515 Week 2

I thought the 20thingsilearned was an interesting little book. Some of the stuff mentioned in it seemed like pretty basic stuff at first, but then I realized just how much stuff there is out there on the internet and what all goes into something as simple as a web address. There is also a lot out there that can harm your computer or steal things from you, like your identity, so it was good to learn more about malware and phishing.

I currently have all my documents, pictures, pretty much anything I have saved digitally to either my hard drive or to some sort of portable drive, (I have two jump drives that have pretty much anything I've saved in the last three years or so, and then I still have some 3.5 inch floppy disks that have some real old stuff on it--none of which I really use anymore). I should probably save some of the more important stuff to a cloud app, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Plus, all my pictures are taking up a lot of space both on my hard drive and in my jump drives.

I have been a dedicated google user so far in my online life and I really don't plan on switching from it for my searching needs. I almost always am able to find what I need in a very short period of time, but it is nice to see what else is out there and know that I at least have options.

515 Week 1

I'm back writing on this blog for the first time in 4 months. I was just reading some of my old posts reminding me of previous classes. I'm excited to get going with this new class. It sounds like we will be learning about some great web based technology tools. I've already learned about a lot of what's out there from previous classes that Louis taught so I'm interested to compare these tools to what I already know and use in school. I'm always looking for new and exciting websites to share with both staff and students and for me to use in my library skills class.

Using graphics could be beneficial to me in a few ways. I definitely could jazz up my web site for me school library with some graphics. I know the art teacher in my school is always looking for new ideas to use so I plan on introducing some to the graphics sites to her. The book is also interesting so far. It is almost more like a workbook with all the questions it asks along the way and provides great tools and learning activities.

I'm sure glad I'm a renter on days like these!!!

Go Pack!

Week 6!

I was very impressed with everyone's units in class on Wednesday. We had a nice variety of topics covered, plus I was able to see how someone did a unit with a similar topic (Jenny with immigration) than me in a different way. I got a lot out of the class too. LoTi levels was a completely new concept for me and it allowed me to look at lesson/unit planning in a different way. I was also introduced to some great ideas for project based learning that I could either use with my future students or suggest to future colleagues.

On now to start another phase in my life. I'll be moving back to the Madison area (Middleton) on Sunday and I'll be back living there for the first time since my undergrad days. I'll be starting a new job on Tuesday in a new field (Library Media Specialist at River Valley Middle School) so I'm very excited but also a little bit nervous for that experience. I'll also enjoy the three week break before we start our next and final class in the LMS cohort.

week 5

This has been one of the craziest weeks for me. I worked at State Fair to make a little extra cash before I move out to Middleton, but I didn't realize they were going to give me so many hours. It has been a non-stop circus but the extra money will come in handy. I have been putting the finishing touches on my unit plan and I am pretty confident with where it is at. My plan focuses on immigration in the United States in the late 19th to early 20th century. It is an authentic experience and students are using a lot of technology. It also hits many social studies standards along with many ITL standards. I am very much going to enjoy these next three weeks off before the next class in the cohort as I will be moving to a new town and starting a new job during that time.

Week 4

I was intrigued about our discussion on the Digital Divide. This is a topic that I am always curious about. I always wonder what the statistics will say about internet use for people. Will we ever just assume that everyone can at least find a place to access the internet? So much can be done online these days and it makes me wonder just how many people have easy access to the internet. According to some of the statistics we looked at in class, it seems that age plays a big factor in internet use. Also income, education, and race play a role in overall internet use along with the quality of the internet use (broadband vs. dial-up). It makes me wonder about the future of things like mail and whether or not that will become obsolete. I will be working in a more rural area next school year, so I am curious to find out what sort of internet habits people have there.

Week 3

Our discussion on assessment this week brought me back to one of my classes I took through Stritch's M.A.T. program when I was getting my initial teacher certification. A lot of the focus was on formative and summative assessments and how assessments should drive future instruction. It has been five years since I took that class but I still remember a lot of the information because I would prepare for job interviews with a lot of the material from that class. I have decided now that I'm going to do my unit assignment on the immigration project that I found on the project based learning website. It's designed for three weeks but I think I'll be able to shorten it up to five or six days. The challenge will be coming up with the day to day lessons. The big picture stuff seems easiest.

Week 2

This has been a very busy past week. I took a children's and adolescent literature class that met each day for 8 hours. It was a great way to get three credits. I also found some overlap with our 521 class. During the class we watched the movie Freedom Writers which had great examples of both project based learning and authentic learning. The students in the movie (which is a true story that takes place in the 1990s in L.A.) took all their journal writings and combined them to publish a book. Everyone was from a different background and told a different story, many of which were related to gangs. The book obviously was turned into a movie so the whole project seems to be pretty high on the LoTi scale because they took their idea so far to the next levels. An assignment that started out as students writing in journals turned into a Hollywood movie that reached millions of people. That is very authentic.

Week 1 for 521

Onto another class already! I learned a lot of great information in our first class about Levels of Technology Integration (LoTi) and project based learning. I did not realize the complexities of integrating technology into classes, schools, or districts. After hearing an overview of all 6 levels, I think I would put myself at a level 2 for now. It's difficult for me to figure for myself right now because I have never had my own classroom to gauge. I also took the LoTI survey which put me at a level 1, but again, not having my own classroom to base answers off of, it was difficult for me to answer a lot of the questions. My group got off to a great start on our LoTI presentation today. I think everyone has a strong grasp of what we need to do. We are reporting on a fictional middle school and have already found some great information.

The biggest idea I took away from the first class session was how we need to go beyond just using technology. In order to get into the 4-6 range of the LoTI, student experiences need to be authentic and have an effect on things outside the walls of the schools. I am starting to think about what else I could do to take student learning one more step beyond what I have done in the past.

Week 5

I have spent a good portion of my time so far this week working on my google site. It can be accessed at: http://sites.google.com/a/wolfmail.stritch.edu/rvmslmc/ if you would like to take a look. As of right now it is still a work in progress. Google sites are a great way to organize information for library media centers. I can utilize a variety of Google applications within the site such as the calendar, docs, reader, and many other applications. I have set up my site to act as the website of the middle school library media center I will be working at in the fall. I provide a variety of links and information on ready reference, policies, citations, teacher resources, parent resources, and many others.

Week 4

Well, the information overload continues as I have been learning about and utilizing diigo.com to bookmark valuable websites I have discovered. My diigo site can be viewed at http://www.diigo.com/user/ajmayer14. I am just starting out with it, so there is not a lot of information there yet, however it will quickly develop with time. I could see myself using diigo in multiple ways in my upcoming job. I am able to annotate and highlight web pages for myself or for others to use. I could use diigo to search for keyword matches which will lead me to finding other diigo users who are finding and linking to sites that I find relevant and interesting. When diigo is combined with RSS, it becomes even more useful in a classroom setting. I would have students start their own diigo accounts, then I would create a unique keyword that they add to each site they save. Then I search the community archive for the keyword and subscribe to the RSS feed for the results. From there on forward, once any student saves a site I will be notified of it and know who saved it. I also could use diigo to share information with my colleagues. As a library media specialist, I need to be able to get appropriate, relevant information to colleagues and diigo allows me to develop a highly personalized, organized, searchable archive of information to share with people.

Sunset

DSC00467
Originally uploaded by ajmayer

This picture turned out fairly well considering it was taken from a my car while driving across the highway 41 bridge over Lake Butte des Morts in Oshkosh.

Week 3

I have been fascinated with RSS since first being introduced to it last week. I had never heard of it until taking this class and I'm amazed at the ease of which to find and organize information out on the web. I am using Google Reader because it comes highly recommended in our textbook and I am already using Blogger and google mail so it was a smooth transition. I already was subscribed to two blogs because I am following them and have begun following many other blogs for both personal and professional use. I think the best feature is the sharing function. I can have all my favorite posts listed in a separate place and have it made available for public viewing. My site is http://www.google.com/reader/shared/ajmayer14 if you want to check out what I'm sharing. As of right now I have four items up there but I know I will be putting more up there soon.

I think Reader would be extremely useful with students. If I was having my students blog, I would subscribe to their blogs and every time they posted something I would know. I would also have them set up a Reader account and have them subscribe to each others. The opportunities are endless because there is just so much information out there.

Week 2

Wikis are an incredibly useful tool and I definitely will be using them with my classes next year. I could see setting one up for my library skills class to help organize all the different topics we will be covering. I also like the analogy of a wiki being a pot luck dinner on the web; everyone contributes something. I think one of the tougher decisions to make will be whether to use a wiki or a blog. I find it interesting that in my current school district they allow wikis to be used, but yet blogs are blocked. I guess the higher ups decided that wikis have more educational value, but I see them both being equally useful.

I have used both wikispaces and pbworks before but not wet paint. Wet paint seems similar and easy to use also. I also like the wikipedia activity we did for class this week along with the textbook discussing wikipedia's usefulness. I was impressed with the amount of accurate information on it and I feel more confident now about students using it for research purposes, as long as it is not their only source.

Week 1 for 534

Once again, I learned a lot of quality, valuable, technology information just from one class meeting. The "angel" seems like a very good web tool and I'm interested to see how it will compare to the ning we used for the last technology class. I definitely could see myself using "typewithme" in a class. Students could work on group assignments together either on school computers or at home. I like how it applies personal responsibility for what each person writes by highlighting it in a specific color. I as a teacher, could see each group members contribution to the assignment. It would help avoid one person doing all the work and then putting all the group members' names on it. I also could see myself using technorati to help find blogs on specific topics. RSS also seems like a tool I will be utilizing both professionally and personally in the future. Zoho also provides an endless amount of free online tools that I could use myself or for student use.

Week 5

I was very impressed with everyone's six best pictures they took along with the variety of ways in which people's prezis were created. That's another one of prezi's nice features, being able to set up your presentation pretty much however you want. No two presentations will ever be the same. It is a nice alternative to power point. I have been enjoying putting together my pucha kucha of my trip to D.C. this past summer. It's been bringing back some nice memories. I'm putting the finished product on voicethread. For my rubric, I decided to create one for a fictional A.P. US History class. My assignment was for students to choose a decade from the 20th century and then do a pecha kucha on it. I think it worked out pretty well.

It will be strange meeting in person again on Wednesday. I think we have been getting spoiled by having the online at home class meetings, and I'm already used to it. I hope future classes in the cohort implement some online class meetings. The eluminate setup is very handy and user friendly, at least for us as students. I don't know how much work Louis has to do on a weekly basis for it though.

Off to a Super Bowl party! See y'all in person on Wednesday.

Week 4

Another interesting week in the land of digital storytelling. Our new technology this week was the presentation tool called a "Prezi." I have been viewing all the samples on the website and watching the "how-to's" on Prezis. It definitely makes presentations more interesting for the viewer to watch. I like the whole concept of main ideas and more specific points being organized like a web instead of the standard outline format. It's basically a presentation using a graphic organizer (more specifically a word web). Graphic organizers have been the all the buzz for a few years now on how students should organize their thoughts, ideas, and information. It makes total sense for it to be available in a presentation form. In terms of using the prezis for our six best pictures, I'm not sure how exactly we're supposed to use them. Do we just post the pictures within the prezi and then write a few thoughts about each picture? Is there something specific we need to write about? Do we need to write anything at all? It doesn't really specify on the rubric.

I also enjoyed seeing all the presentation slide examples in chapter 7 of Presentation Zen this week. It was nice to see some final products of what Garr has been preaching about rather than just a slide or two at a time. I was also amazed at how much I understood about the presentations even though there was nobody speaking and there were very few words on the slides. It goes to show how important simplicity is in slide preparation.

I also am moving forward with my pecha kucha. I am going to do it on my trip to Washington D.C. I took with my girlfriend this past summer. I have a variety of pictures that I took of both historical sites and of the two Brewer games I went to. It was difficult limiting myself to the 20 pictures I needed to choose for the presentation. It is proving just as difficult to select my 6 pictures for the prezi presentation.

Week 3

I first want to discuss some of the best presentations. I don't know if the one on water (the presentation that is embedded on the Ning) has won any awards yet, but I thought that one was very good, and that's without the benefit of the presenter talking. It had fantastic visuals and great statistics. It also made me thirsty as I was going through it. I also viewed the one on health care reform and insurance reform. It won the best presentation for 2009. I thought it was very good also, but it did seem to get a bit cluttered at time with words and there was a lot of reading to go with it. I'm sure it would have helped to hear what the presenter was saying along with it. I did like the whole "napkin" concept and how it kept all the diagrams fairly simple. Also each category (person, insurance company, medical provider, and government) was kept the same color throughout. I also kept waiting for the presenter to take a side, but it seemed to just provide facts and not necessarily try to sway the viewer one way or the other. I'm trying to use some of these examples to help me improve on my previous presentation. I think simplicity is the way to think about it. I'll see what I can come up with.

I also listened to some of the This I Believe stories. I was impressed that they still had a lot of the original essays from back in the 1950s. A lot of the topics seemed to focus on the goodness of people and somehow tied into the Cold War. I have a strong familiarity to T.I.B. because a teacher in the school I work promoted this program and had students and staff members writing and then reading their essays to the school over the P.A. system. It makes me think about what I believe in strongly. If I were to write an essay I still don't know what it would be about. I also think it is a great exercise in helping develop and write thesis statements. What a person believes is the thesis and then all the reasons why help support the thesis.

Animoto was fun to work with this week. I didn't realize that the website actually produces the video. All we have to do is upload the pictures and pick the music. They decide how to display the images. It makes it very simple and user friendly. The Pecha Kucha will be an interesting assignment. I like the idea of having restraints, as was mentioned in Presentation Zen. It helps weed out all the unnecessary information and makes it more succinct. I'm curious as to how broad of topics our P.K.'s will be able to use. Our group also had a successful meeting on tokbox this afternoon, although one group member's microphone was not working. We were able to remedy the situation by having her call another group member and communicate through speaker phone. We could see her and she could hear us, but we couldn't hear her, (before the speaker phone idea). That is a great resource to have available on the Ning.

I can't believe we're already halfway through this class!

Class Session 2

I think that session two provided some very valuable information and I once again learned an incredible amount of new ideas. I looked at a few of the stories on the Center for Digital Storytelling website. The one I found the most intriguing and well done was titled, Minutiae and is about a man's daily morning routine. He is married with two young children and he details his morning ranging from making coffee, to getting the kids ready, to getting himself to work. I thought it was very well done and I was amazed at all he does in just an hour or two.

I also watched Ken Robinson's talk on creativity and was blown away at some of the things he talked about. He brought up some wonderful points about today's education system. He questioned how we can educate people when we have no idea what the future holds, even five years from now. He described how creativity is squandered in schools and how everyone is born creative but are eventually educated out of it. He even went as far to say that creativity is as important as literacy in schools today. He pointed out that kids will take a chance if they are not frightened of being wrong, however education systems are teaching that mistakes are the worst things you can make. He also states that if we're not prepared to be wrong, we'll never come up with anything original. He also discussed the hierarchy of education systems and how the arts are usually at the bottom. He also believes that with the way the current education system is set up that their goal is to produce university professors. Finally he discussed academic inflation and how degrees are meaning less and less and also his three types of intelligence; diverse, dynamic, distinct. Sir Ken is an excellent speaker and really threw some new ideas out there to get me thinking about education in a whole new light.

I also spent some time on voice thread this weekend. Through my initial browsing, I was impressed with one fifth grader's story about Washington D.C. I traveled there this past summer plus I figured if a fifth grader can make voice threads I'm sure I can. He did a great job, and also saw a lot of the same stuff I saw last summer. I ended up doing a story on violence during the civil rights and found some great photographs. I then uploaded a power point I did for the 571 class about copyright. It has a lot of information in it, but I already know there will be a lot of changes to it.

I believe that I can use digital stories in a lot of things I do, both personally and professionally. Voicethread is a fantastic tool and could be used for any sort of presentation of material. It would be a great way for students to present information to other classmates, and the comments section allows other classmates to share their input. I'm looking forward to use the site more and become more familiar with it and all of its abilities.

First Lesson

I have been very impressed so far with the class as a whole. I have learned so much already just from one class meeting and the work to go along with it. I have already shared much of my newly acquired knowledge with family, friends, and co-workers. The ning is an incredible tool to have available and it seems fairly simple to use. I am enjoying taking pictures everyday and use it almost like a digital diary. I wonder what our ultimate goal with the photos will be. I'm guessing we'll use the photos on animoto to create a slide presentation, but I think I also read something in the syllabus about using our top six photos for something. Even something as simple as the "Readability" site has already enhanced my desire to read more online. I still enjoy reading hard copy books, magazines, and newspapers, but having readability get rid of all the junk on websites and enlarge the text makes reading online more appealing.

Our readings for the class have been very informative and it really makes me look at power point and presentations in a new light. I am very impressed with the creativity that our class has shown so far with the future stories and to see both how far into the future people go, and to see what sort of goals and aspirations people have. The "tech head" stories were interesting, however I ran into quite a few links that were not there anymore and some of the sites just contained large amounts of text. I eventually found two good sites, but you'll have to go to my Example of stories post to find out more.

I am curious to see how the next "class" is going to go online. I have never done a class where all the people meet online with microphones and speakers. I took one class as an undergrad where all the content was online but we never actually met while we were all online. I hope to learn more about the animoto site and about our future assignments. I looked over the syllabus and the rubrics but I'd like to be able to discuss the future assignments and know when the assignments are due.

Off to go relax before the big Packer game. GO PACK!!!

First post for 531

We are setting up all our accounts for the websites we will be using.