CEDU 533 WEEK 5 AND 6

Week five's class was spent being with my newborn daughter in the hospital. She's just such a cutie. I found myself reflecting on the future and what kind of a world she'll be growing up in and what sort of student she'll be. Further I ponder a bit of what schools will be like in 5 years when she enters kindergarten and beyond. Hopefully it will be more along the lines that were talking about in our classes and that we wrapped up talking about at the end of the session on week 6. It's all about dynamic learning as opposed to static learning or one way learning from the teacher ot the student. For example Web 2.0 is dynamic and interactive with so many possible applications for a richer education.

Finally the staff at St. Mary's hospital all had an amazing communication system. They would press a button on what was something like a pager on their shirt and say something like "FIND DR. JOHNSON" then an automated voice would say Dr. Jonson is busy or would put you through for a personal conversation with Dr. Jonson as if it were a cell phone call. This seemed to me to be a small step away from the communicators in the TV series Star Trek. Pretty cool.

CEDU 533 week 4

The mid term has come and gone and I'm amazed how much I bring it up in conversation with friends and family when they ask how grad school is doing. To be honest it's just that I haven't taken a mid term since my undergrad days about a decade ago. Something about it still juiced me up and tweaked me out when I started it last Wednesday. I relaxed and actually had fun with it after my initial apprehension. At the same time I was thinking of my students and how I , as a teacher, have gradually done more and more performance assessments as opposed to a traditional "paper and pencil" test. I appreciate those performance assessments in a whole new way now.

I'm looking forward to learning more about CSS and applying it to my web pages. It just doesn't seem like that much more work relative the benefit you get in return. I guess the "idle curiosity" question I have is who invents this stuff in the first place. How does someone conjure this code up and have it do what they want it to do? I believe this has been addressed in parts of class but it's an interesting one.

CEDU 533 week 3

I have no real explanation or excuse as to why I waited too long to get this blog entry done for week 3 ( I could venture a guess that it has something to do with my baby on the way and focusing on that). As I scan my memory and notes and syllabus and try to focus in on week 3 I do want to say that I'm starting to get the rationale behind even learning this in the first place and it has to do with the criteria for creating a good web site. Our study teams of course came up with redundant explanations but it was still interesting because it verified that this process can be narrowed down to a science not just an art. From this point teachers can get their heads on strait about how to design their own sites.

In my own opinion, it seems that a lot of teacher created sites that I've been to don't observe these guidelines and end up looking of poor quality.