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).