Learning About the Internet and Online Word Processing

This week we are learning about the structure of the internet, how to effectively navigate it using web browsers and a little about online word processing.  There is a lot of content here so lets dive in:

1.  The structure of the Internet -
This is pretty interesting as I always assumed the internet was something that was just growing in terms of number of web pages and not really in complexity.  The team behind the Google Chrome web browser put out the following booklet about the structure of the internet and if you can stand a little bit of the pandering to try to get you to use their web browser it is a really good read.  You can check it out for yourself at http://www.20thingsilearned.com/home  I really liked the part about how Google and other companies are trying to stream line the web so that less code can do more.  3D, video, pictures, sounds and other multimedia used to require a lot of plug ins in order to properly work.  It seems that now HTML has evolved to take on these challenges.  It will be interesting to see what is in store for the web in HTML6 and beyond.

2.  Searching the Internet - 
This week we are to look at several different web search engines and evaluate them against our current preferred web browser.  I, like many others, have been a Google guy for many years and it will be fun to use a few different browsers to see how things stack up.  I am especially excited about the possibility to produce my own narrowed search engine using http://www.google.com/cse/.  I just had a quick assignment for my students to find out how much energy usage they typically had in a day and they produced wildly different numbers due to not having a narrow enough search.  Hopefully I can put together a decent search engine for them to use through out the remainder of their Alternative Energy unit.

3.  Online Word Processing - 
The last thing we are looking at this week are online word processors.  I appreciate that the cloud is a wonderful way to share information, but there are some downsides that I am a little worried that we have not discussed:  the lack of ownership of one's own creation, the lack of powerful formatting and editing tools that a full software package offers and the tying of your work completely to an internet connection. That being said online word processing has numerous applications in the classroom that I can see.  Last week we looked at the wonderful website typewith.me and the use of the document creation software for collaborative work in a synchronous fashion.  I could see implementing google docs or writewith.com as an asynchronous option.  Having students email files back and forth tends to get really messy when working on projects.  A word processor that is in the cloud can really help students organize collaborative work.

Embedding my presentation for CED 515

I had trouble embedding my presentation for CED 515 so you get to see it here!  Check it out below:



Check it out as it is a little bit of Physics Phun that I think you'll enjoy.

Starting CEDO 515

We are now into a class that is all about using productivity tools effectively.  I am a firm believer that technology implemented in the classroom poorly is worse than no technology being used at all.  It was kind of nice to have these sentiments echoed in the first chapter of Supporting Learning with Technology. The chapter of the book outlined some steps to proper implementation in the classroom.  i'm looking forward to evaluating my classroom use of technology since I worry that sometimes I do things with technology just to do them with technology instead of actually improving student learning.

We also are looking at a couple of different productivity software applications that are available online.  i tried out GoAnimate.  You can view the video below.  I am hoping to implement this program in my science 9 class to better have the students demonstrate a couple of different science concepts to me.


GoAnimate.com: CED0515 Wilkinson Animation by JBWilkinson

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

How CEDO 510 Applies to my Teaching

This week we looked at computer components, did a construction of our ideal computer and learned a lot about viruses and other computer troubles.  This is all very useful to me in my current role at Greendale High School.  I am on a tech committee that is working to put together a plan for getting one laptop in the hands of every student at the High School.  Since this week we have been looking at the hardware side of things it will help me in making informed recommendations to the committee and ultimately the school as a whole.

One thing that I've been having a little trouble with in our 1 to 1 implementation is the fact that the computer is great for word processing, but if you are trying to have students sketch quick graphs or diagrams computers typically are not as fast as good old pen and paper.  I've experimented with having students take pictures of sketches that they make, but it has been unwieldily.  I've also experimented with using the iPad as a tablet for sketching graphs, but the input is not precise enough to really do much drawing or annotating with ease.

Due to this class I found an awesome alternative:  The ModBook.  Axiotron makes a touch screen mac out of a MacBook.  This is a great compromise to get students to be able to input into the computer in a variety of different ways.  You can check it out for yourself at :http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook

Backups and Security

This week (well two, really) we have been looking at ways to protect our computer systems from hard drive crashes and from malicious software.  I can honestly say that I've had many computers over the years "die" because of these things.

In 1994 my family had a Macintosh LC that I thought was the best thing that was ever invented.  I played video games for hours on end on the machine.  In '94 there were not many people that had a mac, but one of my friends had one and we shared games back and forth.  After installing one of the games my friend had lent me my computer would not open a couple of the programs i had installed previously.  We took the computer to a shop and they told us that we had a computer virus and that they could fix the computer for $50.  Needless to say my folks were not happy with my use of the computer and there after made me show them what I was installing.

I had violated a couple of rules that are now big parts of a safety strategy when dealing with computers:  don't share files you don't know the source of, have anti-virus software installed on your computer and always have a backup to restore your machine back to functionality.

Fast forward to 2007.  I was working on my school issued MacBook on a final exam.  I thought that I was a brilliant teacher in getting done my final exams done a month early. During that time I had all of my files saved on the hard drive, the school network and, this is important: a pen drive.  The school network was having some trouble backing up files so I started saving my files to a directory that was not backed up by the server.  (You can see the trouble coming)  The laptop started running hotter and hotter as time went on and soon the hard drive failed.  Had I not been backing up my files manually after each day I would have lost countless hours of putting together those final exams.

I had followed most of the rules of backing up:  have a separate drive to store backups, establish a schedule for backing up and keep the drive physically separate from the computer so that natural disasters do not take down both your computer and your backup.

Week #2 - OS Madness

This week we learned about computer operating systems and for the first time ever I got my hands on a Linux variant: Ubuntu,  It was fun to see the differences in Ubuntu versus OS X and windows.  It does seem that computers are starting to have a very similar operating system by design.  Each company (and open source community) finds out what works from their own research as well as cribbing information from each other.  Over all learning about Ubuntu was a fun way to delve into OS topics without having to do expensive and time consuming full installs of comercial products.

On a side note I am still trying to get my USB install of Edubuntu to boot up.  I'd love to have it as a backup for those students who do not have their computer working at full potential in my laptop classes. I'll keep you all posted about how it all works out

Also, incase you haven't tried Edubuntu there is an excellent website available to try it out without having to download the iso and burn a boot CD. [link]

Computer History for John Wilkinson

When I was in grade school, probably about 3rd grade, my mom brought home an Apple IIe for the summer as part of her school's "Computers on Loan" Program.  We had a word processor, a blackjack game and as no school computer could ever be without it: Oregon Trail.  I was only allowed to go on the computer after dark and this rule was in place for good reason.  From the moment my tiny fingers hit that keyboard I was hooked.  I played around with the computer for hours at a time.  The old green screen would make my eyes burn after a couple of minutes, but I didn't care.  It was so cool that I could type and it would show up immediately on the screen, I could play blackjack (although I was always fuzzy on the rules) and I could shoot buffalo on the Oregon Trail (although I could only carry back 100lbs of the meat :) ).  

At first my mom had to type in the commands to get the programs to load up from the big noisy 5 1/4" floppy disks in the front of the machine, but soon after I had watched her do it a couple of times I was able to log into it by myself and play the night away.  I distinctly remember helping my father boot up the computer after he had tried several times to get the machine to work.  He looked so proud at me when I helped him.  This experience has been replayed countless times in my classroom where students have been able to make the computers do almost anything they wanted with little outside training.  I have a feeling that in a couple of years this will just be even more of a divide between digital natives and those who have come into the technology later in life.

The last thing that was memorable about my first computer experience was when a neighbor and I were playing the blackjack game and we accidentally hit the "-" button when we were typing in our bet.  Suddenly when we lost (the two of us still had not figured out strategy in the game) our total increased instead of decreased.  We tried it a couple of more times and soon we could get to the 10K total the game declared as the goal.  This ignited our imaginations and we spent the better part of two weeks playing with the betting function of the game to see what would happen when we typed in other things.  As our experimenting was really random we did not figure out why the "-" key made our bets act in the reverse of what they should.  I later asked my dad about it and he tried as hard as he could to explain the concept of subtracting a negative number, but I was a little too young to figure it out.

Over all I really enjoy using computers and I believe that this first experience was crucial to developing this love.

Starting CEDO 510

One class down, quite a few more to go!  The course that I am in now is "Computer Systems: How They Work".  This should be a fun class to get to poke around in the machinery of computing for a little bit.  As a physics teacher I love to find out how things work at a ver low level.  I've built two computers from scratch (but neither was particularly well put together) and I've taken a little programming in college, but as for the true hardware / software interaction I am very much a neophyte.  This will be very useful as it looks like we are taking a nuts & bolts approach that will help me in the classroom to diagnose and "tech triage" the laptops my students are using.  I look forward to the class and hope that we can do some great stuff in digging around in a computer's guts.

Week #2 - Web cams, Social Bookmarking and Online Storage

This week we took a look at web cams, social bookmarking and online storage.  I'll have to admit that using web cams for voice chat in school scares me a little if it is not properly monitored. The technology has quite a few ways that it could be abused.  However, I've used webcams with my students in a couple of other ways:  using it as a camera for taking pictures of lab setups, with white boards to produce quick flip books and as video recorders to produce video lab reports where the students talk about their labs instead of just writing out a conclusion.

Social Bookmarking was a neat thing to dive into.  Digg and delicious are both great sites to wander for a while when you have some time to kill.  I was most impressed about Diigo, though.  The research applications of the web service are awesome.  I have a feeling that I'll probably be using it at some point during the course of this program.

Online storage was the last thing that we looked at this week.  I chose Drop Box as I had some familiarity with it in the past and many people had recommended it to me.  In the classroom it provides me with a way to have students be able to access their files outside of school.  Currently I have my students submit digital lab reports to a school controlled "classrooms" drive that is only accessible through the school's network.  it would be great to implement a service like Drop Box so that students would not have to log into school in order to submit their work.

Getting Started With Blogging

Hi There!
My name is John Wilkinson and this is my blog for Cardinal Stritch's Masters in Education - Instructional Technology.  Through this blog you can view my thoughts and progress through the program.  Feel free to leave any questions or comments you might have.

I am starting the program with a couple of great opportunities waiting in the coming years.  My school is possibly going to a 1 laptop per student ready access model within 3 years.  By going through this program I am hoping to gain some skills with how to implement the unprecedented access my students will have to technology.  I am also hoping to get a good handle on distance learning as I'd love to get my AP Physics students continuing their physics education the summer before they take AP.

Needless to say I have high hopes for this program and am very excited to start.