Week 3- The Wiki Wiki

My Wiki Link http://wikiofawesomeness.pbworks.com/

At the end of the article by Tim O’Reilly, states that two of the major competencies of Web 2.0 companies are that they provide a service and allow the users to become co-developers. As a teacher I try to set my high school classes of Civics and Economics up to run like a college level class. With in both of these classes are very large projects that become a substantial amount of the student’s grades. After working on the Wiki site that we were to set up this week, I have come to the conclusion that it would be a very useful tool for both me and the students during these projects. Not only will it make the conveying of information to be easier for the students to get a hold of, it will allow them to make suggestions and fix certain aspects of the project. I believe that when the students are given a chance to make constructive input into a project, a lot of great ideas I would have never thought of flow out.

The project that I have my Civics class work on is the creation of a political party. Within the party the groups have to come up with different stances on platform issues such as government spending, health care reform, and state/local issues. With the help of a Wiki page, I could set up a page for each individual platform that the students could access. Each page on the Wiki could then have links to websites, videos, or other valuable information that could help the groups come to a decision on where they stand on that particular issue. The other valuable aspect of the Wiki is that the students could add to the construction with the information that they have found throughout the project on their own. By allowing them to add on to the page the pool of information at the finger tips of others grows. In a way the Wiki will allow the students to create a type of social networking website that has an educational purpose to help others with necessary information.

The project in my Economics class would follow a very similar scenario as the Civics project. The only real difference would be that the subject matter is Personal Finance. For this project, the Wiki would act as more of an organizer, rather than an information portal. Part of the project is for the students to keep track of three different companies on the stock market. If the students were allowed access to edit the Wiki to add their stock information every week they could check in how the companies of others are doing in the class. Over the past three years of doing this project, I have found that many of the students start to become very competitive and involved in the project based off of what their stocks are doing. The ability of the Wiki to condense the information might push that drive in some students a little more.

For me as a teacher I value the input of the students, as I have stated above, and I want to know how to improve the project for future classes. The Wiki could be that tool that makes the whole processes easy on me. I would no longer have to have the students write a paper of suggestions because I could just have them post their ideas, links, videos, or other information to the Wiki. Allowing the Wiki to grow over time and become a valuable resource for the class.

The last thought I have about the Wiki as a technology tool is that it seems to be a blog with a lot more components to it. I know that O’Reilly stated that both the Wiki and blog are part of the Web 2.0 movement, but looking at it these two compare as much as the idea of Netscape and Google. Both of the tools can post links, pictures, videos, etc., but the Wiki allows for the information to be organized and changed. While a blog is more of a journal format and can be present within a Wiki itself. In the end, I was left with the feeling that a Wiki was sort of like a blog on a major dose of steroids.

Intro to Ed Tech- Week 2

Reaction to the blog and reader

To be honest both of the applications consumed a little bit of time for me in the begging.  After working with both formats I have found both to be a very valuable technological tool on staying informed and informing others.  Now that I realize that we are supposed to post our responses to the blogs each, the reader will come in very handy because I can view everyone’s post in one place. While the blog will allow me to post more information and questions about the class other than what is required to post on blackboard. These are defiantly two items that, when used correctly and appropriately, could help with the education process in the classroom. Both the blog and reader would allow a teacher to communicate with his or her students online, without the strings of Facebook.

Cone of Awesomeness

The reality of the blog and the RSS is that giving the situation, class, and profession that is being taught both tools could fit into every category from top to bottom.  The application of both of these tools in a classroom would fit into the categories of educational television, motion pictures, still pictures, radio. From the reading I believe that the categories of television, motion pictures, radio, and still pictures are all just different forms of mass media.  All of these categories can be posted as links on a blog or as a subscription through a reader. Both of these tools allow a student to stay up to date and have the ability to voice their opinion on what is going on, while organizing all of the information into an area that is easy to navigate and use. 

The blog tool could also be use to accomplish the levels of visual and verbal symbols on Dale’s Cone.  The blog allows for a teacher to post charts, graphs, or any other visual information that will help the student understand the content that they are teaching.  (This will work great for the lesson on supply and demand in Economics.) Over time and repetition a symbol on the blog can turn into a verbal symbol, such as the Y=MX +B.  By the second or third week a math teacher should not have to explain that this is the equation of a linear line.    

Computer Imagination- Siegel

The Blog and RSS

First to take the stage for this response is the technological tool of the blog.  Not only is the name cool and sound like a comic book character, it also can be used as an imaginative educational tool.  The potential that I am seeing as an educator for the blog is that it can be used to convey information to a mass number of students, who then can respond and ask questions from anywhere they want.  The ability to post documents and links allows a teacher to lay out the class and also, if a student so chooses, gives students a chance to find out what they have missed when gone. The blog uses “computer imagination to exploit the strengths that cannot be produced by other medias,” by taking the traditional classroom means of projectors and lectures (2). As with the readings from last week, a blog can allow a teacher to be a coach on the sidelines for those students that need no further explanation on a project or work, but also allows the teacher to be able to answer the questions of other students who are having problems. It even allows the students that maybe shy or timid to ask their questions.  

The second technological tool will be the RSS or reader.  This tool seems to work hand and hand with the blog.  From playing around with the one I created, it would lend itself to classroom efficiency.  By this I mean that all your students could create a blog for the class, so they could talk back and forth with each other and you. The reader would then allow you to see what they are posting to make sure that they are on task, but it also consolidates all of the feeds into one easy area.  The problem solved in this equation is that the teacher does not necessarily need to walk around the class to monitor the students, but can do if from the computer.  It also allows the teacher to answer multiple questions at once without running around.  To reiterate, this tool allows for technological efficiency and allows students to move at a quicker pace.

Intro to Ed Tech Post 1

Reigelut/Joseph

                This article points out a great flaw within our educational system, in that the act of standardization breaks students into measurable group that are taught the same material at the same pace. This is a problem that I am having in my very own classroom. I believe that all students can learn the standards passed down by all knowing Federal/State government, but at different paces (pg 9).  The reality of the situation in a general education classroom is that a very large number of schools have gone to total inclusion.  In no way am I against the idea of inclusion, but the idea of total is a perfect example of what this article is trying to say.  The evil word of tracking is in theory eliminated if everyone learns the same, but as all teachers know the end result is a caste system in the classroom of the students who are lost, the students the material challenges, and the students that all have mastered the content by week two of four.  Then we as teachers attach grades to this progress, leaving me to wonder sometimes how a student with a C is more knowledgeable about the subject than a student with a B.   The authors touch on this subject too and offer the use of technology as the answer.  The ability of mastery learning is enhanced by using tools such as the internet and allows a student to move at their own pace on the content required by them in the class.  This style of learning allows the teacher to be the “guide on the side,” rather than a hand holder (pg 11).  It also allows the teacher to spend more time with the students that need the help to achieve this mastery and at the same time cuts the students loose that would normally be bored in a normal classroom pacing schedule.  The main problem I see with this scenario is that even though the current student body is information/technology savvy, there is an extreme lack of self motivation.  The downfall of technology is that it is a great tool, but as I have seen in my classroom many students think that Google is an end all research tool.

Postman

“One of the principal functions of school is to teach children how to behave in groups. The reason for this is that you cannot have a democratic, indeed, civilized, community life unless people have learned how to participate in a disciplined way as part of a group. School has never been about individualized learning. It has always been about how to learn and how to behave as part of a community.” (Postman)

                After reading this article, I felt that starting with this quote was very appropriate.  To a point, I agree with Postman in the fact that a great deal of what we are taught in college and in our first two to three years is more classroom management.  Or better put in the quote above, how to behave in groups. If you were to ask me to write this response two years ago, I might not have agreed so much.  Problem is that I had all Senior and Junior students, I now have middle schools students this year.  What I have found out is that my class period is sixty percent management and the other forty material. Unfortunately that means I agree with author to a point, but he also states that all technology through the years has allowed information to flow faster both in society and the classroom. Although, being a skeptic, he does not seem to see the need to invest 50 billion for information’s sake.  Thinking about this statement has really struck a chord.  The use of technology is a problem for the students in my classroom because they do not use it for research; they use it as a social tool.  Now more than ever, the technology in a classroom is the most important tool because all of the student body is plugged in and for most of them it is their only source to find information.  The function and the word of book is becoming as useful as speaking Latin. 

“Well, if anyone is wondering whether or not the schools of the future have any use, here is something for them to contemplate. The role of the school is to help students learn how to ignore and discard information so that they can achieve a sense of coherence in their lives; to help students cultivate a sense of social responsibility; to help students think critically, historically, and humanely; to help students understand the ways in which technology shapes their consciousness; to help students learn that their own needs sometimes are subordinate to the needs of the group.” (Postman)

                This statement also seems to strike me as something I disagree with.  Instead of opening a world of information to a student, we as teachers are using it to shape their consciousness and submit to the needs of the group.  I see his point, but on the other hand as in the previous article, technology allows the teacher to be the guide in the classroom.  If we are the guide on the sidelines, the students then are learning the information on their own in their own way and there is no conformity to societal learning norms.  Technology to me, as a teacher, allows me to be a teacher rather than a babysitter for all.  Technology opens up information and doors that set different challenge levels for the various levels of students within the classroom.  Subordination and conformity will continue if we do not use the technology available to us as teachers.