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.