Nearing the finish line!

     I learned a lot in this class about online technological resources, collaboration resources and google capabilities.

     The cool tool duel was a great demonstration of some of the creative and useful tools out there available for teachers and students alike.

     A great portion of this class was dedicated to collaboration. Collaboration is a vital part of teaching and in this class I exercised my collaboration skills! I enjoyed working with others and sharing ideas.

     The best part of this class was discovering all the wonderful resources Google has to offer. From online powerpoints to creating your own webpages, Google has everything you need in one place. I enjoyed this part of the class and even got the app for my iphone!

     Overall, I enjoyed this class very much and look forward to implementing many of these techniques and tools in my classroom! Good luck to everyone and enjoy your break.

Add Internet, Delete Institutions

Clay Shirky describes in his book Here Comes Everybody how social tools such as Facebook, Twitter and WordPress and online collaborative projects like Wikipedia support group participation in ways that could never have been done before. Shirky does a great job of evaluating the effects of the internet on modern group dynamics. In the video lecture, he describes the effects of the internet on television and how executives he talked with see internet as a fad! Someone is in denial.

These online social tools and platforms allow individuals to form groups and collaborate without the restrictions of time, distance and cost. Anyone can now have the ability to participate without restrictions of age, experience, ethnicity, location, etc. This new way of mass communication and collaboration will have drastic effects to the current institutional outlets such as newspapers and news outlets. We have seen book publishing already suffer some great losses to the internet, as well as the newspaper industry.

Clay Shirky describes his book as being about “what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures” and the power shift in society that this creates.

I look forward to the future of online group collaboration. This springboard is key to globalization and global communication. These tools allow for individuals to connect who had previously been unable to communicate without institutions. What an amazing discovery!

 

The Future of the Copyright

Federal Copyright laws of the United States support the creativity of all art forms by granting its creators with a set of exclusive rights. These rights include the ability to make and sell copies of their work(s), the right to create related art, and the right to perform or display their works publicly. What is very interesting about Federal Copyright laws is that they are not forever. They are subject to a time limit and generally expire 70 years after the creator’s death.  In contrast to Federal Copyright laws, Creative Commons is a non-profit group dedicated to expanding copyrighted work to be legally shared. For example, an artist may waive a portion of their copyrights in order for other artists to benefit and build on.

Therefore, I believe that the future of intellectual property is moving towards a shared mentality. The older, more established artists understand the importance of supporting the younger artistic generation but sharing their ideas and creative powers.

I am hoping that previously unavailable creations will be more readily shared with students in the classroom. I believe that today’s artists (writers, painters, musicians) have a better understanding about cultivating our young student population. By making their art more available they can keep their own art alive.

Social networking and such has had a negative impact on the idea of sharing copyrighted information. This is because the reason behind utilizing copyrighted material is usually for financial gain and not the financial gain of the creator.

My Crystal Ball

A decade from now so much will change. Technology is growing at an exponential rate, it is hard to imagine what it will be like then. Cheyenne and I researched 4Teachers.org. It is a collaboration website that connects teachers from around the country, giving them online lessons, quizzes tutorials, conferences, and much more all related to helping teachers help students. Online collaboration is a growing area of the internet because it does connect people from all over the world together in one place and allows them to share information. This is a valuable tool that I feel will have an impact on education in the future. Instead of picking a classmate to pair up for to do a group project, you can pick a peer student in France. The ideas are limitless on who can share information and what information can be shared. The benefit of online collaboration is that teachers can find many ways in which to reach students, ideas they would have never come up with on their own but once employed it works magically.

The pitfalls I predict can be that this forum would not be sufficient for future projects. I can imagine a virtual, real time classroom where teachers and students from all over the world meet in one virtual classroom to learn. I can imagine a virtual space where students from China, Argentina, Libya, Israel, Africa and the US have discussions about creative writing. What an awesome thought!

I can’t wait for the next big technological advance!

Technology in their Hands

I hope that technology, like an iPad, can be available for every student. I see the benefits far outweighing the cons. In a classroom setting, the introduction of a tablet device, such as the iPad, would transform the learning process in every classroom. A tablet device would be able to store textbooks, reading books and calendars. Teachers could email weekly assignments to students for upload to their calendars. This would help students to stay organized. Using a tablet would alleviate the need for books in the classroom. This would free up a lot of space, especially since the number of students per classroom has nearly doubled in the past few years. Tablets would allow students to access information quickly and easily. It would allow remote interaction between student and teacher. Tablets would also allow for group collaboration with other classes, schools and students.

The downside to this technology is that it would be costly to implement and costly to repair. However, the cost is progressively being reduced by competition in the market. I would think that the school would have to hire a full time IT person to cover repair and troubleshooting for the devices. This would be costly, but overall it would do more to prepare kids in the classroom for the reality of life.

I am an avid supporter of technology not only in the classroom, but in the hands of students. In all cases I believe the benefits outweigh the negative cons. I would like to see a push in that direction.

Me and My Cloudware

In an online environment cloudware allows users to interface, build and maintain collaborative and interactive activities. The cloudware that I have used so far in this course has been Picassa, WordPress, and Screencast.

 

Picassa is a great tool that allows users to upload photos into albums that can be shared with others or kept private. It allows multiple users to access the photos and makes sharing easy.

 

WordPress has been more difficult to use. The privacy settings do not make for easy application and cannot be manipulated easily. I have found that in order to get the privacy I desire and still allow my fellow classmates to access my blog I was forced to change my name on both the site and WordPress URL.

 

Screencast is a product that I am still investigating. It seems useful as a storage locker for accessing information when away from your home computer. I see the value in it as a medium of storing information to be recalled on the go.

 

Overall, I like all the cloudware ideas that I have utilized but I don’t necessarily like the specific programs we have used. I would like to look into other avenues for blogs especially because of the security issues.

School Anxiety

    I read the article A Bold Approach to Reducing Student Stress by Mariko Nobori. This article details the implementation of 30 minutes of meditation time daily within an inner city school in San Francisco.

     Before the implementation of the meditation program, Visitacion Valley Middle School was overrun with violence, plagued by poverty and being swallowed by the drugs that surrounded the school. Students were coming to school over stressed by their environment and Principal Jim Dierke was determined to make a difference.

Once the idea of two 15 minute meditation sessions were sold to teachers, students were asked to have their parents sign a waiver allowing their children to participate in the meditation sessions. To the school’s astonishment no parent objected. Students were then given classes in meditation and quiet time officially began.

As a result of the implementation of the quiet time program violence, truancy and suspensions were reduced. Grades improved and the school was taken off the “hard to staff” list. Paid for by a grant from the David Lynch Foundation, this program has been successful. In conjunction with the San Francisco police department, faculty and community are working together to improve school participation and reduce crime.

The continued success of this program is not solid. The program is dependent on grant money from the David Lynch Foundation and without it the program would become unsupported. The students and faculty at this site are hoping their story might ignite researchers to take a harder look at what methods best relieve stress and how we can implement those methods into our schools.

The Flattening of the World Through Globalization

Thomas Friedman is one of my favorite authors. I have a read about 10 of his books. He really has insight on the economy of the world and role of governments and policy.

These videos highlight key points from his book The World Is Flat. While The United States is writing and reacting to history as it unfolds – 911, World Trade Center Attacks on the Pentagon and the Iraq War – other countries are passing us by. The convergence of technology and the events that has provided a means for India, China and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services, technology, and manufacturing. Thus, this creates and explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world’s two largest countries and gives them a huge stake in the success of globalization.

This “flattening” of the globe, has applied pressure to the US to run faster just to be able to toggle for first place. This level world playing field has highlighted the deficiencies of the United States in the world of technology and economic stability.

Shift Happens and Visions of Students Today

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Shift Happens

I think the most important lesson that I learned from watching the Shift Happens videos is that the world we live in today is not the same one the children we teach will live in. In order to successfully prepare the children we teach for the future, today’s educators will have to be technologically advanced and constantly educating ourselves on new world content that influences the lives of our students. Teachers must accept that technology is the future. Who would have guessed that you could communicate with anyone from any country at anytime in one place? Facebook has redefined what communication means and tomorrow it will be redefined by another entity that has yet to be created. This all has nothing to do with curriculum. Math, literacy skills and curriculum have changed little over the last 50 years. 2 + 2 still = 4 but now we have calculators, computers and cell phones to tell us that. Thinking is no longer required. We must find ways to help students to critically analyze and apply the information and technology they have before them. The challenges of teaching will continue to be redefined exponentially.

Vision of Students Today

I found this video to be disheartening. College students no longer find value in the educational system as it is now. To some extent, I agree with that. Online courses are rapidly taking the place of face to face meetings. $100 textbooks are being replaced by e-books. Personally, I prefer a hard copy to a computer screen but I have found that a large part of the textbooks I purchase for college are useless. A lot of the problems the students in this video bring up (poverty, lack of education, debt, etc) will not be solved through an education. I suppose it’s my constructionist view, but we should be preparing students to be successful in the real world by giving them the tools they need. We already know that we can’t prepare them for a specific job, because more than likely that job hasn’t even been created yet but we should be able to give them the knowledge to think critically, evaluate issues with the information provided and apply what knowledge they have to solve the problems they encounter in life. Let’s not get too caught up in the details, dates and specifics because those can always be solved by Google later. As educators, lets stress critical thinking.