Starting with ED270 in 2012

This class is a crazy mix of about anything you may run into with computers and electronics, even cell phones and social networking. Most of us already have used Word and Powerpoint enough so that we need to waste class time with those programs.

And we all know how to email and use the Internet. But do we know how to find whatever we want on the Internet and do we know the proper rules for using those materials? What would you like to find online?

Do you want to make a movie? About what?

How about Photoshopping a picture so that you can stand beside President Obama? Or writing an application for the iPod or iPhone?

Some say that computers should not be used in schools? Agree? How about using Facebook with classes, like teachers and students being "friends?"

Click on "Comments" below and tell me what you think!

Beyond Facebook

Facebook is synonymous is social networking, interactively communicating with others over the Internet using either computers or cell phones. It is not alone in the SNS world as we have discovered these first couple weeks. We're blogging which suggests more words, more thought, less spontaneity, and more effort to find and read. But we are communicating and we don't need to be friends.

Flickr.com and youtube.com are also a part of our lives, at least for the moment as a part of this class. We're displaying ourselves through images and videos, and commenting on each others' work. If it became a habit to use these websites for ourselves and our friends, we could communicate here also. Of course, Facebook does images and videos also.

Most recently there's GoogleEarth and although we didn't adventure into saving our information on GoogleEarth to retrieve from anywhere at any time, it can be done and we can "communicate" again with others this time focusing on maps and locations on the earth, push-pins and balloons with our personal notes.

Where will this end? Or will it?

Facebook

The line between using Facebook professionally as a teacher and personally seems rather clear in our class discussions. Issues included privacy and the proper relationship with a student, particularly a young student. Appropriate postings and pictures were also discussed and particularly when one doesn't have control over what others post about you, even if innocently. The idea of establishing a group with only individuals relevant to that discussion or coursework would be included in the group. Perhaps establishing two accounts, a personal one for socializing and a professional one for relating to students, was another solution, at least in part.

However, the use among young people was clearly recognized and its incorporation into learning seemed a natural next step despite the banning of Facebook from many, perhaps most, schools. The expanding functions of Facebook along with its popularity indicates that educators will be visiting this issue in the future. For now it's an experiment.

Why we should fail

I ran across these quotes a couple months ago. I like them.

"The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledgehammer on the construction site." ---Frank Lloyd Wright

"The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket." ---Albert Einstein

"There are days when I make five of them, but one has to reckon that of 20 drawings, only one will be successful." ---Vincent Van Gogh

"There is no such thing as failure. Only giving up too soon." ---Jonas Salk

"There's a way to do it better--find it." ---

"Fail. Fail again. Fail better." ---

"If you want to succeed, double your failure rate." ---Tom Watson, IBM

"I write 99 pages of shit for every one page of masterpiece." ---Ernest Hemingway

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.

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.