LightintheWoods

Today was a big day.

Alec Couros has invited me to participate as an assistant with his EC&I 831 Course. Tonight was the first class via Adobe Connect. I am very excited about this opportunity. Not many folks are teaching assistants without first taking the course, nevermind a graduate level course.

Dean Shareski made my day brighter by inviting me to join him on Friday to shoot video and later accompanying him to work with classrooms within Prairie South School Division.

Having these mentors is quite a honor and definitely a testimony to my learning of educational technology over the last while. These two individuals are instrumental to my personal/professional development and I am honored to work this closely with them so early in my career.

Later in the day, I returned to the University of Regina to complete the final course of my Education Degree. The course is on the the teaching of writing, so I have no doubt this blog will see improvements in my writing. Returning to class feels odd. I don’t know if it’s because it’s a second year course and I am ready to graduate with my second degree. It may be that I feel ready for the classroom, I feel ready to teach. Perhaps, it is because I have taken control of my own learning process and the class is disconnected from the network (so far). I had some ideas for bringing web 2.0 to my peers. I am going to speak to my prof about creating a common tag for internet resources. Hopefully I will coerce somebody to join me on del.icio.us. I already have plans to create a wiki for my major project, and hopefully I will be able to push the idea on my group members.

I continue to explore, learn and develop professionally. Thanks be to the network.

Note: I found this archived post from Sept 20/07. Reading over it again tweaks my brain. I still agree with what I wrote. I get a sense of my own growth and learning over the past couple months by looking back at posts like these. My current notes are in green.

Today and tomorrow I am participating in seminars for our Digital Internship Project. I think this is a great opportunity professional development opportunity for new interns. We are a group of 34 interns and a handful of faculty advisor’s collaborating to find and implement new strategies for learning. Please visit our network to follow along with hot topics through the forum, individual blog reflections and videos that we are watching.

The fact is that current teachers are generally not well versed with how to use technology in the classroom, but we will be. We will hit the ground running. Technology, specifically web 2.0 tools, are becoming an increasingly important component of education. Students are online, they are interested in learning through the screen. This engages them and promotes life long learning. I stand by this entire paragraph, I have spoken to my peers in education and other faculties and none feel as though they have enough preparation in regards to how they can use technology for their own development. In fact I find that most neglect their life long learning and only do whats needed to secure a % grade.

We all have issues… there is always hoops to jump through, have to find solutions if we really believe in it.

I am trying to move from the idea that we are “jumping hoops” toward the concept of “working through struggles.” Every situation has them, the difference is in how one works through them.

Alec Couros stated “It is like a life change in technology, it all seems very complicated until you get started and you slowly develop.”

Alec sums up my learning experience over the past 7 months. I am very comfortable now sharing the tools that I us. By taking risks I have found many rewards and continue to develop further.

Reminds me of Clarence Fisher’s advice that the secret to success is to “Let it be organic, don’t force it, let it grow. Pick one thing and become an expert. If it’s blogging then blog and blog well, then move on to new tools.”

I often bring this lesson up when I am speaking to people about bringing technology into their lives. I am guilty of spreading a net too large. I tend to start many projects without really finalizing as much as I would like. As a digital intern I tried to become an expert teacher of technology and facilitator of learning. With my classroom I developed a blogging style that opened learning up and directed students to explore and utilize the web. It was a good start.

For my professional development I have really focused on being a leech that feeds on information from my ever building my network. I have come to better understand my learning. Part of me wishes I blogged more frequently, but I get myself busy surfing & reading, twittering and del.icio.us’ing . My goals for the New Year are to become more active creating and commenting. To collaborate and to develop new material, to trial and to error.

Live blogging from our Digital Internship Project

Here are some sites he shared. I will add links and descriptions later.

9:00 - Alec shows us some tools from a brainstorm list

• Chacha - Live online Search
  
• Skreemer - Music Search
• Google Sketchup -
• Remember the Milk - Remember tasks through online tasks. Idea to share assignments and reminders with students.
• Gmail accounts for students and teachers - Couros Blog - Watch the Jing Cast

• Dandelife - Lifecast - Student Biography Projects - Personal Time Lines
• Slideshare - share powerpoints - Add audio with slidecast
• Gliffy - Online Drawing Tools
• QiZiQ - Online study help. Created by 15 year old
• Dynamic Images
• FD’s Flickr Page - Motivational posters
• Let them sing it for you
• Edutopia. Great source of ideas for teachers.

9:45 - A short explanation of Creative Commons. Re-useable content, crediting

10:00 - Dean Shareski is getting us Geocaching. I have looked forward to this presentation for some time.

geocaching.com

Dean is going to share how geocaching is applicable in a variety of ways. Technology doesn’t have to be sedentary. Anecdotes of GPS in dogs, senile grandparents, agriculture (GPS in tractors), prior to 2000 the satellites were only used for military use.

video from howstuffworks.com

video Simpsons on Google Earth

video - geocaching on UNC-TV

What is GeoCaching. Hidden Caches like a treasure hunt. Multi-cache sites, Dozens of forms of geocaching. Scratching the surface of how we can use it in the classroom.

People are starting to use GPS for all sorts of businesses and hobbies.

How to: look up on web, get coordinates, find location with a GPS

10:20 Getting Ready to go outside. Passing out devices to go over interface. Looking at geocaching.com
viewing the online map, clues and cordinates. Finding the location on Google Earth. Read the logs of other people that went looking for the cache to make sure of existence of the cache.

Fun way for students to learn coordinates, longitude, latitude. Need to learn more about mapping marked points. I will need to spend some time geocaching and thinking about classroom implementation before I get students going.

More to come.  This is something I want to learn more about

We are streaming live

Alec has created this wiki on Media Literacy, unfortunately his slides are not posted. The wiki provides many great examples on the dark side of the web.

Looking at the dark side of the web. Alec touches on history and problems since 2000.

1. Scams, bullying (starwars kid)
2. racist sites, pro-suicide sites, anti-immigration

We touched on Prensky’s idea of Digital Natives vs. Immigrants.

Touched on how consumerism drives companies (iPhone).

Neil Postman 5 things we need to know about Tech Change. Missed the last two and am looking for a link.

• tech change requires tradeoff
• +/- are never distributed equitably
• not addictive, ecological

Parents have little idea of what’s happening. Alec shows metaspy.com what people are looking at.

Whats big with teens

- poker, rating sites (hot or not), alcohol sites, downloading/sharing,

- video assults, phone bans

Interns shaddy experiences on the net

- Axe deordant ad on website

Plagiarism is a major issue with internet. Sites that trade and sell papers. I did this, but would never now that I understand content. I had a lack of awareness and understanding of researching and consequences.

turnitin.com is a solution that cross checks references. Policing is the last thing we need, Alec says more groundwork needs to laid. I think being proactive should always be the first step. We need to teach what plagiarism is and why it is wrong. Need to teach importance of citations and reference.

Democratic creation of material is a foundational component of Media Literecy. We need to teach awareness so that our students can achieve the potential of the internet while avoiding dangers.

Safe Searching images, wikimedia commons