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.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Sunday, November 1, 2009
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
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.
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