Web 2.0

Web 2.0 applications have definitely changed the way we interact with technology. Tim O’Rielly describes web 2.0 as a platform for a host of commercial, entertainment, and learning applications (p.299). Web 2.0 affords the use of lightweight, readily accessible, and low-cost learning applications and tools (p.304). They have had a great impact in education especially in high education and e-learning settings. One example of this is this course where we have been working with web 2.0 applications through the whole semester. All these applications are very interesting to me but my favorites so far have been blogging, wikis, Zoho,  screencating, and Google docs.

Perhaps my favorite is blogging because is tool that allows people to be creative and share with other their ideas. Terry Anderson says that “web 2.0 applications generally sit outside the confines of institutionally protected spaces, thus allowing input, purview, critique, and comment by others in addition to the teacher and those enrolled in the course” (p. 300). I think that one of the powerful benefits of the blog is that other people can give you feedback of your work or ideas by critiquing or makings comments in your blogs. I love the idea of using blogging with colleagues to share information that you find interesting and have their opinions and also using your blog as a platform for your classroom where you share relevant information of the course.

 The BECTA said: “web 2.0 can facilitate more collaborative ways of working, community creation, dialogue and knowledge sharing” (p.301). I think this sentence describes my other favorite application: Google doc. Google doc (Google drive) is a great tool for collaborating and save information online (clouding computing). This app is perfect for group assignments because you can work with different types of documents. You can access to it from anywhere anytime and everyone can work on a document at the same time which is very convenient. Web 2.0 tools utilize individuals and group contributions to create value (p.300). 

Free Online Apps

Office suits

Zoho

I would recommend to my school and coworkers to use this online application. Zoho offers online business, productivity and collaboration applications. Some of its applications are documents, presentations, spreadsheets, wikis, music, videos, project manager,email, calendar, etc. You can also upload Google docs and other Google apps to Zoho which is very convenient if you are a Google user like me. Zoho can be used in your mobile devices, you just have to download the application. I think this a great tool for collaboration because you can share whatever you create and you can have a meeting, discussion or chatting online in real time.

Image Editing

PicMonkey

I would recommend PicMonkey to my colleagues or anybody. PicMonkey is a free online photo editor. It is very easy to use and it has a lot of interesting features like make a collage, effects, texture, text, frame, theme, and even makeup effects. You cal also have the upgrade version for more features. You don't need to register to use it or download it. After editing your photo, you can save it or share it by email, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and others.

I played a little bit wit it. Here there is an example of what you can do with it.So, here the before and after:

Website

I love the idea of websites because it can be a very useful free resource. I had never used google sites before, but it is not that difficult. I decided to created a resource website for teachers. The purpose to of this website is to provide a list of useful website for teaching. I created links to those websites and a short description of them. I also added a calendar, a tweeter fallow bottom, and you tube news. I created a teaching resource webpage and a web 2.0 webpage.

Click to see my website Here

Concept Map

I created a concept map with the classification of the pronouns. I would use this concept map for explaining the classification of the pronouns with examples of them. This can be very useful to summarize the pronouns lesson and could help to students understanding of pronouns.

Screencasting

Screencasting

Back in my country I am a teacher. I love have students working in small groups because it is a very effective way to teach big classes like mines. One of the major benefits is the interaction and cooperation among students. But sometime when I assign group projects, most students complain that they don’t have the time to meet because everyone is too busy or they live far away from each other. Another problem that I face in my classes is when we have presentation. Most of the time my students work on PowerPoint and the day of the presentation it just doesn't work or they forget their UBS at home. So I decided to use Jing to do a tutorial of Google Drive.

With Google Drive, students won’t have the excuse of lack of time for working in a group projects because it allows people to share and edit documents from wherever. Also they won’t need any physical device to save their files. Google Drive works like a cloud service. You only need a connection to the internet. This application has a lot of features that can be very useful for teaching or learning. In order to make my tutorial, I used Jing. It takes screenshots, captures an image of what you see on your computer screen, and record screen casts up to 5 minutes of onscreen video. So I just installed Jing in my pc and I made up the tutorial of Google drive.

Google Maps for Teaching

Ver Colonial Zone en un mapa más grande

For my lesson of giving directions in my language class, I would make my students to create their own google maps. The idea is very simple but could be very useful for this purpose. Students would create a map of their community or a place they like and will highlight the place marks they find interesting. Then they will add line between the locations. These lines could be for walking routes as well as car routes. After they create their maps, they will make a presentation of it in class. They could use power point or prezi. In their presentation, they will use their maps to give directions. This will allow them to use the lesson vocabulary in a real environment.

Podcast

Podcast

Podcast

I subscribed to Learning Matters through RSS reader. John Merrow, president and founder of this podcast, which discuss current events in education. Podcasts are short — generally 5 to 10 minutes each — and topics include Race to the Top, education in New Orleans, ways to evaluate teachers, ESL and more. It is non-profit media production company focused on education. Their mission is to encourage and enrich public dialogue about education, youth and families. Click here to check it out.

I love the idea of podcasting because you can listen to and/or watch the information instead of just reading it which gives more options to your students. I think we could use podcasting for making tutorials, which is something I definitely would like to do in my classes. We could use them for teaching, especially the one with video podcast because the learner is watching and listening to the information. Also podcast can be used to update on what’s new on any field that interest to you.


Audio Podcast

LISTEN: Education Thinker/Consultant Angela Maiers

In this edition of the Learning Matters podcast, Angela speaks to Rachael Wettenstein about evolving notions of education, how technology has changed the game, and what exactly a ’21st-century classroom’ should look like. Angela Maiers could probably best be defined as an education consultant, but she can speak to so much more.

Click here to listen to it.

Human Performance Improvement

Human Performance Improvement (HPI) is to achieve, through people, increasingly successful accomplishments that are valued by all organizational stakeholders, including those who perform their managers, their peers, the organization as a whole, shareholders, customers, regulatory agencies and even society itself (pag. 135).  HPI stresses a rigorous analysis of requirements at the societal, organizational process and individual levels as appropriate to identify the causes for performance gaps, provide appropriate interventions to improve and sustain performance, and finally to evaluate the results against the requirements.

I think that the principals laid out by Gilbert on page 137 can be well applied to the educational system. These principals emphasize the need to account for the many environmental factors that affect how people (teachers, students) perform their work, achieve their valued results (learning), apply their work process (understanding) and exhibit their behaviors. What I like from these principals is that he states that even if you provide some factors and lack others, there will not be success in the workplace (in our classroom). It means that we need a combination of different factors (motivation, knowledge, understanding, hard work, rewards, accomplishments, performance) for success in classroom.

I also see that the ideas on Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model can help me as a teacher and my students at school, especially cell 1: environment information and cell 2: environment resources. These cells describe clearly most of what we teachers are supposed to do in order to accomplish our job.

Reference

Reiser, R. & Dempsey, J. (2012) Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology.  Third edition. Pearson Education. Boston, MA

Embedding Media Activity

I will try to teach learners how to calculate and compare the units costs of various sizes and/or brands of a product using three theories of learning. I will use the behavioral learning theory, the constructivism, and the situated learning theory.

Behavioral Theory

According to Reiser and Dempsey the behavior is observed both before and after and intervention such as instruction has been implemented and the observed changes in performance are related to what occurred during the intervention (pag. 36). To teach learners how to calculate and compare the unit costs of sizes and manufacturer brands of a particular product, I would first ask students what they know about it in order to have that information before the intervention and compare it with what they know after the intervention. Then I would use their own example to further explain calculation and comparison.  I would divide the class in small groups for they search on the web about the product. Groups can use Microsoft Excel or other application. After they are done with their research, they will share and explain their findings with the class.

Constructivism

In the constructivist approach, learning is more a matter of going from the inside out. The learner actively imposes organization and meaning on the surrounding environment and constructs knowledge in the process (Reiser and Dempsey, p.40). The learning environment should engage learners, provide collaboration and opportunity, setting learners’ own goals, and encourage reflection (pag 41). The leaner constructs new knowledge from what s/he knows. I would allow students to work with any product depending on their likes. It could be from a supermarket product to technology product because the more they know about it, the easier it will be for them to understand the mathematical processes (calculate and compare).

Situated Learning Theory

Reiser and Dempsey say that learning from a situated perspective occurs through the learner’s participation in the practices of a community, practices that are mutually constituted by the members of the community (pag.38). Since this approach is a social and cultural, I would ask students to identify any stores or salespersons in the community and compare the prices of a particular product. Then they will share their findings with the class using, prezi, power point, or a chart. The idea is that can understand calculation and comparison with what they see every day in the community.

My Country: DR

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Gloogle Map: WMU

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Pics!

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

Reflection 5: Photo Sharing and Chapter 3

My Photobucket!

Providing teachers and students with 24/7 access to laptops, curriculum materials, and wireless internet service is a project that seeks to innovate the instructional practice in the classroom. The findings show that it has had a minimal effect in the manner in which instruction was presented in the classroom by the teachers.

There are three factors that influenced the project would have little impact on instructional practice: the teacher resistance to change, the poor instructional quality of the media software, and failure to provide teachers with adequate guidance on how to integrate the new media into their instructional practices.

The teacher resistance to change, especially top-down change, may be one of the main reasons why the project did not achieve the expected innovations. The project was designed by the school administration and the teachers had very little participation or input. All the important decisions of the project were made by the administration. Out of the four teachers only one believed in the project and was willing to use all the tools provided. Teacher’s interests and believes are essential to success in teaching and learning.

The second factor is the poor instructional quality of the media software used in the project. This software was mostly memorizing, boring exercises and was not any challenging for the students. All the materials used basically verbal and visual symbols only which did not allow much interaction to the students.

The third factor was the failure to provide teachers with adequate guidance on how to integrate the new media into their instructional practices. There was not any training for the use of this technology provided to the teacher before or during the project. Professional development is very important for the use and management of innovations in education. It can make the difference.

There are some strategies that may have helped this project to success in improving the instructional practice. The first thing is that for any plan to be successful, you have to be motivated and convinced that it works. The administration had to make teachers and students believe that this was a good plan and that those technologies were needed for they improve in their teaching and learning. Everyone involved on it had to be empowered. Another things that may have helped is that teachers had to be trained on how using effectively all these tools. This could have been done in workshops and practice before beginning the project and give support to the teachers during it. Also the project needed to be evaluated by the administration, teachers, and students often in order to see if it was working and how to improve what was not working

Social Bookmarking

Daily we find interesting websites online that can be useful for us or someone we know. It can be a headache to remember all them or save them in organized way and most important; have access to it from anywhere. Here is when bookmarking comes in handy. A Social Bookmarking service is a centralized online service which enables users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents (Wikipedia). You can save and organize your web documents by tagging them as you desire and share them with anyone. I used to save my web resources in a word documents and sometimes it takes me a long time to find and specific document. Other thing is that since it is saved in my pc, there’s no way I can access to it if I don’t have my pc on hand. I will definitely use my delicious account for now on. Click to see My Delicious Account.

I like the idea of using bookmarking for sharing web documents with others. I have a few ideas: 1) I often share information with my colleagues, so bookmarking may make things easier for me and for them as well. 2) School districts can share useful information with administrators and teachers and even parents.3) Students could have their bookmarking accounts and create tags for all the subjects they take and share it with peers. 4) I would create tags for different matters or topics in order to share it with other people besides teachers. I think bookmarking can be used in different fields besides education like work place, family and others. I would be nice sharing your bookmarking with friends and coworkers.

Trends & Issues in Instructional Design and Technology reading

Most of time when people ask me what I study and I answer Educational Technology, their first words are: ‘It’s sounds awesome’, ‘that’s nice’ or just ‘what’s that?’ I’m really thankful that I go to read Chapter one about Defining and naming our field because I may explain better what my career is about next time someone asks. I always thought about the improvement of the performance by the use of technology, but never thought about systematic instructional design. Also I didn't know this field had been studied since so long. But it makes sense to me that its definition has been changed so many times, it is understandable. If we read about any field of knowledge, it would be the same story. It’s funny the authors of the books refers to our field as Instructional Design and technology while here at WMU, they refer to it as Educational Technology. I wonder if in the future they may change the name of the career. Although my ideas about the field are clearer now, I think I still need to learn a lot about it and hopefully this course (EDT 5410) will help to do so. 

My Wiki!

My Wiki!

Setting up and using a wiki space was fun to me. I had heard about it, but I had never used it before. I found it easy to set it up and I noticed that its pages look like MS word processor windows, so it was very familiar to me. Also wikis are very similar to websites, but they are simpler to use and don’t have much distractions. It’s perfect for teaching and learning.

Wiki spaces can definitely use in almost any field: teaching, social life, work, community, church, etc. Since I am a teacher, the first place I thought for using it was school. There are many ideas for using wiki for teaching, from very simple ones like posting your schedule to more complex ones like a school projects. I would use wiki space for collaborative assignments like creating and sharing material for the class in order everyone can have it. I teach English and French as foreign languages and it would be very useful to have a website (instead of visiting many sites) where my students can find vocabulary, grammar explanation, songs, readings and any other resources. It would be great that students can create their own vocabulary lists with the definition of the word, images, example of how using it and even dictionary entry. I could have my own wiki with all that information, but I think it better if they create it by themselves. Instead, I would use my own wiki space with other teacher in order to exchange teaching resources and any other information.

Week 2 Reflection

My technology tasks for these two weeks were to create a Blog and a RSS Reader. My first thought was “Oh my God, how am I going to do that? I have never done this before” So, I decided just to read and follow the instructions. I never imagined that creating them was so easy! That is something I can’t forget about Google: everything is so easy with it! (I have to confess that I am a Google apps lover. I even have a nick name for it: “Saint Google”). Creating a blog was very exciting and positive experience for me. I’m just getting to know it and I see that it could be a useful tool for teaching any subject. Setting up a RSS Reader was not as funny as setting up the Blog, but I liked the idea. It can be very useful because you can all the websites that you use or visit very regularly in one place. It’s just fantastic!  I am still in the process of fully using both of them, but I have a lot of expectations.

Which part(s) of Dale’s Cone do you think each tool (Blog, RSS) lends itself best to and why? I am going to answer to this question as a teacher and as a student. I think the Blog lends itself best to many of the Dale’s Cone of Experience-Learning. Since a blog is a website like tool to me, it lends to Direct Purposeful Experience because the student is actually doing (setting up) the blog; Demonstration because is a visualized explanation; Recording because you can an audiovisual experiences display in your blog; and Visual symbols because you could have any kind of chart in a blog. I mean, practically it lends to almost all of them. I consider a RSS Reader is much simpler than a blog. But again since you can feed all kind of websites, blogs, etc, it can lend itself to some of them as well.

Blogs can be use by a single person, a group of people or an organization or institution. Potential educational uses of blogs are endless. Schools can have their blogs where they post their activities and information, especially for parents and students so they can provide feedback. A class could set up a blog for a particular subject and since it is a web 2.0 tool, the students interact with other classes and even with other schools’ students. Or you just could have each of your students create a blog for your assignment in order to share them with the rest of the class.

RSS Readers are not interactive as blogs but can be very useful. Everyone surf the net daily, so it tremendously helpful having all your favorite websites in one place. I would have my students to set up their own rss reader for my class in order they have all websites that they use when doing research for homework. That would save them some time.

Postman and Reigeluth & Joseph Articles

The article by Reigeluth & Joseph: “Beyond technology integration: The case for technology transformation” and the article by Postman: “Of Luddites, learning, and life” are both about education and technology, but each article presents a different perspective.

Reigeluth & Joseph’s article is about how technology can transform the way we teach and how our students can improve their learning with the use of it. They state: “It is not an exaggeration to say that technology is indispensable for allowing us to transform teaching and learning to better meets our children’s needs in the information age”. The problem is how to implement this transformation in our schools. I am sure that most teachers agree that technology is the answer to many of the problems we face at school, but I am also sure that we don’t know how take advantage of technology. I particularly use the technology available in my school, but I still think that is not enough. I would like to see more result on my students with the use of it. I really hope we can get that transformation soon in our schools.

Postman’s article is completely different to any education and technology article that I had ever read before. He definitely has a very particular point of view on this matter. He says: “I find that that their enthusiasm is almost wholly centered on the fact that these technologies will give our students greater access to more information faster, more conveniently, and in more various forms that has ever been possible”. To some extent, I agree with part of this statement when he refers to information. But I definitely disagree when he says that our enthusiasm is almost wholly centered to the access to the information that technology allows. I do agree that there is so much information available today that sometimes it can be very confusing for students to discriminate what is important or relevant and what is not.

Technology is definitely changing our world in almost every aspect, so why don’t allow it to change education for the better? Sometimes I wonder how our schools will be in twenty years or fifty. Will we teaching in a school? Will we use any board or book? How personalized will education be? Perhaps I do not have answers for those questions, but I am sure that technology will be there to help.

Reference

Reigeluth, C.M. & Joseph, R. (2002). Beyond technology integration: The case for technology transformation. Educational Technology, 42(4), 9-13.

Postman, N. (1993). Of Luddites, learning, and life. Technos Quarterly, 2(4).