- Group work: Mike and Chris you guys are awesome. You've both got great ideas and have unique experiences that you are willing to share. It might have been hard to get together some times, but you guys were great group members.
- The graphics assignment: GoAnimate - my students love the program and have made several animated shorts with it. It is a great program and I'm glad to have been exposed to it during this course.
- Talking about proper tech usage - We cannot just throw tech at students and expect magic to happen. This class was heavy into not only the hows of tech usage, but also why we need to implement tech in order to keep relevant to our students and our world.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
What I Learned from CEDO515
CEDO 515 was a class in which we took a look at a lot of stuff that I thought I knew all about: word processors, spreadsheets, presentations and calendars. It was a fun to see how much I could learn about all of these things as well as quite a few barriers to technology implementation. The high lights for me:
Sunday, January 23, 2011
TED Talks, Google Sites and Technology Learning Plans
This week we looked at brining all of the productivity tools that we have used in the class together into a Google Site. Google Sites seem perfect for students to create their own web pages, but my school would be pretty uneasy about students maintaing a web presence for school that was not hosted and controlled by the school itself. I'm going to investigate some of the security features and permissions and see if my students can't use this as an electronic portfolio for some of our physics projects / labs. If you want to see my own Google site you can click here
We also looked at Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk about the importance of creativity in education. It was an interesting talk (as all TED talks are) that really railed on our current "academic producing" education. I liked that the focus seemed to be in creating more avenues for education, but it was quite pie in the sky. The vision of education would require such a major overhaul that a single person could never direct the whole revision. You can check out the TED talk here
The last thing for this week was to create a technology learning plan. The plan involves producing goals and then creating measurable progress to gauge completion of the task. I have about a hundred things that I'd like to accomplish so I need to focus down to about 3 measurable goals. I'll post what I choose next week.
On a side note I just have to write about the online textbook I have been using for all of the class readings. I've been using Course Smart. It was only about $30 to rent the book for 180 days instead of about $60 to buy the print version. It has a lot of note taking features and has been a positive experience. It is a good sign for electronic textbooks. You can check out the website here
We also looked at Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk about the importance of creativity in education. It was an interesting talk (as all TED talks are) that really railed on our current "academic producing" education. I liked that the focus seemed to be in creating more avenues for education, but it was quite pie in the sky. The vision of education would require such a major overhaul that a single person could never direct the whole revision. You can check out the TED talk here
The last thing for this week was to create a technology learning plan. The plan involves producing goals and then creating measurable progress to gauge completion of the task. I have about a hundred things that I'd like to accomplish so I need to focus down to about 3 measurable goals. I'll post what I choose next week.
On a side note I just have to write about the online textbook I have been using for all of the class readings. I've been using Course Smart. It was only about $30 to rent the book for 180 days instead of about $60 to buy the print version. It has a lot of note taking features and has been a positive experience. It is a good sign for electronic textbooks. You can check out the website here
Sunday, January 16, 2011
InTime Video and Tech Integration
This week we are looking at Edutopia, Google Calendars and InTime Videos. All of these resources are useful in their own way.
Edutopia seems to be a fairly user friendly site that has TONs of quality videos and projects for students. You can check it out for yourself at http://www.edutopia.org/ I found two great physics articles / videos:
http://www.edutopia.org/motorcycle-physics is a great article on how to incorporate motorcycles into the discussion of physics. Kids always get a kick out of the fact that I ride a motorcycle to school and this article gives some ideas on how to incorporate that hook into a discussion about physics
http://www.edutopia.org/classroom-science-little-shop-physics has tons of ideas about how to have a physics outreach program. In previous years I have done this, but I have never been the lead in creating the presentations. This article has a lot of great ideas about what you can use to make these outreach presentations more engaging.
InTime Video (http://www.intime.uni.edu) has some videos created by users complete with lesson plans and activities. This seems to be an immensely powerful site that can help generate ideas for teachers about how to improve their teaching of various subject matter. For class I chose a video on Newton's 2nd Law complete with lesson plans and activities. You can view the page at http://www.intime.uni.edu/video/012iahs/0/ It mirrors what I do in class pretty closely, but the instructor has a different way of presenting the start of the lesson that made me sit up and take notice. His presentation uses a little humor to start the students talking. This seems to be a great hook for the start of the lesson.
Edutopia seems to be a fairly user friendly site that has TONs of quality videos and projects for students. You can check it out for yourself at http://www.edutopia.org/ I found two great physics articles / videos:
http://www.edutopia.org/motorcycle-physics is a great article on how to incorporate motorcycles into the discussion of physics. Kids always get a kick out of the fact that I ride a motorcycle to school and this article gives some ideas on how to incorporate that hook into a discussion about physics
http://www.edutopia.org/classroom-science-little-shop-physics has tons of ideas about how to have a physics outreach program. In previous years I have done this, but I have never been the lead in creating the presentations. This article has a lot of great ideas about what you can use to make these outreach presentations more engaging.
InTime Video (http://www.intime.uni.edu) has some videos created by users complete with lesson plans and activities. This seems to be an immensely powerful site that can help generate ideas for teachers about how to improve their teaching of various subject matter. For class I chose a video on Newton's 2nd Law complete with lesson plans and activities. You can view the page at http://www.intime.uni.edu/video/012iahs/0/ It mirrors what I do in class pretty closely, but the instructor has a different way of presenting the start of the lesson that made me sit up and take notice. His presentation uses a little humor to start the students talking. This seems to be a great hook for the start of the lesson.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Spreadsheets and Problem Based Learning Over the Holidays
This "week" (actually we get 3 weeks to accomplish these tasks) we investigated spreadsheets and how they could be implemented in education. Thankfully I have had some familiarity with Google Docs' Spreadsheet program as we keep our science supply inventory in the program to make it accessible to everyone in the department. We needed to create a self scaling recipe in the program and then share it to the class. In a fairly prophetic joke my father in law gave me a Star Wars cookbook for Christmas. I chose to use the book's titular "Wookie Cookies" as my recipe. You can get a copy of the cookbook at Wookie Cookies
We are also getting into very deep concepts in our readings. This week's chapters centered on supporting student creativity and problem solving. These two things are either at the forefront of an engaging science classroom or never mentioned in the typical stuffy science classroom. A very tough conversation needs to be had about wether we increase the amount of problem solving that happens in the classroom and decrease the overall amount of content, or if we go for breath rather than depth. As we go toward more and more accountability in our curriculum via standardized tests and other easily measurable objectives I fear that there will be less incentive for teachers to try truly innovative teaching methods involving Problem Based Learning. Eventually we will come to a compromise as to what needs to be taught if not how it should be taught.
We are also getting into very deep concepts in our readings. This week's chapters centered on supporting student creativity and problem solving. These two things are either at the forefront of an engaging science classroom or never mentioned in the typical stuffy science classroom. A very tough conversation needs to be had about wether we increase the amount of problem solving that happens in the classroom and decrease the overall amount of content, or if we go for breath rather than depth. As we go toward more and more accountability in our curriculum via standardized tests and other easily measurable objectives I fear that there will be less incentive for teachers to try truly innovative teaching methods involving Problem Based Learning. Eventually we will come to a compromise as to what needs to be taught if not how it should be taught.
The last thing that I'd like to write is about something cheerful. I really liked the Magic Square assignment that we had to complete this week. I think it could be implemented as a warmup for my students for those days when we have to work with data and see patterns. 
Here is a picture of the Magic Square. Try it out if you haven't already.
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