Blog Reflection Week 5

I have realized this semester that technology is more important than I thought. We must be able to use and teach technology in order to succeed in this ever changing world. I have found new ways that I can communicate with my students as well as colleagues. My philosophy has pretty much stayed the same though. I am sure it will change and grow as needed as I go farther in my career and my schooling.

Blog Reflection Week 4

The group I most closely relate to is the digitally literate. I have been using computers since I was in 6^th grade. I can do most things on a computer but I have learned most of it thru trial and error. I have known life without the internet but I enjoy having it. The internet can make you very lazy though. When I did not have the internet to play games on or surf, I would ride my bike and walk at least 100 miles a week. Now I don't even own a bike and the most I walk is when I am shopping. I believe the internet is a great thing and it has given many opportunities to do things that we never could have done before. I can go a museum in Paris and never leave my house. The internet needs to be regulated for everyone, especially students. If there was no internet or 5000 different video games and consoles for kids to play today, we would not have the obesity problem we have today. I believe kids should be allowed no more than 5 hours a week of free internet play and be made to stay outside and play for at least 12 hours a week.

Blog Reflection Week 3

The Assessment for Learning that I relate to the most is AFL should be sensitive and constructive because any assessment has an emotional impact.  This has been very important to me since I have been in college since a lot of my classes have been based on test scores only.  I have also seen students who have given up simply because they cannot pass the test.  I know of at least four students that I have taught in the past that could do all the work very easily but since they could not pass the test they just gave up.  I have never given up because I couldn’t pass the test but I have gotten very upset because of low grades when I turn in the work and make A’s but when it came to the test I failed them. 

            The main purpose of a portfolio that I may use will be to use them as study material.  Students can go back and look at work they have done in the past and use the information to help them succeed in the future.  My son, my wife, and I have all been guilty of needing some work we have done in the past to relate back to but cannot find it.  If we had put it in a portfolio, especially an electronic one, we would always have the work to look back on.  I will continue to do a portfolio to help aid me in all my future work in both school and career.

Blog Reflection Week 2

The information on the website Victorian Robots, does not seem credible.  There is no actual proof that any of these robots existed and worked.  The linked websites do not seem credible either.  They talk about many different things that are cartoons and movies.  I used Altavista, Excite, and Infoseek to search Victorian robots.  Some start with pictures and/or videos about them.  They all had something relating to the history of the Victorian Age close to the top of the list of related sites.  They all had the website bigredhair.com/robots as the top choice.  Altavista and Excite did not have a lot of advertisements but Infoseek does have advertisements.  I would say that search engines use advertisements to help pay for their company.  Each time someone clicks the link going to their ad, the search engine gets a certain amount of money.  Almost every search engine uses crawler-based technology for their searches now.  Some started out as popularity, meaning they went by the most used websites relating to the topic.  Others started out as crawler-based, which means it spiders the web looking for keywords and phrases to get results.  There are also hybrid search engines, which are gaining in popularity.  These search engines use both crawler-based searches and human-powered or popular searches and display both results.  There is no author for bigredhair.com listed on easywhois.com.  The website itself shows that Paul Guinan is the author though.  There are no records for this site on any other site.  I tried looking up the author and the history of the site and nothing comes up.  I would assume the purpose of this site is to present information.  There have been no changes to the information that I can tell over the past ten years.  I think that this is nothing more than I have done before just easier.  I always try to cross reference my information I get on the internet.  This is done by getting the same information from multiple websites and search engines.  I am very confident with the information that I have used in the past throughout my college studies.

 If we fail to teach our students about these unreliable websites then they will go on thinking everything is true if it is on the internet.  I know my son tried to write a research paper with using only Wikipedia and I had to keep showing him in different websites that about half of his information was just made up or not true.  We must teach our students how to tell if a site is reliable or not.  There are many different ways to do this but it just needs to be done.

The biggest advantage to using social bookmarking is your information is available anywhere you have an internet connection.  If you find a really good website at home and you want to use it at school, you can just bookmark it on delicious and pull it up at school.  The old way was to copy and paste the url into an email and hope it goes through right.  This is going to be a big help for me teaching math and science because I can sit at home and find cool videos and things for my students and be able to show them at school without having to use my computer.

The purpose I had in mind when I created my wiki is communication.  I teach at a really small school and we have to coordinate everything including lunches and free time with all the grades because we are all in one small building.  I have not implemented my ideas yet but we are having staff development days next week and I plan on telling everyone about the wiki I started there so we can go ahead and start coordinating activities and lessons.  The biggest advantage with wikis is that anyone can see them so we don’t have to email everyone every time something changes and hope that the email went through.  We just post it to the wiki and everyone sees it. The main disadvantage though is that anyone can edit it and change things without consent.  I am not sure what I want to explore further, all I know is I want to try to explore any kind of technology that will benefit myself, my students, and my school as a whole.

Concept map

Educational Philosophy 2

This project is going to help me in the future, both in this class and in my own teaching, by showing me some of the ways I want to implement technology and my goals and expectations for this class and my teaching.

Blogging is a helpful way to express your thoughts and share them with anyone who is willing to read them.  It helps you to just put things down that you can look back on and remember why you are doing something as well as let other people learn from what you have done and decide if they want to use some things you have done or if they definitely want to stay away from it.  We have not met the potential set forth by Stephen Downes' and the main thing that is preventing us from doing so is simply no one is educated enough to do so.

The part that stood out the most to me in the article, Creating a New Culture of Teaching and Learning, was the first one, "if it's on the internet, is it true?".  This part stands out to me because I have a 14 year old son who believes that everything on the internet is true.  The biggest thing that gets me is Wikipedia.  He tried writing an entire research paper using only Wikipedia.  He has never been taught that only certain websites are true.  I sat and explained to him and showed him why certain websites are not reliable resources for 2 hours. 

Educational Philosophy

            An educational philosophy statement is a very useful tool for anyone who teaches.  Teaching can involve everything from teaching students to teaching teachers.  The world is changing fast and anyone who is not familiar with technology will be left behind.

            Education has a broad purpose.  Education is the basis of everything in this world.  You have to be taught at some point to do almost everything.  A person who is doing nothing but cooking French fries at McDonald’s even has to be taught how many fries to put in each basket and which button to push for the timer.  In that same aspect, technology is everywhere and in everything.  Watches even now have a type of computer chip in them to keep time.  Everyone must be educated in some aspect regardless of what they do and this is why education and technology is such an important part of every person’s life.

            The role of the teacher and the learner in education go hand in hand.  The teacher must know the material and how to implement technology into the lesson to benefit everyone and at the same time the student must have an idea about the lesson and be willing to work with the teacher to help them with the technology.  Students sometimes play the role of teacher and teachers sometimes play the role of students.  With technology advancing as fast as it is today, some older teachers know less about technology than the students.

            I believe that technology must be a part of teaching.  There are some things that I will find hard to integrate technology into but other things will be extremely easy.  I am going to try to use as much technology in my classes as possible.  I will use the computer and projector to do a number of things from using websites and YouTube to going through step by step dissection for my biology class. 

            I expect my students to enjoy my class and learn more than they would learn in any other normal class.  I expect to learn from my students.  I want to learn about their life, their hopes, their expectations of me and the class.  I expect my fellow teachers to keep me in check and for us to learn from one another about ways of implementing technology to benefit students, teachers, and everyone we come in contact with.  The more we know the easier life will be.

            As you can see there are many things to do when it comes to technology.  Technology takes multiple people to implement.  This is a long process but teaching using technology and teaching technology is something that will help both students and teachers to be more educated and will help us both succeed in life.