Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Why are we doing all this tech stuff?

Each class seems to start at least in part with examples of how the technology of the day is useful in education. A quiz requiring students to remember facts from 20 sentences based on audio or visual concentration demonstrating the importance of visualizing and imagery. Videos of students making their own movies and exclaiming why the new world of education should include or at least allow format beyond the traditional lecture and test model. Each technology has its purpose and motivation, but no technology does everything.

What motivates the author of this post. One student said this technology is so challenging and difficult. But I'm learning so much. I wish I could learn so much in other classes.

You made my day. And challenged me to do better.

Monday, April 4, 2011

It supposed to be spring

My office has no windows so I should be immune to the weather, but I'm not. The weather directs me. So do the seasons and when the seasons and the weather conflict, I'm probably not as elated as I could be.

We're off to a roaring start: digging through the idiosyncrasies of ITC001, the WOU system and Macs: logging on, connecting to the servers, recognizing the different folders, clicking-dragging and dropping and being backwards from a PC. The we dug through some Web2.0 features as found in bighugelabs.com and go2web20.net. While there were numerous sites and options (over 3000 in go2web20.net) some were much more practical and useful than others. So we sampled them and shared our discovered.

Finding the use of the search feature in go2web20.net, the tags on the right side and the popups on each icon made finding an appropriate website much easier. And they're all free but sometimes limited in their breath. But you can't beat that price.