Technology in our daily basis

I loved this course! I learned a lot about new gadgets and electronic tools that we can use to reach our main goal - make our students learn - more effectively, but also I learned a lot with our readings, which made me reflect about the importance and use of technology in our lessons. I'm sure that technology if well-planned and applied with discretion is a wonderful tool that gives us the possibility to pass our content knowledge with more interactivity, therefore more effectively because the students can experience while they are learning. Especially for language students, technology is an awesome help, with blogs, videoblogs, voice blogs, smartboard lessons, pedagogic videos, etc... I'm glad I took this course and I'll recommend it for all teachers who are commited to create a more engaging lesson on our daily basis. Thanks, Ms. Mislevy for all your help, knowledge and enthusiasm toward our challenging profession! See you all soon. Merry Christmas and a blessed 2011 for us all!!!! Bye.

Examples of electronic teacher portfolios

I thought Danielle E. Van Patter’s electronic portfolio was a good portfolio for a undergraduate, but not for a professional teacher. The materials she included work together as a cohesive unit, each adding an essential element to the whole. She included her resume, cover letter, teaching philosophy, students’ evaluations of her, letters of reference, a letter to parents, a wide professional development report and her academic achievements. As she still is a student, she didn’t include many materials about activities developed in her classes, what can be seen as lack of experience. So, I think her portfolio didn’t displayed her as a competent professional.

Her electronic portfolio: http://eduportfolio.org/vues/view/2874#section71767

Stephanie Ladner’s portfolio, on the other hand, showed an also young but experienced professional. It’s more complete and accurate than Danielle’s, showing all the materials that Danielle posted and many examples of lessons done, and activities that she took part of during the years, and also she included pictures of her experience as a volunteer at Nalopa Primary School in Arusha, Tanzania, with a brief description of the work done there, what showed her as a mature and determined young woman.

Stephanie’s portfolio: http://sites.google.com/site/stephanieladner/Home

How creative and instructive we are!

I think Mrs. Mislevy had a great idea of changing the regular classroom presentation of our notebook projects to on-line presentations. It was amazing, much more interesting and interactive, as I could leave some comments on my classmates’ blog.

 I really loved this Notebook presentation project: as Joe said, it really showed how diverse we are, but at the same time how creative and instructive we surely are. I learned a lot reading, watching and listening to the presentations. Ryan Marie video about cyber bullying was very informative and she did a great job editing it. Both Mike’s and Julie’s glogster were very informative, easy to read and get the information using their links to the articles or videos. Josh’s mp3 file was incredible, his music was very catchy and informative as well. Judy’s video was very creative with the use of Mr. Moose and Mr. Bear, but also I learned a lot about the help of technology used with reading disabilities. Sarah’s prezi presentation was the one that surprised me the most: it’s easy to ready, very catchy and informative with all the videos, but at the same time, it was very clean, without so many distractive colors and pictures. I’m sure I’ll use glogster and prezi to prepare some interactive classes or to present some of my researches in the future, as Mike, Julie and Sarah showed, they are great tools to make a regular article very interesting and interactive. I’m very proud to be part of such creative and smart class. Great job, everyone!

The "magic" whiteboard

The first time I saw an interactive whiteboard was in my graduate course. I used to hate the regular whiteboards, even though they were an advance from the chalk blackboard. They are difficult to clean, they can be damaged easily and they are usually not very big.

But, with the INTERACTIVE whiteboard, it’s different. I loved to work with it in class. We can’t say that there aren’t any problems, but what you can do with it overhaul any of those.

What I thought about preparing lessons using it was that we have to get used to it and as my professor said, we must use it, train on it. It takes time until you discover all the resources in it, so I’m sure that preparing the next lesson will be easier that the previous and so on.

I’d really love to have one in my classroom to teach at daily bases, especially because I usually teach foreign languages to adults that could really appreciate all its potential with the games, and the possibility to watch videos and to write on it when you are giving an explanation. It’s for sure far more interesting and interactive than a powerpoint presentation.

I’m sure not only adults, but students of any age will be engaged in a class that uses it as a tool to make the subject more interesting and easier to visualize. All students would appreciate the teacher’s effort to prepare a lesson using it, giving them the sign that the teacher is also engaged in the course and wants to make it more fascinating and interesting to them.

Lesson Ideas for video activities in Foreign Language class

I think the activity of creating a video is such a cool “tool” for us – teachers of Net Geners – because through the process, the students can learn so many things, such as how to organize and plan their actions before shooting the videos, how to use a video camera and its features, how to use the softwares to edit the video (usually the ones they don’t know how to use properly yet), and also it is a great exercise for them to practice making decisions in group and working as a team, but with each person having its own duty in the process, like in a movie crew.

A good idea to use video with foreign language classes is “PSA for Foreigners”, in which the students (from 8^th grade on) should create a PSA about any fact of daily life that is different here in Usa from the specific foreign country, like cultural differences: for example, the fact that here we don’t change plates when we eat pasta, and then meat: in Italy, they change plates every time they change “dishes”; or the fact that here we eat salad in a small bowl before or together with the main course, in Italy you eat in a regular plate, but after the “second course”; or the fact that in Spain when you go to a grocery store you have to pay for your plastic bags at the check out; or the fact that you have to insert one Euro coin in the kart to use it, but you can have your coin back if you take the kart back to its line… For the project, teacher would have to use a computer lab and at least 4 or 5 video cameras.

So, the students divided in groups of 4 would have to:

• research about those cultural differences in the web;
• choose one that they thought was the most interesting;
• show the teacher their option and get approval;
• decide each one’s role in the process;
• create the storyboard with the scenes to be shot;
• film the scenes;
• edit the video using Movie Maker in class with the help of the teacher, inserting effects, transitions and copyright free music;
• Post it on youtube;
• Write a report detailing the process;
• Finally, present the PSA in front of the class in the language studied.

I’m sure it would be a nice way to make students research about cultural differences and use the foreign language in a very practical and fun way. It would be a great opportunity to teach new vocabulary and correct the students’ pronounciation, and most important it would be real team work, but with a lot of fun and excitement.

Our PSA video project

This group video project was really fun to make. It was a relatively simple, but time consuming project, through which we were able to learn how to use different gadgets and softwares, such as a video camera, Movie Maker and Audacity. The video camera and tripod were pretty simple to operate, first we did some regular takes, then we used more of the camera features, like the zoom in and out. Transfer the video to the computer was easy, even if we had to use an USB drive to save it. The funniest, but more time-consuming part was editing it: selecting the scenes, putting effects and transitions using Movie Maker was really fun; it was more time-consuming because our video came as one file (without the scenes  separated), so every time we want to select a scene, we had to copy all the video and make the cuts using the timeline. Finding the “right” music to insert was a little challenge, because at freemusic.com there are so many options that after a while we were confused by all the music we had heard, but eventually we made up our minds and used three musics in the video, depending of the scene and effect we want cause. Post in Youtube was easy as well, because we already knew how to do it.

I think this project show us how fun, entertaining, exciting is to use video as an assignment in class. It makes students work together, make decisions as a group, organize the ideas and plan the actions before shooting. Also the excitement of posting it on-line, the possibility that anyone can see it, gives them more enthusiasm to work to have an more elaborated and well-done project. Nowadays, we must use everything possible to engage students in assignments, nothing works better with the Net Geners than the use of more advanced technology, with which they can create new things and also learn new tools and concepts. Video is definitely a great activity for our Net-Gener students.

They surprised me, but what would they say about some other issues?

    When we think about the Net-generation students, mainly college students, we assume that they are geeks who could do anything they want with their computers, but this is not always true. Reading Robert B. Kvavik’s findings, I was surprised to learn, for example, that in general the tools to create a web page and edit/ create video and audio are the least used. Another thing was their statement that they spend more hours using their computer for homework or school related activities than as a mean of communication. Also, the courses requirements for using a variety of technology tools are the main motivation for students learn how to use new tools or softwares.

    Even though they are net-geners, their skills are basic, just enough to accomplish their homework or work. This is well illustrated by Sharon Fass McEuen: “student technology skills can be likened to writing skills: Students come to college knowing how to write, but they are not developed writers. The analogy holds true for information technology.” But, when asked students stated that they are very skilled, what is very problematic when they begin a job, as confirmed by Judy Doherty, director of the Student Technologies Resource Group at Colgate University “Students state in their job applications that they are good if not very good, but when tested their skills are average to poor, and they need a lot of training.”

     But, actually what surprised me the most was the 2.2% of students who prefer totally on-line courses, I thought that number would be much higher. That’s great to learn that they still think teacher-student interaction is very important for their learning development.

    I would love to know what net-geners have to say about privacy issues, copyright violations (so common among youngsters) and plagiarism, as internet and technology makes them easier to be at the reach of their hands. 

Copyright - a big deal!!!!!

   Our class about Copyright was fun and really eye-opening for me. I was surprised to learn that even if a teacher just uses some copyright material to illustrate a class (in a power point presentation, for example) that he/she gives every year, they should by law ask permission to do so, but it is ok if you use the material for just ONE lesson only. Another thing that amazed me was the fact that if a teacher wants to pass a movie to his/her students, unless it is part of the curriculum, the teacher should ask for the license to show the movie to his/her class. Also, I found it really interesting to hear the examples of problems caused by parents regarding copyright violation.

  Everyday we see copyright violations in schools done by students and teachers, such as photocopy of materials for instruction purpose (instead of buying the whole book), use of music, movies, images to illustrate a presentation used every year by a teacher, use of music as part of a video made by students and presented at school, etc. Out of the Academic world things are even worse: people download videos, music, images without permission or copy software programs to be installed in more than one computer; people copy recipes and publish as their own; people copy paintings (if they are art students), and the list goes on and on. But, for me, in the web is where nowadays most of the copyright violations happen, because of the easy access to the information and the illusion that one is protected by his/her anonymaty.

   I think, as educators, we have to teach our students about copyright, because the general population (including most of the parents) doesn’t realize how serious it is and how it really applies for almost every creative work out there. We can do it by showing them videos about it from youtube, saying that you can just do that using internet connection, not downloading it, because it would be an infraction, and also we could ask students to be in the “artist’s” shoes, making them express what would be their feeling if anyone stole their work. Anyway, I would show them some real shocking examples of copyright violation and their consequences, and then ask them to reason about it, because they take all the materials in the web for granted, so they must learn that here in the US copyright violation is really a big deal.

After this week experience I made my decision

When my principal asked to write him our opinion about switching to google docs and spreadsheet in our school district, I thought it would be a little hard to choose a side, but after using my google docs and spreadsheet this week, I decided that it would be to risky to make the switch. My point is that sometimes (and it is not rarely) the site is not working properly and it makes our work more time consuming, once you have to redo the project many times to try to make it work (this was exactly what happened to me this week). I’m sure google docs and spreadsheets are a great tool that we can use in the process of completing a group assignment, because everyone in the group can enter their findings and share it with the teacher. However, I wouldn’t just save the final project in google docs or spreadsheet, because if something goes wrong with the site and you can’t access it you are in trouble. Another thing is that both google docs and mainly google spreadsheet are very simple programs, missing a lot of cool features that are present in office word or excel. The charts in google spreadsheet are not so elaborated and many of the changes one can do in excel, they don’t work in google. I know that google docs and spreadsheet is free, but as people say: the result will be as good as what you can afford, so being free you can’t expect to have very nice and elaborated projects done with them. So, for me, google docs and spreadsheet is great to be used to share your project with people while doing it, but definitely I would use office word and excel for my final projects. Time and effort are pricey for me, I wouldn’t want to pay that price. 

Some Ideas of using Excel in the classroom

Excel is such a versatile and useful program not just for businesses and school administration, but also for classroom use. Teaching students how to use many of its features and utilities is an opportunity to teach the Net-genders something new for them, thus have them more interested in our classes. Here are some ideas of how to incorporate Excel in our curriculum.

·        We can use Excel to create a spreadsheet of vocabulary entries in English and their correspondent in a foreign language, as one of the final assignments after reading a small book in that foreign language, making it easier to organize it alphabetically.

·        We could also use Excel to collect and organize data of a poll for the school board of students’ election, and use these data to a math class in which percentage would be taught.

·        Excel would be useful for student’s groups keep track of their fund raisings, giving them also the opportunity to present their data in charts, and the data could be used by teachers to teach math or the value of money.

·        Music teachers could use Excel to make students complete pre made charts with the notes

and their values, as an reinforcement activity.

• Teachers could use Excel spreadsheet to make children think about logic, using the feature of “recognizing your analogy”, as for example when you write some months or numbers. Teacher could ask students to explain the logic recognized by Excel, or could ask the students to foresee the logic it would use next.

There are so many ways we could use Excel in our curriculum, those are just some simple, not very time-consuming examples of it. Giving it a try, we could see how useful and fun it is to use it with students.

I use social bookmarking!!!

Social bookmarking is a relatively new (couple of year-old) way of bookmarking your favorite web sites or pages.  It’s called social bookmarking, because you save and categorize (by tagging them) your bookmarks on a computer network, such as Del.icio.us, BlinkList, Simpy or Diigo (the one our professor use in class), that allows you to access that list of bookmarks from any computer and other people can make use of your own bookmark, as well as you do. It’s a great example of R/W web.

What is really interesting about it is the tagging. Using technical but also more generic words to categorize your bookmarks, you can search the sites that are related to a matter much more easily, instead of having to create many different folders and copy each bookmark for each folder that it relates to.

 I think it’s a great way to have access to information that other teachers found interesting and, in a very informal way, have a “peer-evaluation” on a variety of sites. Also the fact that you can search for the tags is a time saver, and that’s a big help for us as grad students and teachers, as what is always lacking for us is time. It’s a great tool and I’m already using it for my other classes. 

Great Goggle Doc!!!!!

For me it was quite easy to use Google Doc for our Lesson Plans Project. It’s like a simpler “version” of OfficeWord. The cool thing for me was to share and publish in the web. It’s very nice to know that we can create a document and just share with some interested people or simply publish in the Web without having a hard time of e-mailing it to everybody. I guess it’s going to be a great tool for my classes and studies for sure. Great learning this week!!!

TEK tools, an opportunity to teach them something new

Thinking about what Wesley Freyer states, we really can create a more student-centered courses with the use of the TEK tools, courses that will make the Net Geners more literate in “traditional/ essential” knowledge, as well as, in digital knowledge. But to achieve that, teachers will have to learn how to use more engaging and complex tools, so they can also amplify their (students) digital knowledge, once it’s said that the Net Geners know how to use well just simple tools (even if when they are asked, they answered that they knew how to use more complex tools pretty well, what some training programs found untrue).

Another thing teachers will have to do is to become more digital authors and producers, not only digital consumers. A good way to do that is using the Librarian 2.0, the Googledocs, the Wikipedia and the Blogs. Those are great tools to make not just the students to write more, but also the teachers, who could share their ideas and lessons with peers and other students, making the process of planning a lesson much more interesting.

“Do you have a check? You could pay in a check.”

“Do you have a check? You could pay in a check.”, I scratched my head as I stood at the counter. Check… Check… I vaguely remembered seeing an unused checkbook tossed carelessly in the trunk of my car that morning. But even if I could locate it, I couldn’t be sure it was in the right sequence. Or that I could even remember how to use the darn thing.”, said Carie Windham

As I said before, I really feel myself as an immigrant not just here in the United States, but also a digital immigrant everywhere, as described by Prensky, because definitly I don’t speak “fluently” the same “language” of the Net Geners, as Carie Windham described so well in her article. It’s not just their “language” that is different, their experiences, their concepts, their daily life are so different from mine that it makes our perspective at least a little diverse. For me, the technology is really an up to date tool that can help me to reach my goals more easily, but differently from the Net Geners I know what is life without all these technologies (I know how to use a check book, rsrsr), I don’t take them for granted. Like the Net Geners, I really enjoy what the technology can do for me, for my work, for my grad studies and for my daily life, but in order to enjoy it I have to “learn” this new language, try to use it as much as possible to become more fluent… it’s a hard but at the end rewarding work.

I agree with them when we talk about on-line courses, if the course is not engaging and challenging, it’s just a matter of difference of the physical space where you are taking the course, with one more negative point for the on-line course: you don’t have the peer’s interaction as you could have in a “boring” traditional course.

So, for me technology is a wonderful and engaging tool that can really make a lesson more interactive and interesting, but the teacher role is always very crucial to achieve that, without his knowledge and creativity, you can have a very “boring” and superficial “high tech” course. I really agree with most of their wishes of more moderate use of technology in the classroom, the only thing is that, I can also really appreciate a brilliant but “boring” traditional lecture, because I’m fluent in that language.

What a revealing week

Thinking about everything that I read and the movie I saw this week, it’s inevitable that we, teachers, have to adapt our methodologies to reach and feed the Net-genders. What both Marc Prensky (in his presentations to educators, The 21st –century Digital Learner) and Gregory R. Roberts of University of Pittsburgh–Johnstown (with his a series of interviews, polls, focus groups, and casual conversations with other students) found out was that our students want us to teach our content by challenging them, like said Ben McNeely “They get bored if not challenged properly, but when challenged, they excel in creative and innovative ways. They learn by doing, not by reading the instruction manual or listening to lectures”, by setting a goal (like said Diana and James Oblinger ,“They want parameters, rules, priorities, and procedures … they think of the world as scheduled and someone must have the agenda.", by making them interact with projects, the Oblingers assert “In a study that altered instructions from a text-based step-by-step approach to one that used a graphic layout, refusals to do the assignment dropped and post-test scores increased. The Net Gen's experiential nature means they like doing things, not just thinking or talking about things”… and the list of examples goes on and on.

But, I know, as a teacher, that to apply these student’s demands is time-consuming and hard. I know that it requires a great effort of creativity and a digital literacy to successfully achieve it, and most of the time, teachers, as the digital immigrants and Generation X that most of us are, don’t know how to begin (remember that we had always been told what to do and how to study), so for most of us, not-net generation teachers, it is really hard to figure it out by ourselves. The students now I really think we should hear how the students want to be taught, as Prensky and Roberts said (not WHAT to be taught, this for me continues to be role of the experienced teachers, to make myself clear), but I also think that the educational system in general should help us, guide us on how to apply them and supply us with new technology, (not just Power Point, as said a girl in Florida "A lot of teachers make a PowerPoint and they think they're so awesome, but it's just like writing on the blackboard.") in order to allow us to, interacting with their new reality, feed the students with the knowledge that they continue to admire on us, like said Samuel Bass, Junior, Southwest Missouri State University, “I love when I come back from a class where my professor’s knowledge of a particular field is astonishing.”

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We are a good example of "students in the Cloud"

I agree that the “ extension of the learning conversation online (with blogs, wikis, e-mail, texting, chat, conferencing systems, portfolios, and so on), helps students develop online literacy skills. Though it is dependent on technology, it represents a return to the roots of human learning. Learning has always involved conversation. In fact, knowledge results from, or increasingly is, consensus-building through conversation.” (article about Cloud Computing). For centuries, knowledge was mainly acquired by conversation as the stories were passed through generations by “talking” to who was considered more expert about something, just a very few people were able to acquire information through books, so the learning conversation online is a return to the roots, but as it’s always been, it’s a process that must be guided in order to be more accurate. That’s the role of the college instructors and professors who design courses that uses one of the interfaces click-and-go, like our course, with the Diigo and Blog.

Great parallel between Net-genders and Natives

I really enjoyed Marc Prensky’s article, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, because the parallel he does with Net-generation learners, that he so nicely called digital natives and teachers/ professors, called by him digital immigrants, is so real that I, as a second language teacher and immigrant, can say that “I`ve been there!” (in both my life and carrier). I really believe that what Dr. Bruce of Baylor College of Medicine says (“Different kinds of experience lead to different brain structures”) is true and anyone can see it on any net-generation acquaintance (students or not): how they face and solve problems, how they multi-task every single thing they do, how they are fast on their responses, but not accurate… just like a native can do with a language: a native is much more intuitive when solving a vocabulary problem, an immigrant has to trust a dictionary of some kind, not his instincts that can be influenced by his former language and his past; a native can watch TV and read a newspaper and really understand both, for an immigrant, to fully understand some news, he must pay totally attention to what he is reading or watching, doing both usually leads to misunderstanding or not full comprehension; a native uses his language much faster than an immigrant, because it’s so “natural” to use that language that, most of the time, he doesn’t think about it, what leads many times to no-accuracy, on the other hand, when an immigrant really learned a language he tends to be much more accurate, because he has to “rationalize”, to think to use his new language.

I think the process of learning, independently what, is always the same, therefore what happens with a language acquisition in natives and in immigrants, it happens with new technology in Net-genders and in all the others non-net generation ages.

So, in order to access and use this new “language” called technology, we must learn it, experience it, use it as much as possible and be in close contact with natives to learn more about it and about the way they use it, just like an immigrant must do if he wants to communicate with a native in a foreign country: he has to try to use the native’s language properly. Learning another “language” is difficult? Yes, sure, but it’s not impossible, and once you incorporate the new “language”, a whole new world of opportunities opens the door for you.

First blog of a lifetime

This is my first blog ever... thanks God I had assigned for this class... it's gonna make me social....