The Changing Past

When I started teaching at WOU in 2000, we would write and hand out to students very specific steps as to what to do on the computer.  Today I had the students set up blogs in blogger, I was not certain what they would find or if they would find the same thing based on their previous experiences with Google or Blogger.  So we did the best we could which not only got us to our objective, but we could be creative along the way.

Then we discussed some of the tools that evolved out of Web2.0 and recognized how much they have changed over the years.  I had become very comfortable with RSS feeds and Wikis.  Now major companies like Google and Apple don't include RSS and there are better and more fun alternatives to wikis.  Even college aged digital natives don't know what wikis are even though they use Wikipedia regularly.

Teaching technology has therefore become a process of understanding discovery and exploration and not following recipes and step-by-step instructions.  Fortunately digital natives are more secure in experimentation than us older cautious learners.

The Internet is a storehouse of information, much of it good, some of it not so good and some of it rather bad.  We need to be lifetime learners and understand how to differentiate between the good, not so good and bad.

Blogging in ED270 - Spring 2013 version

This will be different.  It's different every time I start a class.  The students have different names, faces and personalities.  I hope my approach is different in that I have improved the process.  But as much as anything this will be different because as a class in technology the technology has changed.  For example, blogger.com has new and improved features but it has also removed older comfortable features.

One purpose of the blogs for each students is that the blog is a collection point, like a journal, of all the activities throughout the term.  Of course, it also exposes them to the use of blogs both technically and theoretically.  So here we go this another term, another set of blogs and the possibilities that something new may replace blogging.

In our history classes and many other situations time is explained as a line with dates on it identifying significant events.  I learned years ago that in some culture time is seen as a circle that cycles around every year or month.  School life is more cyclic as we repeat at the beginning of each term a similar routine.  "Please, introduce yourself,"," My name is blah-blah-blah and I'm majoring in Blah-blah."

Just call me Denvy. I'll answer and you don't have to be concerned about another "Denvy" answering in lieu of me.  Google Denvy.  There aren't many out there.  I've lived in eight different decades and was born about the time the word computer was applied to devices that did computing and started working with them about the time universities and the government were starting to use them, so I will have a couple stories to share with you.  I'm an Alaskan born in North Dakota.  One of my greatest passions is working with college students so they will earn an "A."  Plan to be one of those students.

Sunrise

Every sunrise has its own day, every day has adventures waiting for us, and every adventure is filled with potential for great things, or not such great things. Adventures are fun and filled with people, action and new discoveries. For several hours each week for a half score of weeks, one of the adventures is spent with me.

A couple things happen on opening day. We get to know each other and a bit about what we can and can't do now, in our past and in our future. We turned on the Mac's when our hands were accustomed to PC's, we wrote on a SmartBoard which was more magic then smart, and we tried to drag the page up and down on that board as if it were an iPad as we presented what we discovered at bighugelabs.com.

We are ready to reach to our expectations when we serve as teachers now and in the future. Hopefully everyone has had a chance to check out go2web20.net and review at least two applications, and then included your review in your blog.

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.

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?