The PowerPoint project was a cool one. There are so many tools that we take for granted, using only a small portion of them, because that's the way we've always seen them used, when in fact, under the hood, they're extremely powerful. The ability to program in PowerPoint is one of those secrets that few know about.
I enjoyed the finished project much more than the process. I've never enjoyed programming, but this was simple enough. 12 questions, 3 potential answers equals 48 individual slides, most of which won't be seen (especially if people get the right answer on the first try). I liked that the project required good feedback, even on the wrong answers, so I felt like my students would learn even from choosing the wrong choice. I think that's smart.
I'd say the most rewarding part of this project, like I said initially, was the finished product. I feel like this will be a nice study tool for my students, and it's simple enough that they'll be able to do it at their own pace, which works well for students of any learning level.
PowerPoint is a great tool for the classroom because it's so readily available. Many times educators beg for some crazy expensive application that they feel is necessary for teaching. Many times (not always) the tools they have in front of them are more than enough for what they need. In a world where education budgets are consistently slashed, it's good to find new uses for the tools we have at hand.
The only concern I have with PowerPoint is that it is sooooo over used, and is frequently boring. Many teachers and presenters will just read text from a PowerPoint presentation which is just dumb. One of you doesn't need to be there, and if I'm in control of the budget, you're more expensive than that presentation.
Students are frequently encouraged to use PowerPoint for presentations, and I think that's great. It's a tool they'll use in the real world as well, and if we can teach them how to make GOOD presentations, we'll have served them well. I think some of the best ways to have students use Power Point is to have them teach a lesson on the subject matter. Another great way students can use PowerPoint is as an assistive tool in Speech class, many people who struggle with speaking in public find comfort in having a third object "between" them and the audience. One last way I can think of to have students use PowerPoint is a tool like we created here. It isn't something they're creating, but a fantastic tool like we created could be used in many situations.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Project 1 - Integrating the internet into Secondary Classrooms
First, I have to say, I love this project. This was a lot of fun, and as this is my first actual Education class, it's been a good exercise for learning how to come up with a project for my future students. Very cool. :)
I chose my standard based on what interests me in literature, and what I think my students will remember going forward.
I honestly found the trackstar portion of the project to be the most difficult. Beyond trackstar being slow, old and a pain, searching for websites that would lead my students where I wanted them to go was tricky as well. I wanted them to focus on the fatal flaw of each of the heroes listed in the project, but I found it difficult to find a lot of writing on the subject for some of the heroes. The easiest thing, would have been to just point all of my links to wikipedia, but that would have been cheap. I spent a good deal of time searching for articles that showed what I was looking for, and luckily none of them had annoying banners, or weird extraneous information that wouldn't have been appropriate for this project.
The only real difficulty, like I said earlier was dealing with trackstar. Their site is so old and slow, many times I would wait upwards of 5 minutes for a page to load. I also ran into problems when trying to use a youtube video for one of my links. It wouldn't show in the trackstar frame. I tried using the regular http: url, the embed url and even the old style embed url, none of which worked. In the end, I just used the regular url and an annotation directing the students to watch the video on youtube. I really like the philosophy of trackstar, that of guided learning, but it appears the last time they did anything with the site was 2005. The internet and internet standards have made some significant leaps since then, and trackstar is definitely feeling it. If the site admins were to update this to current web standards (for example supporting browsers beyond Mozilla 1.3 beta /facepalm) seeing as Mozilla Firefox is now on version 12, this could be an excellent tool.
I chose my standard based on what interests me in literature, and what I think my students will remember going forward.
EL.LIT.3.6 2006 Evaluate the way in which authors have used archetypes (original models or patterns, such as best friend, champion, crusader, free spirit, nurturer, outcast, tyrant, and others) drawn from myth and tradition in literature, film, political speeches, and religious writings. [11.3.6/12.3.6]I then narrowed it down from all archetypes, to heroes of twentieth century literature. The twentieth century is an interesting time in literature however, because we've broken the media mold. We now have books, television, movies, comics, the internet etc... So it's a bit broader than previous centuries. I tried to hit on a few heroes from books, movies and comics to show the breadth of literature throughout the 20th century, and I also tried to find heroes who would fit the assignment well.
I honestly found the trackstar portion of the project to be the most difficult. Beyond trackstar being slow, old and a pain, searching for websites that would lead my students where I wanted them to go was tricky as well. I wanted them to focus on the fatal flaw of each of the heroes listed in the project, but I found it difficult to find a lot of writing on the subject for some of the heroes. The easiest thing, would have been to just point all of my links to wikipedia, but that would have been cheap. I spent a good deal of time searching for articles that showed what I was looking for, and luckily none of them had annoying banners, or weird extraneous information that wouldn't have been appropriate for this project.
The only real difficulty, like I said earlier was dealing with trackstar. Their site is so old and slow, many times I would wait upwards of 5 minutes for a page to load. I also ran into problems when trying to use a youtube video for one of my links. It wouldn't show in the trackstar frame. I tried using the regular http: url, the embed url and even the old style embed url, none of which worked. In the end, I just used the regular url and an annotation directing the students to watch the video on youtube. I really like the philosophy of trackstar, that of guided learning, but it appears the last time they did anything with the site was 2005. The internet and internet standards have made some significant leaps since then, and trackstar is definitely feeling it. If the site admins were to update this to current web standards (for example supporting browsers beyond Mozilla 1.3 beta /facepalm) seeing as Mozilla Firefox is now on version 12, this could be an excellent tool.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Technology Autobiography
My name is Kyle, but you can call me Kyle.
I'm a Secondary English Grad Student, studying to be a High School English teacher.
I've lived a heavily technological life for the last nine years of my life as I've been working in the IT field. In my previous work, I did everything from server maintenance to training on smart phones. I've had a smart phone of some type for the past seven years and don't know how I'd live without it! This drives my wife crazy, but having access to Google maps, Facebook, Wikipedia, email and the rest of the internet in the palm of my hand has been helpful on many occasions. I've used both a mac and PC and am fluent in both, but I prefer the PC. Mac's have become extremely popular over the past few years, but it's honestly hard to come up with a business reason to spend 2 to 3x more money on one. PCs are cheaper, and easier to fix when they break which when it comes to computers, happens no matter what platform you choose. My family and I have also been using lots of technology around the house. We've been using a DVR in the house for a few years now and it's completely changed the way we watch television. We almost never see commercials and when we DO, our kids get confused! :) I'm definitely cool with that. We also connect to Netflix through our Blu-Ray player which is fantastic for our two kids. Whether watching Dora the Explorer or Spider-man and his Amazing Friends, there's always something available for the kids to watch. Just recently I bought a Kindle Fire and am trying to find a way to fit it into our lives. It's fantastic for reading, watching movies, and playing games, but it's hard to find where it fills a need that isn't already filled by something else.
Most of the technology that we use either gives us access to research utilities (laptop, iPhone, Kindle) or to entertainment (laptop, iPhone, DVR, Netflix, Kindle). The amazing thing is how blurry the line is getting between entertainment devices and research devices. a Kindle which originally was made for reading, now gives me access to the internet, email, netflix and games. My iPhone, which was of course originally just a phone, now does everything my laptop or Kindle does, but it fits in my pocket.
I'd say the 4 most significant technologies in my life would have to be my iPhone, laptop, DVR and Netflix. My iPhone, as I said before, is my constant link to the internet and all the information available there. My laptop gives me that access, but has a keyboard big enough to write blog posts and papers, as well as gets me connected to the games I like to play which require a bigger screen, and a lot more processing power. My DVR, as I said previously, has changed the way I watch TV. I don't watch commercials and I pick only the shows I want to watch. Netflix has changed children's television in my house. Shows that I wouldn't have access to because I don't have cable tv (like Dora) and not just the episode that the network decides should be on today but ALL the episodes from all (or most) of the previous seasons. Being able to pick for instance, from the last 8 seasons of Sesame Street, is fantastic.
I'm a techie kind of guy. That's the way I live, think and work, and I'm certain that my classroom will be heavily reliant on technology once I become a teacher. The generations that I'll be teaching will not have known a world without youtube or facebook, and I feel it's my duty to communicate with them in ways that they'll best understand.
I'm a Secondary English Grad Student, studying to be a High School English teacher.
I've lived a heavily technological life for the last nine years of my life as I've been working in the IT field. In my previous work, I did everything from server maintenance to training on smart phones. I've had a smart phone of some type for the past seven years and don't know how I'd live without it! This drives my wife crazy, but having access to Google maps, Facebook, Wikipedia, email and the rest of the internet in the palm of my hand has been helpful on many occasions. I've used both a mac and PC and am fluent in both, but I prefer the PC. Mac's have become extremely popular over the past few years, but it's honestly hard to come up with a business reason to spend 2 to 3x more money on one. PCs are cheaper, and easier to fix when they break which when it comes to computers, happens no matter what platform you choose. My family and I have also been using lots of technology around the house. We've been using a DVR in the house for a few years now and it's completely changed the way we watch television. We almost never see commercials and when we DO, our kids get confused! :) I'm definitely cool with that. We also connect to Netflix through our Blu-Ray player which is fantastic for our two kids. Whether watching Dora the Explorer or Spider-man and his Amazing Friends, there's always something available for the kids to watch. Just recently I bought a Kindle Fire and am trying to find a way to fit it into our lives. It's fantastic for reading, watching movies, and playing games, but it's hard to find where it fills a need that isn't already filled by something else.
Most of the technology that we use either gives us access to research utilities (laptop, iPhone, Kindle) or to entertainment (laptop, iPhone, DVR, Netflix, Kindle). The amazing thing is how blurry the line is getting between entertainment devices and research devices. a Kindle which originally was made for reading, now gives me access to the internet, email, netflix and games. My iPhone, which was of course originally just a phone, now does everything my laptop or Kindle does, but it fits in my pocket.
I'd say the 4 most significant technologies in my life would have to be my iPhone, laptop, DVR and Netflix. My iPhone, as I said before, is my constant link to the internet and all the information available there. My laptop gives me that access, but has a keyboard big enough to write blog posts and papers, as well as gets me connected to the games I like to play which require a bigger screen, and a lot more processing power. My DVR, as I said previously, has changed the way I watch TV. I don't watch commercials and I pick only the shows I want to watch. Netflix has changed children's television in my house. Shows that I wouldn't have access to because I don't have cable tv (like Dora) and not just the episode that the network decides should be on today but ALL the episodes from all (or most) of the previous seasons. Being able to pick for instance, from the last 8 seasons of Sesame Street, is fantastic.
I'm a techie kind of guy. That's the way I live, think and work, and I'm certain that my classroom will be heavily reliant on technology once I become a teacher. The generations that I'll be teaching will not have known a world without youtube or facebook, and I feel it's my duty to communicate with them in ways that they'll best understand.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Assistive Technology
Monday in class we watched a video called Freedom Machines about Assistive technology. While I've never had use for the kinds of technology needed and demonstrated in the video, I've had a bit of experience with some of it in my previous career.
Two of the people featured in the movie, (Bonita and Kent) used a program called JAWS that is essentially a screen reader for the blind. While working at the University of Notre Dame's Help Desk we had a student who also used JAWS and visited us from time to time for help. The thing that amazed me about JAWS was that it didn't JUST read the text on the screen, it read where your mouse was pointing. This is amazingly helpful if you're on the internet. Imagine if every time you went to a different page on a website, it read all the header information, all the menus, ads, and all of the things you really don't care about. I'd give up pretty quick just from annoyance. But it's smart enough to read the section your mouse is hovering over.
Another thing that stuck out to me from the video was how expensive these things were, that the schools were expected to pay for them, and that in some cases, only 1 or 2 students at a time could benefit from them. That sounds harsh at first blush, but if you're a school administrator who has to deal with a ever decreasing budget and are struggling to just keep your teachers paid, it's hard to find money for an Assistive technology to help one child in your school. While I agree that every student should have the opportunity to learn in the classroom, and this kind of technology is far and away some of the best ways to help with that, in most cases, schools just don't HAVE the money to put toward these things. It seems like pressure would be better put on government to give grants to schools for A.T. so that the money is there when and if it's needed, rather than forcing a school board to decide between having enough teachers, and having the tools to teach our special needs students.
One other thing that really jumped at me in this video was how varied these students handicaps were. Lets say you're an inventor and you decide you want to make a keyboard for people who are physically handicapped. Where do you start? Well, you look at the handicaps that are prevalent in the world, and see that, for instance, 75% of physically handicapped people have a hard time finding the keys on a keyboard. Great, you've found a problem, and a group of people you can help. So you develop a keyboard where the keys are maybe spread a little further apart so keys aren't accidentally pushed, and you also tie it to some kind of predictive text input software so that typing the letters "SOFTW" might auto-complete to "SOFTWARE." You take it to market, you charge a reasonable price for the device to recoup your costs and make some money for yourself and think you've helped the world. And you have! but what about the other 25%? Some of them can't use their fingers properly, some of them can't control their arms at all, some have NO arms! Handicaps aren't standardized. If they were, we'd have solved this issue long ago. Can we help a blind person read? Yes! We can give them braille books! But what about a blind person with no hands, or physical problems as well? Umm, well, we could use audio-books! Well, that helps, but what about books that haven't been converted to audio? Do we limit the experience of this subset of handicapped people, or do we find another way to help them?
This is a big messy problem, and I doubt there will ever be a solution that will help 100% of the handicapped people of the world 100% of the time, and all for a reasonably price they all can afford. But I'd assume you solve the problem the same way you eat an elephant. One bite at a time.
Two of the people featured in the movie, (Bonita and Kent) used a program called JAWS that is essentially a screen reader for the blind. While working at the University of Notre Dame's Help Desk we had a student who also used JAWS and visited us from time to time for help. The thing that amazed me about JAWS was that it didn't JUST read the text on the screen, it read where your mouse was pointing. This is amazingly helpful if you're on the internet. Imagine if every time you went to a different page on a website, it read all the header information, all the menus, ads, and all of the things you really don't care about. I'd give up pretty quick just from annoyance. But it's smart enough to read the section your mouse is hovering over.
Another thing that stuck out to me from the video was how expensive these things were, that the schools were expected to pay for them, and that in some cases, only 1 or 2 students at a time could benefit from them. That sounds harsh at first blush, but if you're a school administrator who has to deal with a ever decreasing budget and are struggling to just keep your teachers paid, it's hard to find money for an Assistive technology to help one child in your school. While I agree that every student should have the opportunity to learn in the classroom, and this kind of technology is far and away some of the best ways to help with that, in most cases, schools just don't HAVE the money to put toward these things. It seems like pressure would be better put on government to give grants to schools for A.T. so that the money is there when and if it's needed, rather than forcing a school board to decide between having enough teachers, and having the tools to teach our special needs students.
One other thing that really jumped at me in this video was how varied these students handicaps were. Lets say you're an inventor and you decide you want to make a keyboard for people who are physically handicapped. Where do you start? Well, you look at the handicaps that are prevalent in the world, and see that, for instance, 75% of physically handicapped people have a hard time finding the keys on a keyboard. Great, you've found a problem, and a group of people you can help. So you develop a keyboard where the keys are maybe spread a little further apart so keys aren't accidentally pushed, and you also tie it to some kind of predictive text input software so that typing the letters "SOFTW" might auto-complete to "SOFTWARE." You take it to market, you charge a reasonable price for the device to recoup your costs and make some money for yourself and think you've helped the world. And you have! but what about the other 25%? Some of them can't use their fingers properly, some of them can't control their arms at all, some have NO arms! Handicaps aren't standardized. If they were, we'd have solved this issue long ago. Can we help a blind person read? Yes! We can give them braille books! But what about a blind person with no hands, or physical problems as well? Umm, well, we could use audio-books! Well, that helps, but what about books that haven't been converted to audio? Do we limit the experience of this subset of handicapped people, or do we find another way to help them?
This is a big messy problem, and I doubt there will ever be a solution that will help 100% of the handicapped people of the world 100% of the time, and all for a reasonably price they all can afford. But I'd assume you solve the problem the same way you eat an elephant. One bite at a time.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Here's a second one
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