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Top 10 reasons to use technology in my classroom

1. It lends itself well to be utilized in best practice for students
2. It facilitates student/teacher connections by its very nature
3. It eases work of teacher with record keeping, clerical issues
4. It could be integrated flawlessly into project based learning
5. It's relevant in students lives
6. It can, when used properly, lend itself well to higher level thinking skills
7. Many technological tools are dynamic with back-and-forth interaction
8. It allows for cheap, easy, and instant communication between students from different parts of the world
9. It allows for a potentially global audience for student's works and sharing of ideas
10. Since technological progress is inevitable teaching students using current technologies sets them up for success in their future employment.

Ok so they started to become - no particular order

Signing Off - Chris Yoder

Computer Architecture Week 4

The questions that were prompts for this week . . . How does this course and its content connect to me? Is it useful information that will help me in the future? If so how?

These are good questions for any course. The answer is that I feel this course actually helps me become a technology leader. Through this course and it's content, I feel more confident about the technical aspects of a computer. It's that relative confidence ( I say relative confidence because there's still more to learn and I'm keenly aware of all that I don't know) that directly translates to building wide technology leadership. When someone in the building comes to me with a technology problem I really think that because of this class I feel just a bit more confident about troubleshooting.

I really liked the Under the hood activity but still was never totally clear on what it was I was seeing and would have liked more information.

I enjoyed the alternative operating systems activity and enjoyed making the live CD.

The component activity took a lot longer than I thought though was very interesting.

Overall a useful class

Computer Architecture Week 3

Sometimes I wonder just how much of an environmentalist I really am. It was during some of the discussion of week 3 in which the topic was on the disposable nature of computers that got me thinking. I'm slowly trying to recycle more in my life and it's my goal to get a compost going. The disposable nature of our modern society disturbs me more and more. So my question is why am I OK with buying a new computer about every 5 years - sometimes less? Anyway, that's been my track record for the last 15 years or so.

Maybe it's the program ending but I find myself looking ahead to the future of technology and my prediction/hope is that we're going to see longer and longer life spans of computers and hardware.

Computer Architecture Week 2

I'm very impressed with the series "Triumph of the Nerds". Two themes struck me the most in this series so far. First was the fact that these early Silicon Valley pioneers were simply having fun and set out to create computers out of an interest and hobby rather than to simply create enormous personal fortunes. I was immediately struck with something that I do in my classroom called the fish philosophy. It's a little on the cheesy side but I keep it a little more low key for my students. The one part that I was struck with was the "play" part of their philosophy which is that students can learn and achieve while having fun and doing something that doesn't feel like a chore. That's certainly what these early Silicon Valley creators were doing and look at the results. This is a good example that I could share with my students.

The other thing I was struck with was the fact that Microsoft bought the right to DOS for $50,000 ( I think I have that right). The commentary by the narrator was something to the effect of typically the fortunes go to the exploiter of the product and not necessarily the inventor of the product. HMMM. Issues of equity and fairness come to mind when I hear stories like that. I fully realize that Gates had the vision for the product and seized an opportunity. . . still.

Computer Architecture Week 1

Interesting stuff! I like history in general but it seems to be in fields like natural history, US history etc. But computer history I knew very little about. The concept I found most interesting was that the basic design of the computer are really relatively old, going back to Charles Babbage and similar pioneers of his age. I'm struck with a larger question of what causes someone to think "outside the box" like this. I think it's a natural human tendency to just go with what you're given. So what caused him to be so innovative? Clearly the spirit of technological innovation at the mid 19th century had something to do with it, but I'm continually struck with the relevance of Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. Clearly Babbage by this measure was gifted in the area of Logical mathematical intelligence.

I'm also very interested to learn in week one the process by which computers work. I was simply ignorant of it before. Sure I had some knowledge but lacked clear understanding of just what an operating system is or what the startup process is doing on any given computer. I'm starting to feel that, with this in mind, this would be a better class to have in the beginning of the program.

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CEDU 534 Week 4

Social Bookmarking seems like yet another way of connecting to people about information and content. As far as application to the classroom, this one seems more applicable to teachers in the classroom and to a lesser extent to students. Teachers can really benefit from peer to peer collaboration. I know that I've always benefited from this collaboration.

Over the last couple of weeks I've had an idea that I think would be a good one. Any school district (mine for example) could spend one inservice day hooking up all of their teachers in a social networking site of some kind. They could pitch it as fun and entertaining - posting pictures and at the same time posting cool lesson plans that they've done and evaluations about them. In addition to this why not give all of their teachers an account on a social bookmarking site. The growing number of teacher and education related sites is getting too big to keep track of. By having these this could really benefit all teachers and thus their students.

CEDU 534 Week 3

As compared to the other online class experience over the summer I like the dim dim a bit more than the other one that was used (educator?) I think that it was refreshing to see a face on the other end of the "line." The main experience from the week was all about RSS. I'm finally beginning to "get it" and like anything it was beneficial to experience it first hand with actually using an aggregate to subscribe to blogs. Sure I had read it and written about it before but it's not until I did it myself that it sunk in. I think that RSS feeds are a new way to experience the web and in a way make it "custom made" for each user. The biggest application that I could see for classrooms are first, teachers learning from other teachers. By subscribing to other teacher's blogs for example through an RSS feed the teacher uses less time and learns more in a more efficient way. Of course research (particularly at the high school level) would be greatly improved by RSS technology

CEDU 534 Week 2

Week 2 was an interesting one. For one it became clear to me that social networking sites and the corresponding technology in general are/have been completely adopted by the youth of today. It seems to me that there are certain duties that come along with our profession of teaching. One of them is to adapt to serve the needs of the children that we have in our care. Their world is changing and to not address that is in essence educational malpractice. A school district that has a blanket policy brohibiting many parts of the web runs the risk of also neglecting to teach our our students how to be safe and responsible on the web. Lets be careful as educators to work with our district administrators to provide the best online saftey information we can.

CEDU 534 Week 1

It was a nice to be back and get right back into the swing of things with web 2.0.

Hate to get philosophical but. . .

I really like the concept of web 2.0 being an interactive - dynamic - back and forth- web where anyone can contribute. There's something democratic and egalitarian abut it. The flip side of course is the other edge of the sword. Since everyone is on the same playing field, the moron who tells you that the Holocaust never happened is right there getting their message out with regular folk. But . . . I think in a way there's more personal responsibility with web 2.0.

Now on to the teaching applications. . .

There's no doubt in my mind that this is the future of teaching. The textbook will become an accent to curriculum and will be replaced by a plethora of 2.0 possibilities. The classroom itself will be transformed with interactive web experiences replacing the paper and pencils of today. That can start today with blogs wikis and podcasts used in my classroom. Personally this year the easiest one that i'd like to start with is podcasting constructed responses for math

It's exciting to be learning about this now - ahead of the curve.

CEDU 527 Educational Leadership in sum

Truth be told one of the reasons I got involved in this program was because of a friend and fellow teacher at my school. He finished up his accelerated program at Stritch in Educational Leadership last year. While I had no interest in being a principal I did want a masters and he spoke highly of Stritch and the accelerated program. He will be getting a position as a principal next year and leaves a void of leadership in my school. He was a key player and got a lot done at the school. Well, I've been thinking of how and in what capacity I'll fill in at some of the leadership roles that he left behind. This class comes right into play with that. To quote John Gabriel "most teachers accept leadership as a reward in itself: they derive a sense of self worth from having their voices heard. . . " I'm looking forward to making a difference this coming year not as an egomaniac but as someone who is legitimately interested in making the lives of children better.

Educational Leadership week 4

I enjoyed playing the game "systems thinking Systems changing." I got the feeling that it was a reasonably accurate portrayal of several key personalities and players within a school district. It was clear after reviewing the biographies on the people that we've all met people exactly like these before. From the eager go getters to the sullen nay-sayers it was an accurate portrayal. The thing that I was struck with is that influencing certain people effected others around them and moved them along with the person. I believe that that is accurate. So it lead me to ask which one am I, the one leading or following. It's my goal to be more of a leader this coming school year.

CEDU 527 Educational Leadership Week 3

There was one particular anecdote that I was reminded of as we were in our chat rooms for the breakout sessions online. The topic was: What are some of the advancements in different fields of society over the last series of years. The anecdote popped into my head related to the topic of telephones and deals with my grandfather and his proud LOTI level of 0.

Some time in the 1980s the Ohio telephone company was doing a major overhaul on it's phone lines presumably to modernize them in some way. One day they stumbled across on old "party line" that was still in use. Yes, that was my grandparents phone line. Of course all of the other people on the party line had long ago gotten their own private lines so that only my grandparents line was left connected. When the telephone company called my grandfather to inform him of this they seemed to assume he would be happy to switch over to their new and improve technology. They didn't know my grandfather very well. "If it ain't broke don't fix it" was a life philosophy for him.
After multiple dead ends trying to convince him over the phone they actually sent someone out to his house to "sweet talk" him to switch over. He was offered new phones, free long distance for a period of time and so on. Although my grandfather was the farthest thing from a sell out, he finally agreed.

The application of this anecdote to the broad topic of educational leadership is this. Maybe you have to do the sweet talk to the level 0 teacher and visit their classroom one-on-one to get them to come around. And all the while respect them and their views. The tools for schools article was extremely insightful on the Millennial generation but one thing I liked about it was it never ridiculed the older generations but merely pointed out the differences. As I'm more of a Gen-Xer myself I appreciate that view.

CEDU 527 Educational Leadership Week 2

I was very impressed with the format of last weeks online class. The "eluminate" online site is a great idea. I was impressed with how dynamic and interactive it was. With the written chat feature, the lecture, the slide show and of course the audio contributions it was enough to keep you busy the whole time and yet somehow pay attention to everything. Oddly enough there was no difference in my urge to contribute to class discussion as compared to a regular face to face class. I was a little unsure about my internal microphone and would have liked a "sound check" before the session began in order to confirm it but got just as much out of the written text and following along.

CEDU 527 Educational Leadership Week 1

At the risk of divulging too much personal info I've just never viewed myself as much of a leader in any school setting. For whatever reason I tend to err on the side of not making myself look bad so as a result little to no leadership action of any kind is initiated by me in a professional setting within the staff dynamic. - At this point I want to clarify that I initiate plenty of great things within my classroom and within the classroom dynamic as opposed to a staff dynamic. So where's all this going. . .
I'm very much looking forward to this class. Week one certainly felt different than the other classes and It was nice to get into the rationale behind leadership. I like the premise of the information from this first class and that was that teachers , with the right conditions, are in a position to greatly influence their school. This message was simply very encouraging and positive. I also like the premise of the Gabriel book on teacher leadership and that is that there is a "science" behind teacher leadership and these skills can be taught and utilized by teachers. also an encouraging message.

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.

Cedu 533 Week 2

This week clearly went better then the previous week with regards to the personal homework that is due at the beginning of week 3. It just made more sense this week than last and although it's still challenging and time consuming, it took less time than last week. Secondly, there was something Prof. Sklar said in last weeks class when talking about the midterm exam and the class in general. He mentioned that people we getting better at this then in previous years. He credited "web 2" for that increase saying that people were simply more familiar with basic concepts and could relate to HTML better by having been exposed to Wikis and the like. I agree that that is personally the case for me as the connection I make in my naggen to make sense of HTML is brought about more redilly because of my experiences with WIKIs etc.

DECU 533

The idea of HTML programming antimidated me at first, to be quite honest. However once I got going I realized that it's just like any skill. . . with a little practice you can get the hang it pretty quickly. Really it's just a matter of spending the time necessary for the accurate programing. In some ways I made the connection to carpentry or pottery. . . when you see the finished product you end up with that sense that you've built something. The one exception I had was the insertion of a graphic onto the web site. That was far more difficult then I pictured and I never mastered it. When I was successful the picture was far too large and I was never successful at resizing it.
The biggest problem that I had, oddly enough, wasn't with the editing but the FireFTP. At the beginning I just never got any rythym with using it. I would place the index.htm in odd places and loose track of it continually. It was in my study team where I learned the trick of centralizing everything in a desktop folder. Only from that point afterward did everything flow.