Final Entry

I have experienced a number of new technologies this semester that I had never used before. It will be interesting to try them out in the context of real courses that I teach with real assignments and connections to education. I now definitely have a number of new options for performance-based assessment ideas, classroom organization tools and resources for myself and my students.

Our final presentations confirmed many of my hesitations regarding technology, but also enlightened me to many new things I did not know about. The presentations covered a number of technologies I had never heard of and have never used, and am excited to explore. In particular, the WebQuest and the Scrapblog site stuck out to me. I had seen WebQuests before, but had never really explored them. The Scrapblog site seemed kind of like a glorified PowerPoint, but with designs and formats that I think would really appeal to young people. I also liked the Mario and Monique's presentations, because I liked the way the camera seemed to pan over the presentation as a whole.

The other blogs I visited were Mario's The Big Onion, Natalina's Keeping Up Globally with Mathematics, Frank's Life as a Science Teacher and College Coach, and Lauren's Literacy and Technology. I thought it was interesting to see how different everyone's blogs were. Some people's blogs were very short but frequent, and others' were more like mine, where they were posting less often, but were writing much more in depth. It was also interesting to hear what other people were experiencing with all of the projects and new technologies.

WOW Project Reflection

I was pretty frustrated with the way my WOW project presentation turned out. I was very concerned about making sure that my project involved interaction but did not create opportunities for technological difficulties for my classmates. So, I decided to use Mind42.com to create a collaborative graphic organizer with my classmates of the different technologies we learned over the course of the semester and how they fit in with the 6 C's of motivation. I thought this would teach the content of the 6 C's as well as actually put them into practice.

So, to avoid any technological problems, I spent quite a bit of time creating individual log-ins for every member of the class to use on Mind42.com so that everyone would just have to log in and be ready to go for the project. Unfortunately, this website, which is designed for the purpose of collaborating, apparently crashed when we tried to collaborate. This is my biggest issue with technology--it so often creates more problems than the solutions it provides. Not always, of course, but it is so incredibly frustrating in a situation such as this, where time did not allow me to turn to an alternative.

Other than that, I enjoyed planning and researching for my project. It was an interesting challenge to try to make an online presentation both enjoyable and interactive for everybody. This was certainly a different type of presentation than any I have ever had to do before.

Super Cool School

I watched the demo video for SuperCoolSchool and was very impressed. It reminded me a lot of WizIQ or WebEx but it seemed more tailored for students. I think it would be a fun idea to use something like this in a classroom to empower students to become their own "experts" in something. They could start their own schools, or we could start our own school as a class, and they could offer classes taught by themselves. This could be a great alternative to group or individual presentations or a great way to teach public speaking with a fun technological twist. Students enjoy being masterful at something, and a tool like this could help them display their expertise. This could integrate areas in students' lives where they feel like experts, such as pop culture or technical skills, and areas where they don't, such as schoolwork.

My Videos

These are the two videos I made for our video assignments. I tried to create videos that I could potentially use in my own high school English classrooms, so I chose to cover literary elements.

Parent Newsletter Project

I enjoyed our group's parent newsletter project, if only for the fact that I appreciated becoming aware of how much easier it could be to communicate with parents if I implemented an online method. LetterPop in particular is very easy to use, and even though it comes with formats that make it very easy and quick to make pretty generic newsletters, it also is flexible enough that you can make it your own. In the end, we chose LetterPop because it is so easy, quick and reliable, and it is easy to publish it for others to access. We had some trouble with the Scrapblog website, and turned to LetterPop instead. Since I will be teaching high school and will have five times as many students as my elementary counterparts, I really appreciate the value of accessible mass communications with my students and their parents. This type of project could very easily become integrated into my classroom to the extent that I could even have students working on it as part of their own projects or lessons.

Mind-Mapping Tools in Classrooms

This is an image of my mindmap creation. I use Mind42 to create it. I think this is a great graphic organization tool because it allows you to organize information very easily and can very quickly turn it into this very useable image, and you can so easily link other informational sites or student projects. I chose to use an author as the basis for my mindmap. This was great because I was able to branch off in so many directions so quickly, such as his life, his books, and themes in his writings. I definitely can see this being an interesting assessment and reflection tool at the end of a unit. It would allow students to collaborate on projects, and they could even divide up responsibility for the various branches. This way students could see the "big picture." I think it might even be a neat way for me to graphically represent the curriculum we cover over the course of the year, to give students a "big picture" version of our course and how everything fits together.

Digital Students: Teaching in Context of Culture

No one would think it makes any sense to head out into the tribes of Papua New Guinea armed with lesson plans full of laptops, video cameras, wikis, blogs or digital storytelling tools--I suppose it makes no more sense to head into a 21st century American classroom without them. I am still not sold on the idea of replacing the traditional classroom with technology, but it does make sense to integrate. I really honestly just think it is good pedagogy to be mixing things up and offering variety, and opportunities to create and explore new information. It just so happens that if technology is involved, it generally means that these things are happening. Great, interactive lessons can happen without technology, too, and they should. People shouldn't be dependent on technology, but they should have opportunities to use it to better themselves and their educations.

I found both of these videos to be interesting. The video about the college students was very poignant and exposed a lot of truths about college education. It is not only true that many college professors do not utilize technology, but that they do not even utilize good pedagogy. This combination, in this place and time, can really be devastating for students. Especially since we are paying for this education.

The video about the k-12 students reminded me of Lisa Delpit's book Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, if only because of the moment when the children ask what would you want "if I were your son? your daughter?" It reminded of an important conflict. We as educators have to remember to value our students' education as highly as we would value that of our own children's, but that we also have to remember that not every parent wants the same for their children as we do for our own. For example, if we do paper and pencil all the time, the education will not be engaging or effective, and many parents will be angry with this. If we do "fun" interactive technology lessons all the time, without maintaining a visible level of rigor, relevance and applicability to a curriculum, we'll have yet more people to answer to. We have to find a balance between our own values, the values of our students, and the values of our students' parents.