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.

The Wiki Project - During and After

Check out this link for my article reviews:
PBWorks.com

Check out this link for the group's newest Wikipedia.org entry:
The Benefits of Web 2.0 in Education

Well, when it is all said and done I must say that I am pretty impressed with Wikipedia.  Having spent the last few years telling students not to trust Wikipedia because you never know who is posting stuff, I finally have some insight into the inner-workings of this mysterious site.  They promptly took down my erroneous information from before and have, thus far, left my group's very informational contribution in place.  While it is true that as researchers, we must always be careful of our sources, Wikipedia may have just climbed a little higher on my list.  At the very least, I know I will feel better about allowing my students to use this site.

There is certainly plenty of information on Wikipedia for students to use.  As with all other educational technology tools, it has become more important for teachers to show students how to sift through all of the information available rather than just find the information.   We continue to see the role of the teacher change in our modern classrooms.  Instead of simply delivering knowledge to students, teachers become more of a check-stop for students as they find their own information.  This does not lessen our responsibility in the classroom, but merely change our focus.

Wikiality and The Ease of Becoming an Expert

Who knew becoming an expert was so easy?  While Wikipedia.org certainly has many virtues, my latest experiment goes to prove that people must be wary of what they trust on the informational site.  According to my latest update, the character of Shrek was loosely based on a cartoon character from my childhood...Bullwinkle.  Ignore the fact that one is a moose and the other is an ogre.  Ignore the fact that one is Scottish and the other American.  Ignore the fact that one can think for himself and the other has trouble with thinking.  Ignore all of these because I am an expert and Wikipedia told you so.

While a shared collective knowledge like Wikipedia is important for those of us in the education field, it is always important that we remember to check our sources.  It is especially important to pass this knowledge onto our students.  The job of the 21st century educator has become twofold; not only do we need to introduce our students to prospect of technology and all it has to offer, but we must also show our students to sift through the "knowledge" that is out there.

The bottom line is that if Wikipedia has taught me anything this week, it is that students can no longer simply accept knowledge.  Instead they must question it and discover it for themselves.

Prezi Software

Introduction on Prezi

Over the course of the last week, I have been trying my hand at new software that I could use in my own classroom.  Prezi.com offers an exciting presentation format that I thought had great potential.  During the week as I worked on my brief introductory Prezi above, I came to decide that while the software does have great potential, it is a little difficult to use.  Trying to get images and words to display without cutting each other off is hard.  If the software had a little more flexibility so the user could choose how and where their text is displayed upon "zoom-in", it would make this presentation package much more powerful.    Another downside to the program is that you are limited to themes which affect every part of the presentation.  I found it very difficult to change specific title fonts or font colors.

Even with all of that said, Prezi.com does change the way we can think about presentations and it gives their users a chance to play around with new ideas.  I would highly recommend taking a look at it, but I don't know if it is feasible to assume you could transfer all of your old PowerPoints to this format.