CEDO 540 Week 1

STATISTICS!!!!! Oh how I love that word. NOT!!!!!!! Ok, well at least that would have been my reaction 5 years ago. Now that I've gotten in the "Real World", I've learned an extreme appreciation for the field of Statistics. I am very cognizant of the benefits of stats in the daily world and therefore am excited to revisit this subject.

I have always been good at math and have always been good at manipulating information to get what I want, so I would think that naturally I should be good at statistics and I do believe I am, however, it just has never really excited me. Tie it to something that I want, however, and that could be a whole different story. Three years ago after my first year at the Grove, I decided that the whole Drafting and Architectural program needed an entire makeover to become relevant. In order to complete this makeover I was in need of around $60,000 for hardware, software, and furniture upgrades. In order to get this money I new I was going to need to convince the board that this was relative and was indeed a necessity. In addition to this, I also knew that PLTW was going to be the boards idea of the way that was desired for us to go to get some of the funding for this. It became my task to present the figures I had researched to the board in a manner that would allow the board to see that first of all the change was without question necessary. My secondary objective was to convince the board that my way was better than the PLTW direction and thus we should do it my way, however, as a fallback option PLTW was still better than what we currently had.

To begin my presentation to the board, I compiled an overview of what we had and where I felt we needed to go as I firmly believe that without understanding the past you can never foresee the future. Once I had this accomplished I provided the board with a data set that demonstrated the demand for engineers in our society. In addition to the demand for engineers in our society, I also documented the amount of companies using 3D drafting software as well as the amount of universities teaching a form of 3D drafting software. Once I had established the need for us to go in the direction of teaching a STEM related curriculum, I had to identify why it was better for us to utilize my plan and not PLTW's STEM initiative. I achieved this by compiling a compare/contrast chart that documented the total costs of each in regards to the total funding received from PLTW to identify that my way was cheaper even after funding received. In addition to the monetary documentation, I also compared a pie chart documenting the amount of users using Pro E, Solidworks, and Inventor in the industry, higher education, and high schools. I showed that high schools use Inventor because that is what PLTW requires and that was the natural progression from AutoCad which had cornered that market a long time ago. I also documented that Pro E and Solidworks had all but eliminated a need for Inventor in the industry a long time ago which showed the relevancy for us being forward thinking and teaching to the industry rather than following other schools into a dark hole.

What came out of all these statistics that I put in front of the board. Well, I got my way first of all. We received $62,000 in funding to put in all new Workstation computers with updated graphics cards, new tables, new high def projector and all new software. In addition, I received a workstation laptop to be able to work from both home and school with all standalone software and money to put into prototyping materials. I did not have to go through the PLTW training and most importantly do not have to teach a standardized curriculum to meet the demands of PLTW and instead can produce a curriculum that is individualized to my students and our community. The results have paid off as over the last 3 years I have sent 23 students on to college for Architecture or Engineering and have increased my class sizes to the point where now the administration wants to add 6 more computers to my classroom so they can fit more kids in here. I was hired to grow the program and the statistics helped me accomplish that goal.

I am really looking forward to gaining a better grasp on exactly how to clean up my statistics and present them in a more alluring and aesthetic fashion so as to enhance the power of my statistics and make my efforts more efficient and relevant and this time around may actually stay awake long enough to learn something from our education as I see correlation now for why I need to know this stuff.

CEDO 535 Week 4

OK, so last week I was a little turned off by the assignment but this week I'm in love with it. My students have said I have a tendency to be a bit bi-polar and maybe they are right. I can't express enough how enthralled I am with nings and wikis as well as screencasting. This is the mecca for me as to the reasons I chose to pursue a Masters in Instructional Technology versus all else. I am not an organized person by nature and this has been a life-long struggle for me and I'm always looking for ways I can better myself in this so as to provide a more meaningful and eficient education to my students without my shortcomings getting in the way. Here lies the reason I'm so excited about nings, wikis, and screencasting.

First of all I'm going to go ahead and drop the wiki from this post as I've chosen to create a ning. I think the wiki is great and deserves to be classified with the ning as a great tool, however, since I'm not using it I will focus my energy and limited time to discussing the application I am using in the ning. I started creating my ning early last week and became so engrossed in it that I actually tweeted that I was going to need an intervention to get me to quit or at least back off for awhile. I created a ning for our department, www.broncotech.ning.com, I created a ning for my own personal page which can be accessed through the department page as well as created sub-nings for each of my classes that I teach so as to keep the information sepearate and significant for each of my classes and students. OK so I haven't completed all of my classes yet but if I don't stop soon, I will have a ning created for every class in the schoool. I love the fact that I can create a site that will allow my students to be more organized than I am. I like the idea that if the student is unable to attend class due to illness, vacation, doctors appt., etc. they can simply access the information covered via the internet. This will greatly reduce the amount of time that I spend going back through what was covered yesterday and re-handing out assignments as well as reduce the amount of time I spend rehashing what the original assignment was and when it is due. In addition to these features, I have encorporated a blog directly to the website that I will be implementing in each of these classes as well. I get so frustrated with trying to convince my students to take out their notebooks and take notes that it makes me want to scream at times. By encorporating the blogs, I intend to ask my students to write reflection posts on the information covered in the lectures. I think that by doing this it will provide incentive to my students to pay attention and take notes, it will provide them with a means of restructuring the information in a manner that is meaningful to them, and it will provide an archived data set that can be easily retrieved when needed for studying for a test or quiz. In addition to these features, I also think the added bonus of getting to see what other students are taking from the lessons will expand their knowledge and provide incentive for them to strive for greater understanding.

As for the screencasts, I have always wanted to learn how to do these. I have always implemented tutorials and screencasts created by others into my instruction but have always wished that I could do this so I could more effectively create specific and individualized instruction that would be focused to the needs and demands of my students and classroom. In the past I have struggled to overcome the shortcomings of some of the tutorials and at times have made more work for myself because of this. Now that I have an idea of how to create these, I can easily see myself becoming as addicted to screencasts as I am to creating nings. I love the idea that I can create a screencast and if a student has missed a day, they can pull up the screencast and have access to my teachings without me having to delay the instructions of others to review the information they have missed. In addition, I like the idea that I can now be absent for a day and have instruction continue with only my digitized voice and instruction. In my field of Engineering and Architecture, to find a sub capable of coming in and running with a lesson is virtually not possible without relying on a book. I reach my students by minimizing the books and providing them with personalized instruction so by asking them to turn to a book totally throws the educational process out of wack. My students may not like to hear it but these screencasts will, for me, effectively end the need for movie days and the jockying of curriculum to overcome a planned absence for me. Sorry students, but your education just got a whole lot better because of this.

CEDO 535 Week 3

This weeks work is a little bit meaningless to me but it's a requirement so I will struggle through it. I'm not a huge fan of RSS feeds as I just don't use them very often. I can certainly see their worth and think that when I need to use them it will be a nice feature to be familiar with, however, I just don't have a use for them right this second. The photo sharing account is just not my cup of tea as I'm not a picture taker. I would love to be a picture taker and maybe someday when I have more than a couple of free seconds to myself, I will become a picture taker but as of right now I just don't have the time to think about taking a whole bunch of pictures thus a picture sharing account is not a big factor for me. The Ning stuff, however, is right up my alley. I'm not going to talk a lot about that end as this was just an introduction to Ning's and I have to believe in the coming weeks we will be asked to extrapolate more. I love the idea of Nings and am looking ot create a Ning of my own so I can't wait to get to this work.

Flying Griffon

Flying Griffon
Originally uploaded by longball380

This is a pic of my pup playing in the back yard. I just wanted to see how this posting pictures to my blog worked and this happened to be the picture I chose.

CEDO 535 Week 2

Ok, so first I must apologize that this blog is a little tardy. It has been a hectic week and I'm just now getting around to catching up on everything. The sad part is that next week is going to be just as hectic. I have meetings to get taken care of before Wed. and a football game to work on Tues. not to mention tying up grades for the end of the term all before Wed. as I leave for the northwoods for a week of dog training. Ok so it isn't necessarily Teacher's Convention, but hey, it is my way of re-energizing myself for another term of new classes.

As for the work this week, I found it to be extraordinarily interesting. I love the idea of wikis and intend to develop my own wiki to organize all my classes and the information in each of those classes. In fact, I'm currently in the process of doing this so I can appreciate the amount of work that goes into a quality wiki. In addition to the wiki, I've also been kicking around the implementation of blogs into my classroom. I've tried a couple of blog sites that I'm not completely sold on and haven't found that one site yet that really gets me excited to dive into implementing it in my classroom. The Elgg site really got me excited and I really am looking forward to diving even further into this site and seeing if it is something that I really want my students to use.

CEDO 535 Week 1

This week we reviewed various blog sites and our readings focused on how to utilize and implement them into our classroom. This issue reaches home with me because this is something I've been contemplating doing for awhile but just couldn't fully wrap my head around what I would use it for or how I would keep it safe for my students. I haven't blogged a whole lot myself and therefore haven't seen all of the features and options so wasn't sure exactly what I would want as an end result.
After reviewing the sites provided to us this week, I can honestly say that I would not choose any of these. What I can say is that by reviewing these and seeing what I don't like, I have a much better idea of what I do like and therefore will continue my search for a blog site that encompasses all of the features that I want. In addition to finding out what I do want, I also came to a conclussion on how I would implement this into my classroom.
I figured out that I would like to have a site which provided me with an aesthetically pleasing background that I could adjust to my own personal style, a site which would include all of the links to my students blogs so I could easily pull them up, the ability to secure the site to allow only my students and myself to read these with me in control of this and not my students, and in addition, I would like the site to notify me via email that one of my students has posted a new blog entry or responded to someone else's.
I would implement this blog by asking that each of my students blog weekly to recap what they learned from the week, what they liked and disliked, and what they think they may use the information for in the future as it would pertain to class. In addition, I would also ask the students to complete a final summation recaping everything they learned throughout the year which would allow the students to tie together all the information covered in the class.

CEDO 530 Week 5

This may sound really sad but I really love rubrics. I must be a teacher. With that being said, I don't use nearly as many as I should as I rarely seem to find the time to make them but I find them to be so beneficial to the students. I'm not sure which class it was that really pounded the message home that identifying what was expected out of your students ahead of time was so very important but it really is. We as teachers really do spend so much of our time trying to make our students prove that they know the infomration by making it extra difficult but really we are just having them do party tricks and jump through hoops so much of the time. By providing our studnets with rubrics, we give the students a clear and identifiable means of what exactly it is that we expect while leaving the ball in their court to complete it to the best of their ability. I have always found that rubrics make the whole process go quicker and more efficiently provided they are done in a clear and concise manner. I guess that would be why I'm so looking forward to being able to complete this weeks work. I get to do something that I enjoy doing and find so very beneficial while at the same time, hopefully, learning some new tricks to add to my bag of goodies.

CEDO 530 Week 4

Ok, so I can't really say I have a lot to add that will be efficient for the group so I'm not even going to pretend like I can. I've had some issues in my personal life that have added road blocks that have prevented me from staying up to date with my work. I am working as hard as I can to find the time necessary to get caught up and back up to speed but that is tough in it's own right given the time constraints of my full time job.
I will say, that in looking at this weeks work, it certainly looks interesting. I won't lie and say that it looks in any way shape or form easy but it does look valuable at least. I'm looking forward to finally getting my Animoto account and getting that completed and really looking forward to delving into Prezi. The Pecha Kucha doesn't necessarily excite me in the same way as the others but I'm hoping that as I get into the storyboarding it will review a greater efficiency for me.
At some point, I will actually be caught up and will be able to provide the rest of the group with the inferences and insights that you all so deserve but until then, I apologize. So without further ado, I'm off to regain my place along that path to realingment so so-long to you all for now.

CEDO 530 Week 3

It has been a hectic week so far but now that the wife's surgery is over and all turned out OK I'm looking forward to things getting back to some normalcy and getting some time to work on not only this weeks assignments but a couple that I was not able to get to last week. I can't wait to get caught back up and back on task because I can't stand being behind in anything.

With that being said, I took a little time to look at the animoto site and I have to say I love the possibilities. I'm always looking for ways to pimp my classes and my softball program and I see great things ahead for the use of this program. I think this will allow me to put together an awesome highlight video of both my classes and my softball program and link them to our websites. If the students see that I will highlight their work in an intriguing way I think they will be way more apt to take my classes. In addition, my girls have accomplished so much in our program and work so hard that I think it will be a nice treat for them to get to view some of their highlights in a fun fashion.

I also loved the pecha kucha video as this is something I really need to work on in my own presentations. I really need to limit my slides and the amount of intormation on each slide and I hope in delving deaper into this site I will improve my own presentations. It was also nice to finally learn how to accurately pronounce this name but I too have to agree with one of the responses on the video that this video truly does demonstrate just how important it is to have your slides match what you are talking about. If your timing is off it throws everything out of whack and makes what ever you wanted to get across become secondary because it totally throws the veiwer out of kilter.

CEDO 530 Week 2

Well I am definately one of those people that are not very creative. I'm fine as long as I have some framework to work with, then I will run all day long as far as creativity goes but when asked to just begin creating something, I am terrible. I'm pretty positive that I have adult on-set ADHD and when asked to start searching my brain for something creative it becomes a real ugly sight real quickly. My brain goes in about 100 different directions all at once and nothing of substance comes out.

Because of this issue, I hope that this weeks work will help me better organize my creativity and utilize my random thoughts to create ideas rather than create chaos. In addition, I am definately looking forward to reading and reviewing the six key principles as I am absolutely terrible with the powerpoints. It is not going to be about me determining which one I'm bad at and correcting that but more so determining if I do anything right that I don't have to correct.

In all this weeks work should provide me with a lot of assistance towards becoming a better instructor so I look forward to finding some time to get it accomplished.

CEDO 530 - Week One

What a week! Ok so not so much for my masters work but otherwise it was exceptional. I spent the week in Green Bay learning advanced usage of Solidworks, ArchiCad, Google Sketchup Pro and a little A+Cad. The downer of the week was the 790 question, 5 hour test on Friday for ADDA certification. I actually spent 16 hours studying for this test. If I don't pass I'll be pissed.

The beauty of the week was that I got to see what a school is capable of when it has stupid money. Bay Port High School is a gorgeous school with loads of beautiful toys to play with. What most other schools can only dream of, they had. The sad part was that much of it was not used to the extent in which it should have been. That is a story best left for another day though.

As for the work we will be doing and have done. I'm not good at presentations and have actually spent a lot of my career so far avoiding them and finding ways in which I am good at to present information to my students. I have seen how effective quality presentations can be and have always been envious of people who were able to create quality presentations. It is my supreme hope and desire that with the teachings of this class that I will be able to at least get into the serviceable range and can then continue to learn and improve to the point where someday I will actually consider myself good at these. The scary part is that by the time I'm good at these they will likely be outdated and it won't matter anyways.

I think that the idea of Presentation Zen is a great idea and it is a method by which I can logically make sense of the instruction and apply it to my own presentations. I am excited to delve into this curriculum and become a true "Zen" like presentor. In addition, I have often heard of people completing the picture a day task and have often thought about how I wished I would be better at taking pictures as it is always neat to look back and see where I had been over the last month. I'm always so busy that it is easy for me to forget what I did and when I did it and pictures are such a great way of adding a visual stimuli that will spur those memories. I look forward to the conclussion of this task and looking back at not only what I've done over the last month but also to look back and see my growth as a photographer over that span.

CEDO 525 Week 6

I have to admit that I was relatively surprised to see that I actually did a lot of the strategies we've discussed in this class in the lesson I reviewed. I am not someone who has spent a lot of time focusing on applying given strategies to my curriculum but rather focused on just trying to do what I thought was right and would work. The two areas I felt I was really lacking though were reinforcing effort and utilizing advanced organizers. I think that by providing my students with advanced organizers and implementing them into my lesson will keep the students excited to begin the lesson and create a smoother transition into the project. I'm a firm believer that how a student starts an assignment sets the tone for how the project will go and what better way to start the assignment than by modeling organization and efficiency. In addition, I currently put only a little emphasis on effort but I can see after reviewing this lesson that I need to do a lot more of this. I will create a rubric specifically for rewarding effort and will emplement a blog where I will ask the students to post twice/week on what they have done on the project as well as what their partners have done. I think that not only will I get an idea of any extra-curricular work, but this will also allow the parents to see what the students are doing in class and out. In the long run, these two additions will make my students maintain a strong interest in this assignment and will hopefully generate higher quality projects.

CEDO 525 Week three

In this week we were asked to review several sites containing note taking and data documentation tools or organizers. We had a list of Bubbl.us, CMAP, Inspiration or Kidspiration, Education Oasis, and Explora Tree. I chose to review Bubbl.us, Inspiration, and Education Oasis.

The first I reviewed was Bubbl.us as this was the first on the list. I thought that Bubbl.us was a neat tool to use and it was visually pleasing. I thought the commands and tools were very easy to use and the procedure certainly lended itself to focusing on learning and organizing the information provided versus learning the software itself. I think the less time a student needs to spend learning the software, the more time they can spend learning the curriculum. I can see how using this mapping feature would help students organize the information in a manner that is meaningful to them and that is what we are all striving for. I did not necessarily like the fact that it was pretty much solely a mapping program were as some of the other programs I reviewed had some additional possibilities as well but we will get to that in those reviews.

The second tool I reviewed was Inspiration. I had been hearing of people using Inspiration but had never actually used it myself. I signed up for a free trial and after finally getting it loaded, I was off and running through the beginning tutorials. This was an extremely easy program to use and very visually appealing. I thought the pictures included were awesome and I could see where students would really enjoy making maps using this program. I also liked the ease of use in creating these maps and the quick learning curve that went along with this software. In addition to the maps, I really liked the fact that you could also use the software to create outlines. I think that this additional feature seperates this program from Bubbl.us and therefore I would use this program before using that.

The final tool I reviewed was Education Oasis. This program wasn't nearly as visually appealing as either of the previous two programs I reviewed, however, what it lacks in aesthetics, I felt it more than made up for in functionality. I really liked the idea that you could select from a wide array of map templates, documentation templates, and data collection templates. I think this provides the instructor with some great tools to administer to the students for procurring information and assisting in the retention of that information. I didn't necessarily like the fact that these templates were done in a non-writable pdf format which requires printing them off to utilize them, however, I think I could copy the image and create a writeable format from these documents and then paste them into my shared folder where the students could digitally complete these documents and then store them in their own folders. I think that this would greatly enhance the students ability to stay organized as well as be able to rapidly recall the information when needed.

In all, I think a combination of Inspiration and Education Oasis would be very beneficial to bring into the classroom. I have always been a big proponent of taking the extra time to provide students with a means of organizing their information as I think in the long run, the organization makes what I do more effective and it saves time over the long haul.

CEDO 525 Week Two

I thought the article on feedback contained a lot of truths and a lot of very good information. I think our ability to provide feedback to our students is absolutely essential to their learning and the better we can do this, the better they will learn. I like the articles idea that positive feedback is critical, yet artificial responses aren't valuable either. I agree with this assertion full-heartedly. I am a firm believer that students know immediately when a teacher is being genuine or fake and they will lose respect for that teacher much quicker when they are giving false positve feedback than they would if that teacher was giving negative genuine feedback. It is my belief that a combination of positive feedback mixed with some cold hard facts feedback keeps the students on task and in tune to what you are trying to achieve while giving them the carrot in front of their nose that will keep them going and striving for better.

Though nice, I do not find the electronic forms of feedback to be sufficient for my curriculum. As an Architecture and Engineering teacher, so much of my work is done through drawings that I grade, critique and return to the students. How I control my feedback is by asking that all the students hand in their work through a digital dropbox. Once I have this in my dropbox, I then grade this online as this allows me to do so in a non-printable text so as not to destroy the students time and effort on the work. The students can then make the changes and print off their work for an improved grade. I've found that by offering the students a "second chance", they take the critique more seriously and trully attempt to internalize it which is what we all strive for. I guess to me, with these electronic programs, the feedback is too concrete and to final. I would like to use these some more and play around more to see how I could manipulate these to fit my style but for not I don't really see utilizing them much. In addition, I was not real pleased with Rubistar as it does not contain anything regarding technology curriculum.

CEDO525 Week One

I must admit that to begin this class I was a little leary of just how exciting it was going to be or rather not be. I must say that so far I have been very pleased with the curriculum and especially the book. I just got my book today but found the reading to be very insightful and very rewarding.

I usually can't stand reading textbooks but this one is the exception for me. I have never been a fan of KWHL for my curricular area, however, this book made me see the error in my ways and I've found this to be something I truly could use. I also found it interesting that ch. 1 showed me a way in which I could use survey monkey in my classroom beyond pushing it for student usage. I like Survey Monkey and find it usefull but just had found a good use for it for my own part of the education system. In addition, I also liked the web showcase idea provided in chapter 3. I currently have my Architecture students printout each of their blueprints for their homes and the best ones I hang in my classroom on my walls. The problem with this is that the parents don't have access to these except on the rare occassion of maybe a parent teacher conference. I think it is really important, even for high school students, to be able to demonstrate to their parents what they have accomplished. Often times our students don't get the praise they desire or desreve and the ability to get some kudos from their parents may just be the highlight of their day.

In all, I think there are several things from these readings that I can implement into my curriculum immediately. I intend to go back and reread these chapters so I can take notes on all the ideas I've conjured up with these new ideas. I look forward to what the future will bring with this book and I must give the Authors a lot of credit for making this book relevant and fresh.

CEDO 520 Week 4

Another Class down, I don't want to think about how many more I have to go. This class has been trying for me as much of the class was rooted in a time where I was not only attempting to complete my assignments for this class but also running a high school softball program, trying to finish up the school year in my "real job", and work with a new puppy I got for hunting this coming fall, not to mention maintaining my marriage. It's done now though and it's off to summer and more time to work on things the way they need and deserve. If not rambling and complaining so let me begin with our coverage of Week 4.

We were asked to begin with an assingment regarding copyright, fair use, and creative commons but this was the last assignment I did as I hate copyright and don't understand an ounce of it. I procrastinated way longer than I should have on this because the assignment scared me and I really didn't want to do it. Once I got into it though, I actually learned some things and found that it wasn't nearly as difficult as I was anticipating. I can't really say that I understand the copyright or fair use parts any better than before as they are still so vague and sparse. I did, however, get the opportunity to learn about Creative Commons licensing and this was pretty awesome. I had never heard of Creative Commons before this class and I find it to be the first common sense approach to copyrights that I have seen. I think this will be a fixture for many years to come and as it gets more and more prevelant I do believe that eventually it will replace fair use and copyright all together.

Our second assignment was to right a blurb on Privacy, Ethics, and Security which I infact did, however, I am not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about it here because to me there really isn't much to talk about. I am not real scared of online banking, online shopping, or online theft because I think it is much easier to track a cyber thief than it is to track someone who has pick pocketed you or stolen your check routing information. I'm not someone who spends his life in fear and this is certainly another one of those circumstances where I just plain refuse to be intimadated or what have you. I am cautious of who I'm buying from and I keep track of my order information, however, that is the extent of my caution.

Our third assignment was the Safe Internet Use for Children. I spent a lot of time putting together a presentation for this assignment so again I'm not going to spend a lot of time rehashing it here. I found it interesting that several articles reported that the statistics for child enticement were greatly overblown. I always kind of thought this until I started seeing all the "To Catch a Predator" shows and they kept routinely pulling guys in. After seeing several of these episodes and their effectiveness it made me think that according to the law of averages, there must be one heck of a lot of predators out there. Many of these reports stated, however, that the numbers were indeed overblown and that in fact it was child harassment that was the more important issue. Overblown or not, the severity of the crime attached with child inticement is enough for me to put it at the top of the list. I learned some great ways to prevent these issues and will in the future pass these along to my students and their parents.

The final assignment was the Second Life assignement. In this assignment we were asked to create a SecondLife account and enter at least 2 of the sites provided to us. I personally entered all of the sights because I was excited for this program and it's uses. I found the program to be intriguing and very enthrauling for students, however, I was disappointed with it's implementation capabilities. I can't see ever using this myself for educational purposes and therefore I lost interest quickly after discovering the lack of benefit for my needs.

In the end, I thought it was a great class with a great teacher but unfortunately terrible timing for me. I enjoy playing with and exploring new technological tools but unfortunately I never had the time to really delve into these tools like I would have liked and that upsets me. I look forward to begining my next class and having a little more time to commit to it.

CEDO520 Week 3

In week 3 we spent a lot of time working with partners to research various technological tools for implementation in the classroom. My partner and I spent a lot of time researching of these tools and trying to find ways that each could be implemented into the classroom.

Like anything, some of these tools I found to be very beneficial and some I found to be virtually useless. I'm not going to spend much time being a negative nelly so I will discuss some of the tools that I found to be very usefull.

The tools that I really liked were Google For Educators, Google Forms, Survey Monkey, Bloglines, Backpack, and Tokbox. The Google For Educators was just so diverse in it's uses for the classroom that I don't have enough time or room to discuss all the possibilities I thought of when using this program. Obviously it is largly a conglomorate of current Google Tools, however, it is awful nice to have them in one location as well as to have a site dedicated to advancing us as instructors. On a similar note, I also was quite excited about Google Forms and the possibilities it presented. A major reason that I am in this particular program is my desire to become more digital in my instruction and this application provides me some very viable ways of transitioning to that. I see the Google Forms as being a very easy and effective means of creating tests and the automatic grading aspect and data analysis doesn't hurt either. Just as importantly would be the fact that I could allow students to fill in medical information from home where they have their parents assistance and it would be stored online. This could be really beneficial if a student were to change doctors, phone numbers, or residence because they could just log-on and update the information in real time and it would take away much of the leg work for me. Survey Monkey I'm not sure how much I would use but when I would use it I could see it making life way easier for me. I currently do a lesson on invention where I have my students brainstorm a product and take it from conceptualization to creation and part of that process includes surveying their prospective market. I could see my students really using this application to assist them in that process. I could also see myself using Bloglines as a means of helping to hold my students accountable for their learning by asking them to right a response to what they've learned, much like we are doing with these blogs. Backpack seemed to be a really cool sight and one that I could see myself using as well. I'm not sure I will get the chance as my school district is currently attempting to go to an interactive web setup that seems to be similar to this, however, if they do not go to this new setup, I am definately pulling this application out of my new bag of tricks. I'm someone who really needs to have a series of assignments laid out in front of me as a constant reminder of what I need to do and when I need to do it by and I think many of my students are the same way. In addition, I think that the ability to share files and images would greatly assist the students in completing their assignments as well as reducing the amount of paper I would be using in my classroom. Finally, the last application I found to be interesting was Tokbox. I don't see a lot of need for Tokbox in the classroom but I do find the possibilities stimulating. I have always been someone who has been an advocate for accountability in the classroom. I never believed in telling a teacher when, where, and why they were going to be evaluated as I see so many teachers who then spend all of their time preparing for that one lesson and that is not a true representation of their teaching abilities. With Tokbox, you would have to be accountable as a teacher should you choose to allow parents or administrators to drop in on your class at any given time. I could see using Tokbox to create presentations and then showing them rather than having students get up in front of the class and give presentations. I like the instruction that comes with presentations, however, I hate the amount of time it takes for students to switch presentors, get setup, get going, and then answer questions. I think this system would greatly reduce that time. In addition, I could most predominately see using this to record a video myself and post for students in the case I was to be absent. I could continue to instruct my class without actually being there and I love that fact.

In all this lesson was a very rewarding one for me. I'm always trying to build my bag of tricks and refresh the old tricks. This lesson provided me with a lot of great ideas and things I will implement into my classroom. I'm looking forward to trying some of these applications in the classroom and hope my students will enjoy them and see their merit like I have.

CEDO 520 Week #2

In week two, we were asked to research some resources such as Noodle Tools and Wikipedia. This assignment was right up my alley as I am very much entrenched in the battle of to use Wikipedia or not to Wikipedia as many of our teachers refuse to even listen to arguments about it, however, I believe it is a valuable starting point for educating students on what to research. In addition, I had been hearing about Noodle for some time but just hadn't gotten the time or the energy to really delve into learning about the tool until I was forced to do so for this class.

I found Noodle Tools to be every bit as awesome as I had been hearing and I believe this will rapidly replace Google as my primary search engine. In fact, I liked Noodle so much that for my end of the year engineering research paper that I require for my Principles students, I asked that each student make a gmail acct. (NOTE: if you have more than 15 students trying to create a gmail acct. from one IP address, Google will disallow as a means of protecting against false accts.). I then asked my students to logon to Noodle and begin searching the field of Engineering using the Clusty to get ideas for their presentations. Once the students determined a particular sub-category within the field of Engineering, the student was then asked to prepare a powerpoint presentation using Google and invite me and preferably all the other students as viewers so they could have access to the data and statistics at any given time.

As for the Wikipedia assignment, I found it very interesting to find that many of my classmates had similar beliefs as myself in that Wikipedia is a good source to begin researching from but not necessarily a final stop along the journey towards enlightenment. I also found it to be interesting that while going through this assignment, I actually had a student who had contacted the Webmaster for Wikipedia regarding the validity of their information so as to present this data to his English teachers for the purpose of helping them realize that the information is monitored closely. I informed this student of my current assignment and informed him of my beliefs and my findings and by combining his data along with my philosophy, he actually got one of our English teachers to agree to accept Wikipedia when combined with other resources verifying the data found from Wikipedia.

In all, this weeks of assignments were such that I could implement immediately and were every bit worthy of implementation. I enjoyed these assignments greatly and look forward to continued use of Noodle Tools and gaining a better understanding of it's nuances. In addition, I happy to have a furthered understanding of Wikipedia and will continue to allow it's inclusion in research for my classroom given the meeting of some basic criterium when using it.

CEDO 520 Week #1

Ok, so I know I'm late in getting these entries in but please hang with me as I try to catch up over the next week. Things have been hectic in my life as my softball team made it one game away from going to state before falling a hair short causing me to put off my Master's work as well as my grading so now that we have 2 days of school left I'm trying to cram everything in and maintain some sanity. The worst part is that now that my season is done and the school year is coming to a close, my wife believes that I should be doing all the things on her honey-do-list that I've been putting off until now.

Well enough wasting time because I don't have it yet to waste. I can't wait until Thur. though when I actually have some free time to get all of this stuff done though.

Anyway, we were asked to research internet learning resources in Week 1 and that is what I will discuss briefly here today. In the beginning, when reviewing our assignments I thought "oh, boy! Whoooooo Hooooo, this is going to be fun! NOT!" Boy was I wrong, I actually did enjoy this assignment and found it very interesting and useful for that which I do. In my Engineering and Architecture classes I always require one research paper as a means of creating some cross-curricular instruction but I've never really spent much time thinking about where my students were getting their information from. This assignment really forced me to sit down and evaluate my procedures on this and showed me an efficient and meaningful way to provide further instruction on my research assignments. In addition, this assignment caused me to think about just how much research I actually ask the students to do in my classes and therefore caused me to think about restructuring my curriculum to teach students the proper way to research before going through the entire class with no clue. For instance, in my Architecture class I begin by giving the students the assignment of designing a home within 100sq.ft. of 2,200 sq.ft. under the price of $500,000. I provide them with 4 plots of land that they must research and price out when determining their plot. In addition, they must research the local building codes in that local. I also provide some mandates as to what the students homes must contain, eg. brick in a given sub-division or septic and water needs in another location. The students must research the costs associated with these requirements and then subtract them from their grand total. What ensues is students searching high and low to find given costs and me running around to confirm that their findings are accurate. If I were to provide them with a foundation for research before hand, this would greatly reduce my need to run around like a chicken with my head cut off.

I really liked Kathey Schrock's form for evaluating websites and modified her form slightly to fit my needs in the classroom. I think that providing this form to my students combined with providing them some new forms of internet resources like noodle tools, their searches will result in better data as well as create a more efficient method for my students.

Blog #4, CEDO510

This class has been extremely relevant to that which I do. I am currently an Architecture and Engineering instructor for Union Grove Union High School and therefore I deal with computers on a daily basis. In addition to dealing with computers, the computers that I deal with are extremely high-end computers so the cost of replacement would be astronomical if I were to have to replace these computers. Because of this fact, this class is instrumental in teaching me how to best protect these computers as well as to maximize that which I already have.

I have always been a curious mind and have explored the innerworkings of the computers I have owned, however, I have never really payed too much attention to what did what and how I could improve these systems. This class has forced me to take a look at what the parts were that I was looking at and how I could improve my components to get the most out of them. In addition, this class has also helped me get the most out of my usage of my computers by addressing the appropriate component accessories to best meet my computer usage needs.

I look forward to completing my perfect computer assingment as I am excited to utilize the information that we've learned and apply that in a fashion that I would do so in a real-world experience. I've never been someone who likes busy work and refuse to do such work if I see no point in it. The work we've done however, I can see the application for it. I can see myself not only saving myself money in the future should I need a new home PC, however, I can also see myself saving my school money by being more knowledgeable of what type of computer I need and how I can best assemble that computer at an affordable price.

CEdO510 WK 3. What would I lose?

If my computer crashed I would lose only a few documents of which I have recently completed and that is about it. I go to great lenghts to protect myself against this because when I was in college I did lose everything and had to learn the hard way the importance of backing things up. My college experience went something to the effect of I had nearly 4 and 1/2 years of documents saved to my computer when the Wisconsin DPI came down with the decision to institute PI-34. Under PI-34 we were asked to complete a portfolio and therefore had to come up with several of our old documents. I got about 1/3 of the way through all of my old documents when my computer crashed and all of my old documents were lost. I was so panicked and worried I thought I was going to die. Here I was stressing about this whole PI-34 crap and now all the sudden things are made even worse by the fact that I could no longer create a portfolio with the required documents. I vowed at that moment from then on I would do whatever it took to make sure that if I were to lose information again, it would not be much as I would always have a relatively new backup handy. In addition, I am paranoid because of this incident so I also keep this information in numerous locations. I have some information on Disks, I have some information on an external hard drive, I have some information on a thumb drive, and I have some information in online storage. The disks and hard drive I keep locked in a fireproof safe as to avoid losing them in a fire and the thumb drive that I once thought would replace these has been slowly fazed out since I broke my first one. The online storage has taken the place of much of that information, however, I'm still a little leary with putting all of my personal information on there so that remains locked in the safe on the external. Every couple of months I make it a point to burn new disc backups and resave to my harddrive so as to prevent the future loss of any information. Someday, maybe I will feel comfortable enough with the online storage to just place everything there and at that point I can stop this constant obsession with securing my data.

CEdO510 The Future of the OS

Well let me begin by saying that I am probably the last person that you'd want to ask this question to as I don't fully understand the operating systems as a whole. I like to think that I have a descent grasp on technology and for the most part the operations of the computer, however, for some reason, I have never been able to fully grasp the concept of the operating system and the differences between the various OS's. I have always used Microsoft Windows XP until recently when I switched over to Windows Vista. At first I thought I would hate it but as I've grown accustomed to it I actually prefer it over XP. I think this will be the general progression with whatever OS the future holds or for that matter the lack there of. I do see a minimalist movement beginning to gain steam, however, I think that with the way our culture is and the fact that people like their bells and whistles, I don't see this truly taking over the market. I do think that society may go in the direction of a more webbased system with less demand for an OS, however, I currently can't see people giving up the OS as a whole. Then again, 5 years ago I would have thought it ridiculous to believe that our students would be working on computers with virtually no CPU as our students do in our library by working on thin client systems. There are some unbelievably intelligent people out there who know way more about this than I do and I guess I will just have to trust that they know better than I do what I want and need and I will just have to go with the flow and learn the systems as I go and I'm sure I will like their system better just as it has always been in the past.

Computer history for Ryan Boylen

My first computer was an Acer computer that my family bought when I was a freshman in high school. The computer was slow and constantly was getting confused when you'd try to complete tasks. The computer wasn't the greatest thing since sliced bread, however, it did open up a whole new world of word processing to me. When I went to college, my parents bought me a Compaq Presario and that was a dramatic upgrade at the time. The Presario had it's own issues but for the most part it was a fairly fast computer for the day and allowed me to do much of my work at home vs. spending my nights in the computer lab. I bogged the computer down easily while in school with all the information I had saved to the computer, however, as time went on and the advancements fo computers became more and more prevelant, I was able to upgrade the computers memory capabilities and have since replaced the hard drive, added wireless internet to it, and made several other upgrades. This has allowed me to keep the computer relatively current to the point that I still use this computer today as my desktop computer. Since this computer I have moved on to bigger and better things and actually use workstation computers now to house my many graphically demanding programs but for the day to day operations, the old Compaq remains a decent computer despite a couple of real scares. In all, I'm not sure where my life would be without the advent of the personal PC, as my job relies on them, but one thing I do know is that they have made my life so much easier and more efficient and anything that can do that for me I love.

CEDO515 Week 6

Well, another class down and many more to go. I must say that I learned a lot from this class and found this class to be very beneficial. I enjoyed the work, all that is except for the book, though I might be slanted as I did not get my book until week 5. My only real negative of this class is the timing for me as we started our softball season last week and these first two weeks are always the busiest. Between the season, the end of the term, this class, and trying to find some time to still teach gets a little frustrating. I must say though that if I'm going to do it, at least I feel like I'm getting something out of it. I have implemented the spreadsheets into my daily life and they have helped me tremendously, now if I can just find the time to implement some of the other stuff. I look forward to the summer when I can refocus my attention on finding ways I can utilize the information we've learned and best implement it into my classroom. I took this particular major because I wanted to learn more about spreadsheets and I am delighted to say that I have not been dissapointed.

CEDO515 Week 5

This week we created technology learning plans and looked at software evaluation rubrics. I enjoyed the tlp profile tool as it confirmed a lot of my beliefs in both things that I did well as well as things that I don't do so well. I would have liked the profile tool to be a little bit more precise with its choices and selections, however, for the most part it seemed to be fairly accurate in identifying positives and negatives. In addition to the tlp profile tool, I also enjoyed looking at the software evaluation tools. I have always been someone who likes using technology to evaluate technology so this is right up my alley. I looked through several different evaluation tools and found several that I liked and will actually recommend one evaluation tool to our IT as a plausible tool for him to implement in his own future workings. All in all I enjoyed the reflection and the opportunity to grow as a teacher and hope look forward to the day when I will actually have some time to sit down and begin implementing my findings.

CED0515 Week 4

For this assignment we have been asked to review educational videos from the intime website and then review their usefullness for our classroom and how we might implement it into our classroom. For my part, I chose to review a video entitled Hyperlinking Partnership from the desk of David Pratt from Perry Community High School in Perry Iowa. The video pertains to a collaboration between the students and members of the community in the field of Computer Aided Drafting and Design.

This video relates directly to my field as I too am a Drafting and Design teacher. Over my years as an instructor, I have actively searched out ways to form a collaboration with our community in where we can identify to our students the "Real World" meaning of our instructions in their everyday lives. Mr. Pratt has developed a very good model of how to do this and therefore I can see myself stealing many of his ideas and instituting them into my own classroom. In this video Mr. Pratt has gathered numerous community members and brought them into the classroom to act as mentors for the students in helping them brainstorm and create a desgin using Kennex. I think my own personal lab is slightly more technologically relevant as well as my classroom set-up more conduscive to specialized instruction so with that in mind I would make minor adjustments to the curriculum to better utilize the collaboration of the community members. Mr. Pratt is instructing both Drafting students at the same time he is instructing Architecture students and therefore has members of the community from each of these fields where I would prefer to have just Architects or just Mechanical Engineers working with my individualized classes. In addition, Mr. Pratt uses Kennex to model the students designs where I would prefer to have the students make working models and prototypes of their mechanical designs and prototyped models of the homes they've designed. My advantage over Mr. Pratt is that my software allows my students to create drawings in a day vs. his software that takes weeks to do the same. This flexibility would not only allow my students to create more detailed drawings with the assistance of their mentor but it would also allow them to spend more time determining how to create a prototype. As long as I limited the materials and gave structure to what can be designed, I think one school day would be appropriate for completing this task.

I not only see this application as being very beneficial for my students in helping them learn, I also see this as being a way to present our program to the community and make a solid name for our program within the community. I have had the pleasure of meeting several of our Mechanical workers and they are extraordinarily pleased with where we have gone, however, I think that if they could work firsthand with our students, this may provided a pipeline for future employement.

All-in-all I found this site to be very usefull and very effecient. I will not only utilize this site for this particular lesson but will continue to search further for other lessons that I may be able to scavenge. Yeah, that's right, I'm a vulture and I'm proud of it.

CED0515 Week 3

Ok I promise I won't make this an hour long post. This week we are focusing on spreadsheets and I couldn't be happier. I am terrible with spreadsheets and have always admired those who efficiently and effortlessly seem to use spreadsheets and this was a large reason as to why I took this class. To add to the joys of learning how to better utilize spreadsheets I also get the added bonus of learning how to better implement them through the use of technology. I have so effortlessly and easily learned how to use this feature that I have mandated that all of my coaches create a Gmail account so I can share spreadsheets with them. I have already created budget sheets, rosters, statistical analysis sheets, information documents and many more that I intend to have all of my coaches utilize. This one class has saved me several hours of documenting stuff for my other coaches that I can now have them do themselves. For that I am very thankfull. In addition to saving me time, this has also provided me with a system of checks and balances that will allow my coaches to see the finances and keep anyone from being able to accuse me of stealing money. In addition to my coaching, I've also created documents for my Architecture class and will soon be creating documents for my engineering program. In all I'm extremely happy with this portion of the class and look forward to continue to grow and learn in utilizing spreadsheets even further.

Class 2 week 2

Well, what can I say but thank the good Lord for an extra week. I have to be honest and upfront and say that I really haven't had much time to delve into all the work in depth, however, being as I will be gone at a conference all weekend, I will not have time to write a before the expected timeline so I will do my best with that which I've done so far.

I look forward to the ability to play with the search engines as I am one of those people who have gotten comfortable with my Google and that's basically all that I know. I have used Ask.com a little and yahoo sparingly, however, Google has been my nearly exclusive search engine for quite some time. I do like Google and find it very usefull, yet between what I learned about searching from our class combined with my knowledge that there has to be other good options out there as well, I look forward to the adventure of exploring these newer technologies.

As for the reading, (I really wish my book would get here) I have made it through Ch. 3, however, have not gotten around to reading ch. 4 yet. Ch. 3 really struck a cord with me because I find collaboration and communication amongst students to be one of my strongest strengths as a teacher and concentrate heavily on this skill as I find this to be one of the most important skills our students can learn. I see so many of my students come in with little to no social skils and know that these students will need to be able to communicate with their future co-workers, employers, and clients. Like I've always stated to my students, "you can be the brightest of the bunch, yet if you can't communicate your thoughts and ideas to anyone, all those brains don't mean a thing". In my field of Engineering and Architecture, these skills are even more so desired. In the field of Engineering, one of the greatest obstacles facing our Engineers is the lack of ability to communicate their ideas to desires to the laborers. Most of the laborers refuse to convey their thoughts to the engineers because they believe them to be too stuck up and set in their ways to change and don't believe that they have any clue about reality as it pertains to actual production. In the field of Architecture, we face this problem a little as well. In today's society, where more Architects are having to set down with the actual homeowners and decipher their desires and interests and put that onto paper, the necessity to communicate has obviously gotten more important. In addition to communicating to the homeowner, Architects must also deal directly with the General Contractor. As someone who has worked on the labor side of this, I can honestly say that there are several Architects out there who have no clue how to communicate with the GC and have no clue what it takes to build a house. I've had Architects tell me, after we've poured a foundation, that he changed the plan and we are now going to add brick, never mind that we live in Wisconsin and with our frost layers, that brick fascia would last all but a couple of winters before it was completely cracked, off kilter, or falling down. I had one Architect tell me to just stick to plans when his plans were off by 2'. When I explained to him that if I were to stick to his plan the house would be out of square by 4' he just could not believe that he was wrong until I told him I would go no further on the house until he came to the site and showed me how it could possibly work. Once arriving on site, he looked at the plan, argued with me for nearly an hour about why he was correct until I ordered my guys to set up the forms along the measurement he had provided and he saw that the East wall fomed about an 85 deg. angle vs. the 90 it was supposed to be. Ultimately, I think by teaching my students the ability to collaborate amongst eachother, I am teaching them how to respect others and their opinions. If my students are able to do this, I think they will be better prepared to express their ideas to others as well as constantly improve themselves by being attentive to the fact that others may have some knowledge they can learn from.

My classes are heavily software oriented and yes, most of these softwares claim to be interactive, however, as our text states, they are in no way, shape, or form interactive. We try to overcome this by having our students design for others rather than for themselves. For example, I just gave my Architecture students an assignment today where they have to design a home for a family of 4. The family has $350,000 to work with and I subtract from that total for a chunk of land of their choosing. I let them pick between 25 acres in the country, a 1.75 acre golf course lot, a 3/4 acre subdivision lot and 1/4 acre city lot. I then ask them to research how much these lots cost by reviewing several Reality sites and coming up with comparables. What is left of the money is what they get to work with for building the home for this family of four. It is then up to the students to ask me what the ages of the family members are, what their interest are, and what they desire in a home. I try to give each student some different criterium to go off of but ultimately, this forces the students to learn that they have to work with the family not just for the family. I commonly throw out ideas that make little to no sense and inform the students that it is their responsiblity to give their professional opinions on the ideas, yet ultimately, the people paying the bills are the one who gets the final decision. We also try to come up with several community based assignments for our students to complete. Last year our students designed the new town square recreational park for the city. I asked that the City Chairman come and speak with my class about what their desires were and what they wanted to see in the end. I then had my students ask questions and begin their designs. As our students came up with more questions along the way, I had them call the Chairman directly to get the answers from him. I think too often we as teachers feel we need to handle the interactions of our students with the community and in reality our students are extremely capable of doing this very well. In addition to learning about the process of how to design for the individual, these students also learn the best ways to deal with the client. In addition to such assignments for my Architecture class I also setup much of my Engineering class as partner based assignments. I feel that this forces our students to learn to work with others as well as respect others ideas and opinions. I get a lot of very bright students in these classes, however, a big problem I run into with these students, is that they are so worried about getting an A that they refuse to give their partners enough credit and try to do everything themselves. I usually let this go for a couple of days and then inform the students that this grade is based more on how well they can work with their partners and not necessarily on their final project. This changes things exponentially and once the collaboration begins, we usually get better finished projects than they would have otherwise.

1 credit down, 31 to go......

Is it bad that I am already counting? I'm not trying to be a Debby Downer, just extremely busy right now and not seeing any sign of a let up anytime soon. I think we as teachers should all be put in a position like the one I currently find myself in. As a coach, teacher, husband, and now a student, I am finding my workload to be ridiculously tight and trying to find time to complete everything a bit of a chore. It is for this reason that I think us as teachers should be placed in these circumstances. Many of our students are forced to balance work, athletics, family, and education and are often as busy as I'm complaining to be now. I think by putting ourselves in situations like this, we learn to empathize with our students and their workloads a little more. I think having an understanding of what some of our students are going though only makes us better as instructors. I'm not advocating that we give our students a free pass, only that we try harder to understand what they may be going through and what possible reasons may be when they fail to meet our standards.

Likewise, I think all of our students should have the opportunity to spend a little time in the same shoes we as members of this program find ourselves in. I find that many of our students think that they are going to get a job, make millions of dollars, buy a home that never requires any work and have all kinds of time to play with their toys that they are going to buy with all that money they are going to make. My students at least, seem to have missed the fact that most of us as responsible adults, work very hard for the money we earn and most of us, even though we work hard, have many responsibilities outside that job that keep us from being able to play with whatever toys that money has afforded us. They seem to have missed the fact that the house they intend to buy requires work to maintain or in my case, fix up. They seem to have missed the fact that in order to stay ahead of others who want their job, they will have to push themselves to constantly improve themselves in their jobs. They seem to have missed the fact that the family they envisioned will demand their time and likewise should receive their attention.

I know, I know, it will never happen. Just because we can't truly impress upon our students just how real life can be, I don't think it should stop us from trying. I regularly speak with my students about life and what happens behind the scenes of my life. Usually it deals with the fact of understanding the concept of money as I find most of my students believe that making $10/hr. is going to make them rich. When I ask them how well they think teachers are paid, usually their response is something to the effect of terrible. I agree and then tell them what exactly it is that I make/hr. This certainly opens some eyes. Of course, for reasons of full disclosure, I must admit that I break it down for only an 8hr work day and for the length of one school year as it makes the effect much more dramatic but still there is a point behind my doing so. When I explain to the students that with my salary along with my wife's who makes less than I do, we are able to afford a house, mind you it is 105 years old, I am able to afford a nice truck, yet my wife drives a totalled-out Saturn because she only has to drive 4 blocks to work, and I can afford little else, and finally I explain to them that my dreams of having a '66 mustang to fix up, a snowmobile to ride, a motorcycle to ride, a 4 wheeler to ride on my 200+acres of hunting land have all had to be put on hold because I first must pay back my college loans, my credit card debt that I've totalled up fixing up my house, and my bills, they start to understand that $10/hr. isn't going to cut-it if they intend to live life the way they think they want to. I then ask the students to go home, talk to their parents about what they make and what all they have to pay for. I ask them to talk with their parents about where they began and how they got to where they are. I find that these little peaks into what it takes to get the things that the students desire focuses the students and sets goals for them to achieve. In the same light, by putting myself in a situation where I am extremely busy, I can refocus my goals for my students and try to be more understanding and flexible when it comes to helping my students achieve the goals I've assigned them in the way I want to see them achieved.

I speak of this because of I've learned a lot from the readings this week but feel it was probably not the desired learning originally intended. By reading the text and having continued checkpoints along the way I realized that I was learning more than being asked to read it all the way through and then go back and try to remember what it was that I was reading. You see, I must admit that I've fallen into that old habit of thinking that by making the material harder and having the students work harder to get the information, that they must undoubtedly be learning more. In fact, I'm just teaching these students to find ways to cheat or get by with doing the work half way. This text reminded me that sometimes making the assignment as easy as possible is the most efficient way for the students to learn. It comes down to the fact that if this material was any tougher, I would have felt defeated. I would have looked at it and said no way, how can I get it done good enough to get a grade and call it good. The saddest part about this is I pride myself on being someone who believes in the mantra that if it is worth doing, it's worth doing well and I still found myself going into this with that defeated attitude. This is why I learned so much from this text. The text talked about using technology efficiently by providing examples and direction to make it easy for the student to learn. This can obviously be applied to more than just technology and for that reason I'm happy I've had the opportunity to learn from this text. Now if I could just make writ ting the papers so easy as I'm sure many of you have noticed writ ting is not my strong suit.

So 1 credit down, 31 to go and many more life lessons to go to help me better myself, achieve my goals, and who knows, maybe make it a little easier to afford my toys and buy myself a little more time to play with them.

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Week Two

Well, after a frustrating first week, I'm off and running again. I have always been someone who is easily excited by new technologies and this class for me is like a kid in a candy store. I just hope that I can remember them all when we are done and will be able to navigate back through them all and select the ones that I will truly use frequently.

The video process is one that I find to be exciting because I see great possibility for this when I'm gone from school. I am currently in the midst of changing our lab from what was a drafting board only room into a $60,000 computer lab. In addition to this, I have spent much time away from school researching curriculum options and meeting with colleges to discuss transcripted credits. If this isn't enough, I'm also the head softball coach and miss some school due to games and conferences on that end. With that being said, I think this may be a way for me to provide information to my students while I'm gone, or at the very least to the sub. I do not expect my subs to walk in and have the first clue about how to use Pro E or Solidworks, however, if I give a demo and explain the curriculum through a video, I would think that the majority of the work could be done.

I also have many students who like to "experiment" at home. Being an engineering teacher, I teach a lot of problem solving curriculum in which my students must build a project to meet demands. We've done T-shirt launchers, automated rocket launchers, Rube Goldberg projects and many more. My students, however, like to go home and put this wonderful knowledge to use doing things that I can't allow in school. As long as it's safe, I try not to stifle their creativity and I think this may be a way that they can show their fellow classmates their exploits when not able to necessrily bring it to the classroom. For instance, I had a group of five students last month who built a 6' tall trebuchet that launched a pumpkin over 100 yards. Obviously they could not bring this to school, however, I think my other students could have gained a lot by seeing these students work and hopefully excite some of the others to do the same kinds of things. If they could have made a video and used one of our newly found technologies to store their video on they could have brought it in that way, we got by with them burning their video to dvd and watching it but obviously not all of my students have the ability to create dvd's of their own.

I certainly hope that I find this weeks curriculum to be less time consuming than last weeks as I spent a lot of time working on classwork last week. Thank the Lord for Thur and Fri off. I know that things are new and they will come easier as I start to learn more about the info and for that reason I'm looking forward to begining this new round of research. Of course, it would pry help too if I did the assignment right the first time. Well, I'm off to dive into skype and learning about the wonderful world of online storage. Wish me luck!

Ryan

Week 1- Succeeding in Online Learnng

As always, technology reared it's ugly head and showed us all just why so few of us are truly adept at using and implementing new technologies, not only in our professions but also in our daily lives. The scary part is that by all accounts, I felt our first meeting went relatively smoothly with regards to how rocky it could have gone. It is easy for me to say such as I had nearly no problems what-so-ever, thank God, as I'm usually the guy struggling as others are whizzing through things. With this being said, it is for these struggles in accordance with the prospects for a more efficient and effective personal and professional lifestyle that I feel a class like the one we are currently involved in will benefit us all.

The outreach of this class doesn't stop with us, however, and that is truly the benefit and blessing of such a tremendous opportunity. I can't speak for everyone involved in this program, only myself, yet I know I personally spent much of our introductory class with visions of how this technology can be implemented into my own classroom. I can only hope that I will be able to implement it as effectively as the experience I had on Tuesday night because I see the possibilities as endless.

For those of you who have not seen my bio, I am a technology teacher at UGHS where I teach Architecture and Engineering. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this field, let me be the first to tell you that the technology in this field is changing everyday and has made tremendous advancements. These changes have brought about an ability to complete more work in a shorter time frame with more advanced and in-depth drawings being completed by our students. This all means that my demands for grading, in addition to paper usage, has increased substantially. In an attempt to keep pace with the times I have attempted to go digital in my teaching methods by implementing digital dropboxes and providing information through shared folders. Just as an example, my tutorial sheets for my students generally are upwards of 100+ pages and the students can get a tutorial done in a week or less where a tutorial like this would have taken the students weeks on a drafting board. Therefore, we are not only using more paper to present more information, but the students are producing more completed works which ultimately means more paper yet. The process of digitizing most of my assignments has greatly reduced the amount of paper we burn through, however, it's installation has created additional problems which I feel this program will help me alleviate.

Our school technology program is relatively archaic, I must say the new IT coordinator is attempting to upgrade, so we do not have the ability as of now to present interactive materials to our students. This all means that when I present a word processed assignment online to our students they can not go in and complete the assignment on their computers, save it and re-insert that document into my dropbox. Unfortunately this all means that the student must print off the document, complete it and hand it in. This system helps in allowing the students to always have access to my documents but it also means that my attempts to cut back on paper usage has failed for this particular assignment format. In addition to the assignments I have provided, I would really like to be able to create tests and allow our students to complete these tests electronically and submit them to me. In our current system this becomes difficult to do for not only me, but also the students, making things more difficult when in fact we are striving to make the process easier. What I would like to do through this program is gain the ability and knowledge necessary to create a webpage for my students where they can go and see what we did for the day should they be absent, get the assignment and complete it electronically and then submit them to me. In addition to providing the students with the assignments, I feel it would be extremely beneficial to my students to have the ability to have quick links to information much like what we have in this class with the rubrics and assignments. One program in which I have found that I would truly like to develop my model after is the Glenbrook South High School Physics Department in Glenbrook Illinois. I have attached a link to their website should you like to see what it is that I'm speaking of http://gbs.glenbrook.k12.il.us/Academics/gbssci/phys/phys.html.

As I stated earlier, the affects of my participation in this class do not end with me. By providing a more efficient and effective curriculum presentation to my students, their abilities to learn and grow will be drastically improved as well. In addition to the affects this program will have my students, this program will also affect my co-workers as well. My principal overheard me speaking with our IT guy yesterday and informing him of my visions and how this class can take me there, the principal was so excited about where I was going with this that he has asked that upon my completion, I model the process to rest of our staff to implement in their classes. It is for these reasons that I say the affects of my involvement in this program will affect the lives of many.

In conclusion I would like to leave you all with a quote I have found, which I feel pertains directly to heart of this programs mission, from a very well educated and very distinguished individual, former librarian and former US House of Representative's Democrat from Brooklyn, NY, Major Owens, "Children are already accustomed to a world that moves faster and is more exciting than anything a teacher in front of a classroom can do." With this program, hopefully we can catch up to our students and provide them the education they deserve. For more quotes pertaining to technology in the classroom from Major Owens please view the attached link http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/major_owens.html.

Thank you all for your time. Your comments and critiques are always welcome. I apologize for the length of this post as I had much on my mind and it is hard for me at times to contain my excitement when I feel I am doing something that will positively affect the lives of my students.