CEDU 521 Week 4

This last weeks presentations on LoTi in the class were interesting. First, I must say that the scenario of having them in front of the school board added a component of educational leadership. I happen to be at a school with a great environment conducive to educational technology but it was still interesting to see my school through the LoTi framework.

CEDU 521 Week 3

I must say that as time has continued and I'm more on roll with my unit plan, I'm excited to implement it. I like the general contributions of the text into our class and I believe that the text has had some influence into my Unit Plan. For me, at the very least, it's planted a seed as to how I approach all lessons with my students. I've also already had some basic plans into the extra days extension into my 8 day Unit Plan.

CEDU 521 Week 2

This weeks emphasis on PBL was a nice follow up from the first week. The video from edutopia, narrated by Robin Williams, was a good one and made a further case for the value of PBL. The discussion towards the end of class on Feb 20th focused on the "end-all-be-all" of PBL. I guess I'd like to think that we, as teachers are trained to meet the needs of our class. We know whether a group of our students needs the structure of more formal work or whether they can handle the environment of a PBL. Issues of: How long should a project go? Who should generate the question? I think the answers to these good questions are going to be different from year to year to best meet the needs of our students.

CEDU 521 Week 1

Something that really struck me while working on the videos from Edutopia is just how successful these Project Based Learning scenarios are with children that wouldn't otherwise enjoy the traditional educational model, as well as students who could still do just fine with more traditional methods. By using technology with PBL it simply is a big motivator to a lot of students. My step-father is a child and adolescent psychiatrist who regularly works with at risk youth. As we talk shop he has continually maintained that schools need to rethink their approach towards education to better reach these students. Although he doesn't have a teaching background he believes that lessons in school should be more like a video game to better reach all students. I believe that these PBL can catch the spirit of the kind of scenario that he's describing. Indeed video game design in a high school in Washington DC was covered on one of the videos I took a look at on the edutopia website. I'd love to learn an application appropriate for use in my 4th grade class.

525 Week 4

The last week of class had a real benefit in several ways. First and foremost, I got a better idea of the concepts of Webquests. It makes sense to utilize the resources on the web in a functional and proscribed way that brings the most benefit to a student's learning. Another thing "clicked" for me this week. That was the importance of evaluations for evaluating webquests. Looks can be deceiving. Good evaluation tools are important.

I liked the quizlab.com a great deal. It was very versatile in the options that were available. I'm also very excited about the potential for creating social networking sites for students in an educational setting. I'm looking forward to hearing updates on the proposed chemistry site at Whitnal High School.

CEDU 525 week 3

I'm very encouraged by the reaction to the issue of cyber-bullying and internet safety in general. The safety sites out there like iSafe and wired safety are truly cutting edge. With the exponential growth of the social networking components of the internet, educators seem to be one step behind in general. However these sites, with things like 24 hour cyber-bully support and resources for teachers and parents, are very important.

The site that interested me the most this week was voice stream. This is a neat site. Any activity that encourages multi sensory approaches is going to be a motivator to students. In addition, when children can "see it, hear it, say it" that's when research suggests that they learn best. Great tool with real potential for the classroom.

CEDU 525 Week 2

The class session for the week of December before Christmas was an interesting one. The work that we did on quizzes that we did were an interesting snapshot on some of the information that's out there. Tickle was perhaps the most interesting. Having looked through all of the personal quiz sites, I'm not fully sure of all of the sites relevance to teaching. Most of them seemed more for fun and not always academic in nature. The teacher created quiz sites became some of my favorites. Great application for quizlet, quizlab and Class Marker specifically. Lots of potential for any lesson.

The individual assignment from week #2 was a good one. While the web assignment was very time consuming it was well worth it. Simply put, you benefit from the time you put into something like that. I will use these ten web sites in my current social studies unit on the Midwest. I'm looking forward to sharing the results.