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.