Google Docs and Amazon Book Review

All in all, I am not sure this assignment has done much to change my outlook on Google Docs or book reviews.  Before this assignment, I was already a fan of Google Docs and this simply reiterated what I already thought.  It is easy to use, and welcomes collaboration with the in-"doc" chat window.  I look forward to incorporating much more of this technology in my own classroom in the coming year.

In regards to the actual book reviews, I don’t know that my opinion changed there as well.  Before this assignment, I did not pay that much attention to them and I do not foresee myself paying more attention to them now.  Instead, I search for books covering the topics I am interested in and try to see their table of contents, or even sample pages.  This, I think, is more helpful to me than other people’s opinion.

My list of Amazon.com links:

Rethinking Educational Technology

Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts

Innovative School Leader's Guide

Really Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works

The Project Based Learning assignment I am in the process of creating focuses on the learning strategy of nonlinguistic representation.  Specifically, students will be required to create a multimedia project based on one of the characters from a short story they have read.  Because this is a multimedia project, students will have the option of using many different Web 2.0 tools for this assignment.  They will be able to use Prezi, wikis, blogs, or create a video.  The primary 21^st century skill this assignment addresses is that of the basic Digital Age Literacy.  Through this assignment I hope to have my students improve their visual and information literacies, their cultural literacy, and their technological literacy.  Below is the rubric I plan to use when grading this project.  While this is still a work in progress, I am sure you can see just how awesome this is going to be.  I am truly excited about how this project is shaping up and I look forward to posting the entry event video soon.

Better Late Than Never - Julia Fallon

Way back at the beginning of the semester I forgot to attend an online session that was visited by Julia Fallon.  Through the power of the internet and screencapture technology I have been able to go back and view the archived session.  Overall, I was very impressed with her presentation about Twitter.  I think the thing the stuck out to me the most was her description of Twitter.  She described it as a way to build community and to network.  My experience with Twitter has led me to the same conclusion.  I am constantly amazed at the ability of Twitter to bring me together with some exceptional leaders in the field of educational technology.  Whether they are specific companies, other teachers, or university researchers, Twitter allows its users to create their own community.  Over the last few months, it has become an extremely powerful tool for me.  While I look forward to using it for my own benefit in the future, I am left still wondering just how I might be able to implement this powerful web tool in my own classroom.

Dr. Brian Dixon Webinar

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to be a part of a webinar run by Brian Dixon.  Considering I had never heard of this man before that night, I was pleasantly surprised at his presentation.  Dr. Dixon, author of The Innovative School Leader’s Guide to Social Media was not your average webinar presenter.  Most presenters I have had the privilege of seeing have come in with a predetermined PowerPoint presentation that highlights certain uses of certain technologies.  Dr. Dixon, on the other hand, began his presentation with a Poll Everywhere vote to see what his audience was interested in learning about.  From there he jumped around his presentation to the topics of interest and really covered them in great detail.  One of the best things out of the evening was leaving the webinar with too many ideas of technology integration.  It is never a bad thing when a teacher has TOO MANY ideas to try out in their classroom.  My bottom line is that if you have the chance to read the book, or see Dr. Dixon present, take it and run with it.

Crowd Accelerated Innovation

The article, Crowd Accelerated Innovation, by Chris Anderson and the video of his TEDTalk holds some interesting food for thought.  The idea that web videos are pushing people towards new learning everyday is certainly very interesting.  It seems like every day I see something online, whether it is a video, a website, a blog, or anything else, and I think to myself, “dang, I want to do that on my website, or with my own video.”  The bottom line is that there is some truth to the fact that we, as human beings, are pushed forward by what we see others do.  Moving this into the classroom could be as simple as providing previous student work to your current classes and encouraging them to do better. 

The video below is one video out of three that I looked at to see if there was any truth to Anderson’s idea.  While I believe Crowd Accelerated Innovation is at play in regards to the actual teacher who created the video, I am not quite sure it came into play with their students.  The video, compared to other two videos I watched was certainly a higher quality.  It was obvious that the teacher who created it looked at other videos and figured out how to take their video to the next level.

Action Research and Educational Research

Action Research

Chapter 1 of Action Research: Teachers as Researchers in the Classroom, Second Edition, is an extremely informative chapter for teachers explaining how to conduct research in their classrooms.  The four steps that this author recommends are plan, act, develop, and reflect.  In the planning stage the teacher determines what their current situation or problem is.  The acting stage has the teacher implement an improvement.  The developing stage is a chance for the teacher to review the changes that have been made, while the final stage, reflecting, gives the teacher a chance to report out and give recommendations.  Each of these stages is a recursive and cyclical process whereby the teachers often repeat some or all of the same steps repeatedly until a desired outcome is achieved.  The key to action research is that it is an ongoing process that never seems to end.  Teachers are constantly presented with new students and curriculum which require new and different strategies from year to year.

Educational Research

There are five basic steps to conducting a literature review that the author of Educational Research: Planning, Conducting, and Evaluating Quantitative and Qualitative Research, Second Edition recommend.  Those five steps are to identify key terms, locate the literature, select the literature, organize the literature, and write the review.  Following these steps makes reviewing literature quite straightforward.  By narrowing your search to relevant terms, you can easily rule out those not-so-informative articles.  Running the search and selecting the literature requires a keen eye and the need to evaluate the results of your search.  Finally organizing the literature and writing the review is a good process to help you organize your thoughts and see what exactly you have.  Organizing the literature simply provides you with a visual representation of the research you have done.  For an example of this visual aid, check out the literature map for the Wikipedia.org entry I wrote below.  I made the literature map using gliffy.com.

Made to Stick

Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, presents many ideas that may not be innovative, but are certainly presented in such a way as to seem as such.  One of the main ideas that stuck out to me was that of the “Curse of Knowledge.”  The “Curse of Knowledge” is basically the idea that once we have learned something, it is hard to imagine that other people don’t know it as well.  As teachers, this leads to problems in explaining things to students.  We, the teacher, already know how to solve the problem, but we have to put ourselves in the shoes of our students to figure out how best to explain it to them.

Made to Stick seems to be a book that aims to help everyone, not just teachers, explain problems and concepts to people, or students, in such a way as to make an indelible mark on them that they won’t forget.   According to the authors, by making our concepts simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and related to a story, we can insure that what we are trying to teach our students will, in fact, “stick”.  While I did not have the chance to read the entire book, rest assured it is on my reading list for the summer.  From what I have seen from Chapter One, it should be on yours as well.