8 Tech on tech on tech

I think that Multitouch Displays are going to have the biggest impact on the future of education because they are able to accommodate large amounts of students. While many of the other new technologies such as PLE, and cloud computing can be utilized by many students, multitouch display incorporate technology without totally diminishing human work. They allow for teachers to still use the old fashion methods to lecture to groups of child while incorporating technology just to make it a little easier. I think that these product will be used for many purposes in classrooms. In younger classrooms they can be used for interactive lectures and games while as in older classrooms they can be used to manipulate environments for all types of learning from design to chemistry.

Another future technology that I found and think could do amazing things in Ed Tech are holograms. According to Rodger Riddell in the article “3 emerging technologies reimagining higher ed in 2015 and beyond” from Education Dive, holograms will have many awesome advancements such as “making it possible for experts to present "in-person," connecting remote classrooms, facilitating multi-classroom lectures, allowing online students to project a professor into their living rooms, and making it possible to "attend" historical events like the signing of the Declaration of Independence.” ATTENDING MAJOR HISTORICAL EVENTS!! I think that this would be an extreme advancement in education because of how much more student will be able to understand from going to event like this! No one would forget what the Declaration of Independence meant if they were there and experienced the feelings in the room when it was signed. Holograms would help technology surpass one of its biggest weaknesses of being impersonal.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/3-emerging-technologies-reimagining-higher-ed-in-2015-and-beyond/344103/

I believe that I fall on the same side of the divide as student A, I grew up with fairly easy access to technology and my school system used it regularly. In addition, especially in college I have been immersed in technology. I think that the digital divide will not be as big as an issue when I will be a classroom teacher. Due to how fast technology has been growing, the availability and affordability of computers and other technology has also grown rapidly and I think that all most every student will have access to the internet. However, as a teacher I will address the issue by first determining the number of students who would need better access to technology and then if it was an issue I would make time in class to do all the required work on technology. Also, I would print out some homework and screenshots of things that would be needed as an option for children to take home instead.

7 Adaptive PowerPoint Design

As a student who is exposed to all different types of lectures and learning tactics at an upper level, PowerPoint is one of my favorite lecture techniques. I like it because teachers can use the tool to organize lessons in a clear and more simplified way. I think that PowerPoints keep teachers on topic and give expectations of when everything has been covered. As a teacher I think that PowerPoint would be most effective on the bottom two levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, understanding and remembering. Depending on the subject I would design my PowerPoints so that each sliding is building off the next therefore the student can clearly understand how all the topics come together. In addition, I would use the last slide to pull it all together. Depending on the way a teacher organizes concepts can make understanding a simple process difficult so it very important that ideas are clearly laid out in order to meet all the levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. For remembering, I would print out the PowerPoints, 6 to a page, for the students and have them hand copy them done into their own organization of notes. I would also reiterate main points through the presentation to ensure student remember they are important. I think that is the best way to remember concepts. Although, I think there are better tactics to hit the upper levels in Blooms Taxonomy, I could use PowerPoint to give the class example questions or scenarios which they can then discuss as a class to analyze and evaluate the topics. Lastly, I would meet the first level by having kids create their own PowerPoints, this would allow them to put together the information in their own way and truly show they have meet the other levels. When use correctly PowerPoint can be a very effective tool to meet all sorts of standards and adhere to different learning techniques.

Adaptive technology is technology that help people with disabilities use the technology. This is so cool! When I think of these I think about how people are able to drive cars with just their hands! I have never seen anyone use the products in a classroom but some of the computer based adaptive technologies mostly are ones that are alternative input and output devices; some that stood out to me were one handed key boards, sticky keys, on screen key board. One very important aspect of adaptive technologies as mentioned in the podcast is matching the correct tool with a student, therefore finding what works for them. Further, from a learning standpoint I think that while adaptive technologies are an amazing tool there may be some difficulty adapting them into classrooms. For example, some teachers may not understand how to use the technology and it may be more costly to have extra instructors. Adaptive technology is amazing but I think that in order to properly bring them into classrooms they need to be more widely understood.

The Web Page Design has been a really fun project and I wish we had had more time to truly play around with weebly. I thought it was funny that a lot of well-known sites have used the layouts from weebly such as, Buzzfeed. I picked up many new skills though from this assignment such as, better organization of webpages, adding new pages, and adding design to external links. Although the website has a couple quirks I thought it was extremely easy to use. Another thing that I liked about this site is that it let you create your own custom URL whereas Google Sites required that their name be in part of the URL. I am not the biggest fan of classroom webpages so I do not know if I would use this site in my career as a teacher but I would use it to create websites for companies and other promotional reasons.


http://westonomics.weebly.com/

The Death of Powerpoint

I enjoyed this PowerPoint because it was witty, used short bullets and demonstrated a purpose! It did not have the most unique design but I enjoyed the pictures and clear structure. I learned that it is important for PowerPoint to be direct and not have a lot of information on the slides so that the audience focus is on the presenter and not just copying notes!

Death by PowerPoint from Alexei Kapterev

6 Dangers of Classroom Tech

I looked at Mrs. Ardingers 2^nd grade class page form Edina public schools. I was shocked at all the information I could find about these students from the webpages. I was able to find a photo gallery containing pictures of the students from throughout the year, links to individual students webpages with all their work, and a calendar containing the class schedule.  While, it would be difficult for this information being out on the Internet to directly harm the students I feel as if this is way too detailed and too easy to find. There should be required sign-in security on all educational webpages because it is more dangerous than beneficial to have these students’ faces public.

Before I found this class page I went back to my old Elementary School’s page but I wasn’t able to find any classroom pages. However, I was interested to see how much the school was doing with Ed Tech! They were having an upcoming Digital Citizenship week and had many links to education websites for the students to use!

One of my favorite things about technology is its ability to organize large amounts of data, yet also allows the user to get creative with the presentation of the data. As a teacher, I would use a privacy protected webpage to allows parents to see what is going on, keep track of assignments and include Google calendar to keep information on upcoming events readily available. I would also use Diigo for lesson planning because of its annotating and bookmarking properties. To go along with Diigo, I would use presentation softwares, specifically Powerpoint, in order to design lectures. In addition because I enjoy excel, I would use it for grade records to reduce human error. Technology is an excellent way to organize a classroom and be able to edit and reuse the information as needed.

From the assignment on Web Resource Evaluation I have learned that making a website is not actually so scary or expensive! The last time I had to make a website I had to do coding which is incredibly difficult! I never knew I could build a website right of my Gmail account. Google site was one of the first online design website that I thought was easy to maneuver and efficient at the same time. However, we struggled with trying to add our personal evaluations to the home navigation! I also learned many criteria that need to be considered when doing research and evaluating webpages at any age. A few that stuck out to me include: being able to navigate back to the homepage and that all the links are up-to-date. From all the criteria that I found, I took away that the most important thing when evaluating a website is trusting personal judgment. It is very easy to tell if a site is credible within a first glance.