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....