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.