New Term - New Entries

As I turn my eyes from the screen to the window, I see a beautiful dance performed by the tree boughs and wind. I still hear the rain pounding on the window and the din of house sounds from within. Back on the screen, I'm reading blogs, marking attendance in the roster, and sending pictures to the other instructors. Another term has started.

This marks a time to post blog entries for the ED-Four-Twenty-One team starting with the first three: an introduction of myself, comments on the Eight Guidelines for Media Literacy and my thoughts about the first class. While students will do this in three entries, I will do it briefly in one.

I've always enjoyed the outdoors not for any particular activity, just being in it. This probably evolved from growing up as a farm boy in North Dakota, a homesteader/farmer in Alaska living close to nature and now manifested by living on a hillside in Oregon. So where do computers fit in this picture?

In class Thursday I said out loud for the first time a question that gnawing at me these days. Technology as related to computers and the Internet has become so extensive and convoluted that I no longer can keep up with all the information. This is exemplified in class by viewing all the options available from just one portal at go2web20.net. Many of these options are available as tools for teaching and there are tags and categories and search capabilities. I'll be back here looking for tools for my future classes.

And thirdly, a brief comment of the Media Literacy article. Being very brief, superficial, only as a model, I am excited to hear that even with this new technology reading and writing remain very critical in media literacy. It's also exciting to know that the definition of media literacy goes far beyond words.

Another look around the room as a gust of wind resonated around the house, I hoping that all fifteen students will come out at the end of this class with greater skills, a better understanding of the use of technology and the wisdom to use it properly. Oh yes, and have fun doing it.

iPods - mobile learning

This morning's article said that 16% of iPod owner plan to buy an iPad. There are 75 million iPod owners meaning that there are potentially some 12 million buyers of this new technology and that doesn't count any of the 200 million who don't own iPods. In marketing, I would think that Apple is smiling. In education, we need to get out of the starting blocks.

We may not be the next developers of Apps for the iPod or iPad, but if it's as easy as we experienced this week, to develop Apps, there will be many more that 4400 in a very short time. The other striking statistic is that of those young people thinking about buying a handheld device in the next 6 months, 100%, yes, 100% plan to buy an iPod. With the introduction of the iPad that may change.

Whether get an opportunity to design a lesson around an iPod in the next couple weeks, lessons around iPods are in the future and we need to be there also. It's not if this technology will effect education and its delivery, but when and how. How do we integrate the attitudes of young people, the fads of the time, the motivators of society into better pedagogy?

Pod Casting

I don't think there's any relationship between pod casting and fly casting, but maybe it's the balance between the two that keeps us sane.

Designing a podcast using GarageBand is so straight forward. There's a line for images, a line for jingles, a line for voice and more lines for more music. Write a monologue and record it into the voice line. Find images and add them in the top line as they match the speaking, with just a click and drag from a computer folder. Find a jingle or music for appropriate background. Save it or publish it in iTunes and the lesson is ready.

And it is so useful, and it's straight forward enough for students to develop their own podcasts.

Wow.

Time to Remember

...not "the time in September." But...

The reason(s) we doing this blogging.

It's a gradual process to a huge project at the end of the term: designing a lesson outline using as least five of the technologies we exploring in class. As described on the Internet at http://www.wou.edu/~saxowsd/tech2/ed421/final.php

Another Document Format

Images are as common place and second nature on the Internet as text.  Highlight, copy, paste to retrieve text from the Internet.  Right click and Save Image As to download an image.  Creating text and images on the Internet typically generating the same format as one downloads: typically .doc or .jpg.

With movies in iMovie, the camcorder was uploaded in some unknown format and manipulated and saved through some complex unknown process.  At the end of the editing the movie was Shared, in our case, for Quicktime.  It could be viewed on the Internet as a .mov.

Now the process in GoogleEarth is becoming less clear, but still fun.  The process in GoogleEarth of finding sites is, well, easy.  Adding an image is a bit more complex because the image has to be on the Internet, not just on the computer or in Photoshop.  But it's the saving and retrieving that remains a mystery.  First we click on video to make a tour; then on the record button; and then on the disk icon to save it which needs to be in the folder with the sites.  Then we need to select the folder and Save As which is saved with the extension .kmz.  But if we save it on the Internet to share with other, we can't just click on the icon and watch it, and we can't right click on the icon and download the document (.kmz) and then view it in GoogleEarth.  Hence, a mystery to be lived and not necessarily one to be understood.

But it's a marvelous tool for geography and just about any other subject.

Thirty Second Commercial

This project often seems scary at first. But after picking up the camcorder and trying to relax to "ham it up", it turns to fun. Back on the computer the options are overwhelming so we just use a small sampling that produces a multi-million dollar hit. Now that we're producers, we can teach others to be producers and include yet another fun media to motivate learner in today's youth culture.

This is not a sample of a 30-second commercial.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

But is there truth in those thousand words? Your fourth blog entry will be about what you discovered in class, or out of class, or with no class at all, about electronic images and their use in teaching.

Don't play hide and seek with polar bears. They always win.

Eight? Why eight?

Have you ever wondered why they write books about 101 solutions to lives problems? Or 1001 ways to skin a cat? It sells books. I suspect the eight guidelines is also arbitrary!

Anyhow, read this article "Media Literacy: Eight Guidelines for Teachers" (http://www.ohea.org/GD/Templates/Pages/OEA/OEADetail.aspx?Page=3&TopicRelationID=108&Content=15439). Then write your third blog about what you discovered, what you learned, your reflection or reaction, how you will use this information to improve your teaching skills and enhance the students learning abilities.

What ever happened to the Fahrenheit 451 theory?

Read and Write Web

Someone in class asked what a punch card was when I included the term in my introduction. Ten years ago we were taught to design webpages by typing the God forsaken code and all we could do was read each others' webpages. Today, and for the past several years, we can read the pages, but we can all type on them. Hence the new "Read/Write" web. It's also called Web2.0, although there never was a Web1.0.

This new Web2.0 concept has explored including blogs and Facebook and Twitter. There are thousands of websites where you can write as well as read. The website go2web20.net is a great starting point to find and explore such websites. So, go there, try a couple and write about them in your blog. This is your second blog assignment.

"In the Big Inning..."

My beginning was at the end of World War II, a month before D-day. Some crazies were also developing machine that could calculate and store information. Today we call them computers. My first job was in Alaska working for the federal government helping set up some of the their first computers. After I quit that job and became a full-time live-off-the-land toymaker in remote Alaska, I bought one of the first personal computers and soon was training teachers in public schools how to use their new Apples. Now I just try to keep from hyperventilating while watching the electronic world fly by. I've been doing that at WOU since 2000, the same year I earned my Masters here.

What about you? How did you get connected to computers?