Introducing ... Google Scholar!

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!

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

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!

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!

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 ...

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

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

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!

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!

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

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!

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 ...

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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? :-)