Here is my Yodio podcast about this weekend's OTEN conference. I discuss the keynote speaker, Mr. Tim Lauer, as well as the two showcase sessions I attended with Mr. Jason Niedermeyer and Ms. Suzette Lewis.
The Yodio was ridiculously easy to make. I think anyone could do it.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Educational Technology Standards
After reviewing the various standards for education in technology, I think they can be boiled down into 3 "big picture" goals. Students and teachers should both be able to understand and implement:
1.Creative Use of Technology
2. Ethical Use of Technology
3. Practical Use of Technology
A big part of my job is going to be the creative use of technology to enhance my teaching. It's all about selecting the right tool for the job.For example, if I have a smart board available, I plan to make frequent use of it and it's available functions. I can also use technology creatively to draw in student interest by incorporating pictures and videos found online. I can also attract student interest by using technology to take polls using either google forms or the cell phone polling site. It will be "cool" for students to see their poll results popping up on the screen in real time. Finally, in order to encourage my students to produce the best quality of work, I intend have them publish their projects, with pictures, to a class web page or blog. The fact that it's going to be published should be a good motivator for them.
Ethical use of technology is a bit more tricky. I will certainly be on the look-out for unethical use of technology such as word-for-word copying off of the internet. Fortunately, by using search engines, those things are fairly easy to catch. I will try to emphasize how very serious an issue copying another person's research could be in the real world.
For practical use of technology, an important goal is for my students to be able to organize and chart their research data. I find that high school students often have no idea how to use excel (or google sheets), and those skills are absolutely essential for lab work. Another important tool is power point (or google presentation), and I will be sure that students put together at least one group presentation using a technological visual aide over the course of the semester. I will also refer my students to useful study guides and instructional interactive pages and activities on the internet to assist in developing their understanding outside of class.
1.Creative Use of Technology
2. Ethical Use of Technology
3. Practical Use of Technology
A big part of my job is going to be the creative use of technology to enhance my teaching. It's all about selecting the right tool for the job.For example, if I have a smart board available, I plan to make frequent use of it and it's available functions. I can also use technology creatively to draw in student interest by incorporating pictures and videos found online. I can also attract student interest by using technology to take polls using either google forms or the cell phone polling site. It will be "cool" for students to see their poll results popping up on the screen in real time. Finally, in order to encourage my students to produce the best quality of work, I intend have them publish their projects, with pictures, to a class web page or blog. The fact that it's going to be published should be a good motivator for them.
Ethical use of technology is a bit more tricky. I will certainly be on the look-out for unethical use of technology such as word-for-word copying off of the internet. Fortunately, by using search engines, those things are fairly easy to catch. I will try to emphasize how very serious an issue copying another person's research could be in the real world.
For practical use of technology, an important goal is for my students to be able to organize and chart their research data. I find that high school students often have no idea how to use excel (or google sheets), and those skills are absolutely essential for lab work. Another important tool is power point (or google presentation), and I will be sure that students put together at least one group presentation using a technological visual aide over the course of the semester. I will also refer my students to useful study guides and instructional interactive pages and activities on the internet to assist in developing their understanding outside of class.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Multimedia Project
Here is my multimedia project. It's a screen-toaster video explaining how to use google forms and google forms' possible classroom applications. I don't know why, but the video is moving faster than the audio, but hopefully you can still understand what's going on.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Spreadsheets
For this project, I used Google Sheets. First, I hid tests 1-6 since we're focusing on 7-10. Then, I used the program to get the average score for each student (shown in blue). This will be useful in calculating their grades. Then I took the class average for each tests 7-10 (shown in orange). This information would be useful to the teacher for evaluating the difficulty level of their tests as well as the effectiveness of their teaching. The yellow box is the average of all student's scores, the class average across tests 7-10.
DATA
The next chart I made shows the class average. This would be good to track the overall class progress over time. This chart shows that in this particular class, average test scores are steadily improving.
I next identified which students' averages are below the overall class average of 174.84. Those students' names are highlighted in the brighter green color on the data sheet. I then charted the progress of the below average students.
Based on this data I can see that almost all of the below average students have shown improvement since the beginning of the year, and most show a fairly steady trend of improvement. One anomaly I can easily see is Katherine who has a big drop from test seven to test eight. As a teacher, it may be worth having a talk with Katherine to try to figure out what is going on there.
Overall, I found the google sheets program to be very easy to use in comparison to excel. I think I would have appreciated more flexibility with the charting though. Publishing is easy once you know what to do, but it's not intuitive to figure out.
DATA
The next chart I made shows the class average. This would be good to track the overall class progress over time. This chart shows that in this particular class, average test scores are steadily improving.
I next identified which students' averages are below the overall class average of 174.84. Those students' names are highlighted in the brighter green color on the data sheet. I then charted the progress of the below average students.
Based on this data I can see that almost all of the below average students have shown improvement since the beginning of the year, and most show a fairly steady trend of improvement. One anomaly I can easily see is Katherine who has a big drop from test seven to test eight. As a teacher, it may be worth having a talk with Katherine to try to figure out what is going on there.
Overall, I found the google sheets program to be very easy to use in comparison to excel. I think I would have appreciated more flexibility with the charting though. Publishing is easy once you know what to do, but it's not intuitive to figure out.
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