one of your digital resources. Why not? Some of my best digital resources that I use weekly, even daily, as a teacher are weblogs from really great sources that have really good ideas.

Remember that you'll have to establish the credibility of the blog. Normally website credibility is established when you look for things like government sites, non-profit organization sites, sites by trusted authorities, etc. Weblogs are different because most weblogs are run by normal people. So I'm thinking you could probably justify a blog as a good digital resource if you can explain to me why:
1) It is useful
2) you trust the ideas from this person
3) you would read it often enough to gain value from it
4) you would use the source as a teacher

You might also look for whether the person quotes other sources or is quoted himself, and what kinds of conversation does he/she have on the blog? A blog that is widely read by many people and has many people commenting on it is probably a good blog .

I know what you're thinking, and no, the Dilbert feed I showed you does not count as an educational resource! :-)

Have fun exploring! There are many good thinkers out there and many of them have weblogs!

Question: How do I add links to posts?

2004-09-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a question emailed to me that I thought others might have too:

"I have not figured out how to make links to stuff yet."

Here's my answer:
"The biggest key to being able to put links into a post is to use MOZILLA as your browser (it is on all of the computers in the TLSC computer lab and can be downloaded for free for your home computer at mozilla.org). When you are using Mozilla instead of Explorer, there are some cool buttons in blogger that help you edit your post, for example, you can change colors, add links, bold or italicize words, and do bulleted lists, etc. For some weird reason, those options are not in Explorer as far as we can tell.

Besides, Mozilla is a safer, more secure browser anyway and you'll get less spyware and adware with Mozilla."

Just to show you want you can do if you blog in Mozilla, here's some examples (you won't see these in your Bloglines aggregator. You'll have to actually go to my blog to see them):
You can bold, italicize, put in links, and change text color.

Center text

bullet text

number text

or indent quotes

You can also add pictures, but you need to do a few extra steps that I won't explain here. If you want to learn how to add pictures to your posts, Blogger has some help pages, or you can meet with me sometime and I'll show you how!

Intro Survey is graded

2004-09-16T08:59:00.000-07:00

I will try to always post when I am done grading an assignment so you can check your grades. I just graded the intro survey assignment. If you did it, you got full credit. And thank you to most of you for being willing to let us use your data in the research study! Four students elected not to let us use this data, which is fine, but they then forgot to put their names on the survey. Without their names, we can't give them credit for doing it (the names wouldn't be used in our research anyway--they are strictly for us to give you points for doing the survey). Anyway, if any of those students are in my class, or if anybody else did the survey and did not get credit, email me.

You can check your grades by going to Blackboard.

One last note: Emily Day, are you signed up for our class? I thought you were, but you didn't show up in my Blackboard gradebook so I couldn't give you credit.

Interesting posts for Sept. 14

2004-09-14T14:08:00.000-07:00

Hey gang, here's some of the interesting posts I read this last week. These are not necessarily the best posts, because it's just my opinion of what jumped out to me. But I thought I'd share the ones that you might not have read that I have enjoyed.

Carla's blog, Surprise!, is a great place to have a good discussion. She started a discussion on stem cell research and then this week posted this:

"Houston has purposed (and really wants to) build a school just for immigrants. They have a large group of students whose needs are not being met by the traditional school system, and so they want to make a school with the flexibility and focus that immigrant students need. More info on CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/09/08/immigrant.school.ap/index.html

What do you think? Will this meet the need or will it further isolate ethnicities?"

Megan probably has the same thought many of you do:

"Well, that is my post for today. No one has come and read any of my posts so far so it kind of feels like I am just talking to myself. I hope that someone eventually checks this out! Until next time...."

I commented that at least I am reading her blog (and enjoying it too--she's putting some personality into it, which is nice). Blogging brings up an interesting point about audience. It's out there on the Internet, and you never know who might be reading you--even if they never comment on your blog. I posted a comment similar to Megan's on my other blog, wondering if anybody was reading my blog, and a lady from Melbourne Australia said she was reading it -- and enjoyed it! Who else could be reading, and we don't know? I posted my thoughts on my other blog about how just the potential of having an audience, even if we don't know how big that audience may be, forces me to be more thoughtful and careful about what I say.

At least for this class, hopefully your blogging buddies will be reading. After that, who knows?

"Luma" (still my favorite screen name :-) had a thoughtful response to the Mindtools article by David Jonassen that we all scanned for last week's assignment. In the article, Jonassen says that:

"When learners use computers as partners, they off-load some of the unproductive memorizing tasks to the computer, allowing the learner to think more productively."

Luma disagreed with his evaluation of memorizing as "unproductive." Her reasoning is that

"Although memorizing often seems like busywork, it is very necessary in education. There is no way to get along without at least a few rudimentary memorization skills. The very ability to read comes from memorizing letters, combinations, and sounds. How much longer and more difficult will homework assignments take if students are not required to memorize? Students would be constantly looking up information that should be found in the cannon of knowledge of an educated person."

I thought she had a great point, and there is power in being able to quote or recall information from memory, but I responded with the reasoning from the other side of the fence:

"This is actually heavily debated in education right now. Do we teach students to "know" things by having them memorize procedures and facts, or do we help them learn how to "do" things with knowledge that is stored in computers or databases? For example, should students have to memorize calculus equations, or simply know what the theories are and how to apply the correct equation to the correct situation?"

I'd like us as a class to discuss this further. And don't be afraid to share your opinion, even if it's different from mine. I'm still developing my ideas and like to hear your perspectives!
Here's some possible questions for discussion:

Do you agree with Jonassen that technology should be used as mindtools and not for drill-and-practice, memorization, etc.?
What kinds of learning and knowledge do our students need to learn the most?
Should we have students memorize facts, numbers, formulas, etc.?
How much memorizing should we do and how much other types of learning should we encourage?

BYU vs. Stanford

2004-09-14T14:01:00.000-07:00

We had a lively discussion last week after the BYU game, so I'll post another discussion about last week's game. This is totally off-topic, so if football doesn't interest you, skip this post!

I almost didn't want to post after last week's game. What is there to say? It seems that BYU football just isn't as much fun anymore. It used to be that even if they lost, you were glued to your seat, mostly because we had such explosive offenses that you never knew that the game was really over. I mean, the Miracle Bowl could ALWAYS happen with old BYU offenses. It just doesn't seem that we have that offensive swagger anymore.

Really, our stats were almost identical to Stanford's. What was the difference? Mistakes. Interceptions, Fumbles, Penalties, Missed assignments, Poor decisions. We really weren't that overmatched, and Jason Beck didn't do that bad--we just had too many mistakes.

Go ahead and post your thoughts--I want to hear them! However, remember to be nice. Anybody could be reading this. Critique the game and the team, but let's not bash individuals.

Cool blogging tip

2004-09-14T10:44:00.000-07:00

Katy from another section of IPT 286 found a great way to expand your blogging circle. She writes:

"If you fill out your extended profile, you can list your interests and hobbies. I did this, and then viewed my updated profile. It sets apart your interests and highlights and underlines them. If you click on them, then it brings up every other blog that has the same interest as you listed. Thus you can find people from all around the world with the same interests as you"

Cool Katy, thanks!

BTW - if you find a great blogging tip or feed from a good blog, or if you hear about a great new technology that you think we might be useful in, post it on your blog and spread the news!

Discussing digital resources

2004-09-13T22:03:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I explained what you needed to do for this week's assignment. In this post, I'd like to discuss a little why digital resources are so important. Ideally, we'd hold this discussion in class. I'd usually pair you up, you'd discuss things as a pair, and then we'd share our ideas with the rest. We'll have to do the best we can online, and I hope many of you share your ideas as comments to this post, or as posts on your own blogs.

Why do we want you to learn how to find things on the Internet? Doesn't everyone know how to do that already? Yeah, but like I mentioned in class today, there is too much information out there in the world. The problem is many don't know how to use it. The people who really know how to find good, useful, and credible websites fast are usually much more productive than the rest of us. In an article called "The ABCs of Website Evaluation," Kathleen Schrock gives 26 (one for every letter of the alphabet) criteria for evaluating websites. She talks about criteria such as authority (is it a credible author?), dates (is it current?), bias (why was this site created?), and citations (does it have them?). She also gives the 5 Ws for evaluating websites:

Who wrote this material and put this website together? Are they credible sources?
What is the purpose of this site?
When was this site put together and last updated?
Where does this information come from?
Why is it useful to me?

This is a really great article and I'll send a copy to anyone that asks me for one by email. Once again, I'd post it here, but for copyright reasons I shouldn't.

Here's the discussion questions I'd like to ask you, and I hope you'll answer!

How do you know a good website from a not so good one? What do you look for?
What types of websites are the BEST ones for helping you as a teacher?
What search techniques do you have for helping you find good material in a web search?
How could we teach our students how to find information quickly and recognize good information when they see it?

Digital Resources assignment - due Sept. 20

2004-09-13T21:32:00.000-07:00

Well gang, I am sorry we ran out of time before we fully discussed this week's assignment. I'm used to teaching IPT 287--a 2-credit class. I'll try to manage class time better!

Because I didn't get to explain the assignment in class, I'll do so here. If you have questions, you can post them as a comment and we can carry on a Q and A here on my blog.

First off, the direct link to the assignment is right here. However, you can always get it from the "calendar" or "assignments" link on the right of my blog. You can read the details on the assignment page, but here's the brief low-down:

Purpose: Find a lesson plan and two good educational digital resources (with the emphasis on good).

How:
1. Go to uen.org and find the standards for your teaching emphasis.
2. Pick a standard and find a lesson plan to teach that standard
3. Pick another (or the same) standard and find two educational websites that would help you teach that standard
4. Post your Word document to BLACKBOARD as an attachment to a post in the discussion forum called "Digital Resources."

Like I said, there's more detail on the assignment page.

Once you've found your digital resources, you need to evaluate them and explain why they are good resources using the template we've created for you. On the template, it asks you to what category of educational website your resource belongs to. These were the papers I had available for you in class. You can also download these 11 categories of Educational Websites here. I attended a conference just a week ago where Trey Martindale, a blogger himself, explained these categories. He admits that many really good websites fit into multiple categories, so if the digital resources you find fit into multiple categories too, that's fine--just explain your reasoning.

Trey describes the 11 types of educational websites in the article you can download, but it might still be helpful to get a second take on it, so here's my stab at explaining the categories:

1. Instructional
A website with a learning activity that asks a student to do something, has specific instructional goals, and a way to assess or give feedback on the student's performance.

2. Learning Activity
A website similar to instructional sites, but perhaps lacking the goals or assessment aspects.

3. Content Collection
A popular form of website that simply has a bunch of material on one subject. Example: A website on Shakespeare that has tons of stuff on good ol' Will.

4. List of Links
A website that has the main purpose of providing links to other great websites.

5. Reference/Archive/News/Database (RAND)
A website that is a reference tool, such as an online dictionary, encyclopedia, or the like. Different than content collection because it has information on many subjects and not just one.

6. Teacher and Parent Resouces
A website geared not towards students, but those who teach them.

7. Shared Experience
Websites where students can experience things togethers, such as virtual tours.

8. Personal Expression and Interpersonal Interaction (PEII)
Websites that allow people to interact, express themselves, and communicate.

9. Informal education.
Websites not meant to be educational, but which have educational components. For example the Hogle Zoo probably has material on its website that would be great for elementary lessons.

10. Research and Service Organizations and Projects (RSOP - boy you gotta love his acronomyms, huh?)
Websites that are organized as part of some massive research project

11. Commercial. Example is Microsoft's education page.

Go forth and conquer!

A lesson learned from the music industry

2004-09-13T12:30:00.000-07:00

An interesting observation was made by Timothy on Slashdot recently. Have you noticed that for the first time, the next big thing in the music industry is NOT better quality but better mobility? In the past, the next big thing in music has always been more Hi-Fi, better sound, higher fidelity. Now the future is mp3, which is poorer quality than the current CDs, but is a whole lot easier, more mobile, and more convenient.

Can we learn something from the music industry about using technology in education? I think we can. I think we often think we need BETTER technology, MORE RAM, MORE memory, FASTER processors, the MOST RECENT softwares, BIGGEST upgrades, and so on and so forth. Many times teachers complain that they can't integrate technology into their teaching because their school doesn't have enough money. But it seems that the technologies that sometimes make the biggest impacts on education are the small ones that are so ubiquitous, so transparent, so assimilated into our society that everybody already has these technologies and knows how to use them.

For example, which technologies are used the most in education today? Video. Internet. Audio. Word processing. Why? Because these are easy technologies to use and most students already know how to use them so we don't have to teach them.

What will be the easy, simple, and everybody-has-one technology of tomorrow? Can we start planning how to use those technologies in the schools?

This also ties back into our laptop discussion we had last week. Many students posted that having laptops for every student was a bad idea because of cost factors. So what kinds of technologies are so cheap, simple, and available to everyone that we CAN expect most students to already have them and to know how to use them?

Not everyone plays nice

2004-09-10T10:28:00.000-07:00

Hey class bloggers! Just a warning: Not everyone in the blogosphere plays nice (duh, right? That's a common problem anytime you deal with people--not everyone wants to obey the rules).

What I'm talking about is there's a chance someone could post a nasty comment to your blogs. It's never happened to me yet, but it did happen to another instructor. If it happens to you, send me an email, and I'll explain how to delete the comment. It's not hard to do, so if it happens to you, it's easy to fix. If we get time in class and you want me to show everyone how to do it, I can.

Wouldn't it be nice if we all just were nice to each other? We won't have that problem when we're blogging in the millenium ... :-)

The link to this week's assignment

2004-09-10T09:26:00.000-07:00

A student informed me that one of my links to this week's assignment is broken. I'll fix it today. You can actually access the assignment through the "calendar" link on my blogroll, but just to make it easier for you, here's the direct link to this week's assignment:

http://msed.byu.edu/ipt/west/intro_TI.html

A laptop on every campus

2004-09-09T16:18:00.000-07:00

"As college freshmen head off to campus this year, they're toting cellphones in one pocket, iPods in another. And that click-clack you hear isn't the jingle of new dormitory keys - it's their fingers pounding instant messages back and forth."

Here's a debate for you! The Christian Science Monitor reports in an article today that about 3% of colleges are requiring their students to have a personal computer. A lot of universities are considering doing this, but they are not sure they want to. However, one professor said that they would never go back because it has helped their students so much:

"Everybody in the community talks with each other more frequently," says David Brown, a professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. "Students run into trouble, they e-mail one another, e-mail the faculty. The whole culture changes."

However, Donald Heller of Penn State takes the other side of the fence.

"There are much better ways to improve learning on campus than telling students they have to buy a laptop.

What's your take on this argument? The real issue here is should educational institutions require students to have a technology that they think will enhance learning? We require students to buy textbooks because we think it will enhance their learning. What if we did studies and found that IPods can be used for educational purposes. Should we then require everyone to have one? Some departments and classes here at BYU require students to purchase a remote-like device that helps them interact in large classes (physics 100 with Dr. Turley does this). Is this a good thing to do or not?

Taking it one step further, what about in high school? Should students ever be required to have a technology ... just like they are required to have paper, pens, etc.? Should schools provide technologies to students? If so, which ones?

Italkin' with your IPod

2004-09-09T16:10:00.000-07:00

Okay, this doesn't really have much to do with technology in education, but then again, maybe it could. Now it appears that you can get a program called ILingo for the ever-popular IPod. It will translate and pronounce important phrases like "Where's the bathroom?" into 450 languages!

So the next time you're stuck in Spain and can't find el bano, you'll know what to say ...

I originally was thinking this didn't have any application to education because most people don't have IPods. But then I thought, what if they did? The trend in technology is that the price really bottoms out after a few years. For example, I saw a digital camera on sale at Wal-mart for less than $25. I swear it! So what if IPods ever became cheap enough that everyone had them--just like everyone has personal CD players now?

What ideas would this open up? If you, as a teacher, realized most or all of your students had this technology already, how could you utilize it in your teaching? I expect the foreign language teachers to just pipe right up, but how about the rest of you? The IPod has many potential uses--how could you use it?

Are you confused?

2004-09-09T08:14:00.000-07:00

A student in another section of IPT 286 posted this on his teacher's blog:

"The set up of this class is very confusing. It would work much better if I had a hard copy of the syllabus instead of having to spend time on many different pages trying to figure what and when something is due."

I haven't heard any similar concerns in our class, but maybe I should ask directly: Are you confused about the setup of the class, and what websites are good for what? This is how I have set up the class:

All class discussions and announcements are on the weblogs
Turn in homework to Blackboard, unless the assignment sheet tells you to do it as a blog post
Links to the syllabus, calendar, assignments, etc., are on my blog roll (the list of links on the right of my blog). FYI, I have updated the calendar and assignment page with links explaining a little more clearly WHAT you have to do with your blogs and what I EXPECT to be able to get the blogging and attendance points.

BTW, if you want a paper copy like this student did, of the class syllabus, you can just print one out, because it is linked on my blog.

Granted, it's always a little confusing to learn a new technology, so you have to give it a couple of weeks to get things going. I also know that new students who just added aren't in blogging groups yet, so they're a little outside of the loop. We'll fix that this Monday. Other than that, are there any questions? Post them here, and I'll try to answer them!