Website assignment

Well, here it is.  I must say, I'm still disappointed.  The functionality it not as good as I would want.  For example, in the documents section there are two Google Docs that would be used by the staff of our school. Sure, it might be nice to have them on this website to look at the data, but wouldn't it be just as easy to open the file in Google Docs and be able to not only look at it, but edit it if need be?


Maybe some day I'll think of a great purpose for a website from Google Sites, or maybe I'll explore more and discover more useful gadgets.  Sometimes taking a bunch of cool stuff and putting it all in once place doesn't work out to be one really cool thing.

Late Assignment

It looks like I'm taking a late grade on my website.  It seems anti-climactic.  All this great web 2.0 stuff, and then: a simple webpage.  Sure, you can incorporate lots of the other stuff we've done into a webpage, but I'm not really envisioning anything awesome.  I have no inspiration for it.  I looked at my classmates' pages, and I liked Nicci's and ... Aristotle's?  

I'm also less than impressed with Google Sites.  Every other Google tool I've used, has been awesome, but I'm not liking this one as much.

Anyway, I'll put something together soon.

TED Radio Hour: Building a Better Classroom

I only heard snippets of this during my evening chores, but I plan to listen to the whole thing soon.  From what I heard, every teacher should listen to this podcast.  Check it out here.

The Last Reflection of EDT 5410

This is about it. This class is coming to a close rapidly.

This week's reading included two chapters, the first of which, chapter 29, written by J. V. Dempsey and Richard N. Van Eck, is titled “E-Learning and Instructional Design”. I've been asked to reflect upon my own experiences in this course in relation to what the chapter said, and three points stood out to me.

First, I can tell from my experiences this semester that Brian Horvitz, the instructor of this course, has done this before. The class is extremely well structured and delivered to the students in an easily understandable way. Of the three classes I have, this class is far and away the easiest comprehend what my objectives for each module are. That being said, chapter 29 points out on page 282 “...e-learning today may combine any and all (e-learning instructional methods), do so at a moment's notice, and add or drop them as dictated by the needs of the moment.” As far as I can tell, Dr. Horvitz has not exercised this ability to adapt the course. It seems that we have done exactly what was planned. That being said, I haven't seen any reason for him to exercise that particular benefit of e-learning as the class has progressed quite smoothly with little lack of understanding on the part of the students.

Second, this class has been a very social class. These reflections that I've posted on my blog have also been posted to a discussion forum for our class. The class has been divided up into small groups weekly, and we are responsible for reading other students' reflections and responding to them in an intelligent, thoughtful, manner that contributes to both our and their understanding. This resonates with what was said on page 283: “The biggest swing in the last few years is the strength of community and the use of social learning technologies for purposeful learning activities. The sceneario of the solitary student working alone at her computer...still exists, but many current and future learning systems will emphasize shared experience features.”

Finally, I was struck by how little a quote on page 284 held water with regards to this class. The quote says “Almost thirty years ago, Clark (1983) famously argued that media “do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition” (p. 446).” In the context of this class, Clark is wrong. What we have done would have been ill-suited for classroom instruction. We have created blogs, RSS Readers, wikis, web pages, and other valuable educational tools. We have done so in a constructivist manner – our instructor pointed us in the direction, and we went to explore and complete the task. In this case, the media is a huge part of the achievement. (The other part of the achievement, of course, is the realization of how these various tools can be utilized to improve our own methods.)

The second chapter for this week's reflection, chapter 31, is entitled “Networks, Web 2.0, and the Connected Learner” by Terry Anderson. With this chapter, we've been asked to reflect on the Web 2.0 tools we've been using and explain how it exemplifies some of the concepts explained in the chapter. Without question, my favorite tool of this class is this one: the blog. What can I say? I love to write. I love to have people read what I write. (Is that egotistical?) I love to hear what people have to say about what I write to open up a discourse. (No one's commented on any of my posts yet, but I only recently started sharing it with anyone but my classmates.  I remain hopeful.)

All of this is easy to achieve with a blog. It has legal issues when using it with a public high school class (like the fact that all students' names are classified information in case they have someone stalking them or something), so those would have to be overcome when implementing a classroom blog or student blogs. Furthermore, the issue of lack of control from the teacher could arise since classmates could easily “cyber-bully” each other in the comments, so that would have to be considered as well, probably as a discipline-related consideration. However, the use of a blog by the teacher to convey and elaborate on information (with various forms of embedded media, for instance), and then to have the students able to ask clarifying questions, comment on connections they've made, etc. is extremely valuable. Having students create their own blogs, reflect on their learning process, and contribute to their classmates' learning processes would allow for even more educational value.

Screencast

Using Jing, I've created a screencast (yes, as another class assignment) on Google Docs in Google Drive. It could easily be used to show students how to use Google Drive to create assignments. Enjoy.

Web-based image editing software

As part of our assignments for the week, we were asked to review web-based image editing software.  Although we had a few recommendations from our instructor, I went with a recommendation from a co-worker who told me about Aviary.

The first thing that you'll notice if you go to Aviary's website is that they offer an app for mobile devices and web browsers which will quickly add effects, crop, resize, reorient, recolor, etc. images.  If you notice on the upper left there's a blue banner, you can see that Aviary is more than a simple image editing app.  The advanced portion of Aviary's site hosts an entire creative suite that is free and web-based.  The Phoenix image editor has similar features to Adobe Photoshop including layers, masks, and filters.  Raven is a vector editor that similarly can boast some of the features of Adobe Illustrator.  There's also Talon, a screen capture tool, Peacock, an effects tool, Falcon, an image mark-up tool, Toucan, a color editing tool, and Roc and Myna spurn the visual arts entirely to focus on audio!  Lots of fun and interesting effects and creative efforts can be made using these tools.

However, it is a web-based software suite, and as such, the functionality is not nearly as high as a resource intensive program running on your computer like, well, any Adobe Creative Suite program.  As a place for experimentation, Aviary is great.  If you have any professional use for Adobe CS programs, it would probably be best to get Adobe CS programs.  Once you see the pricetag on them compared to the pricetag of free, you might realize that your "professional" use isn't that professional after all and check out the Aviary Suite after all.

Google Drive

This week I have been asked to review a free web-based office suite.  I chose Google Docs because I personally think Google is pretty okay.  (Yes, they have more data on me than even Facebook does, but a company with the motto of "Don't be evil." in this day and age says a lot to me.)

It turns out, though, that I couldn't review "Google Docs" because they got rid of that name by incorporating it into Google Drive.  Google Drive gives you five gigabytes of storage for free.  Why?  Because they can, that's why.

"Well, what good is that, though?" a skeptic might ask.  "Even my laptop, which is getting pretty old in terms of hardware, has a 220+ gigabyte hard drive."  Can you access a file on your laptop when you're fifty miles away from it, skeptic?  Or even when you're three miles away from it?  No?  I didn't think so.  However, if you had uploaded that file onto Google Drive, you would be able to access it.  Quit being a skeptic and get with the times.  Jeez.  Addtionally, you can purchase more storage, 25GB, 100GB, up to 16 Terrabytes(!) for a monthly fee.  Furthermore, Google Docs formats don't add to your total storage.

Anyway, the Google Docs portion:  Microsoft Office is the industry standard office suite.  Among those programs, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are the most used.  They are well written, powerful programs with tons of features.  Here's the thing, though: most of those features are not utilized (and indeed, don't need to be utilized) most of the time.  Google Drive lets you make documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.  It allows you to export them in Microsoft Office format, OpenOffice format, or other formats.  (A quick note: we were specifically asked not to review OpenOffice for this assignment.  I'm assuming that was because OpenOffice is a download, not web-based.  However, it was highly recommended by our instructor, and I can second that recommendation as someone who has used OpenOffice for years.  Like Google Drive, it's a free alternative to Microsoft Office.)  The programs have nowhere near the amount of features that Microsoft Office formats have, but they have most of the features that one would need most of the time.

They also have something that I was introduced to this school year that Microsoft Office does not: built in collaboration.  Let me set the scenario where I learned about this.  We have a problem that most high schools have.  Many kids require validation from their friends so frequently that they allow their cell phones to interfere with their classroom performance.  Like many schools, because of concerns of cyber bullying, disengagement, etc., we have a no cell phone policy.  The first time a teacher sees a student's cell phone in class, they get a warning.  The second time, the teacher asks for it, and the teacher will hold it for the remainder of the hour (or the student can take his or her phone to the office for the remainder of the day).  We didn't want to create a time-consuming ODR (office discipline referral) every time a student had his or her phone confiscated by a teacher, but we wanted to create a record of when it happened.

The answer, for us, was with a Google Drive Spreadsheet.  A spreadsheet was created, and all of the teachers were given permission to edit the document.  Teachers can even edit the document simultaneously.  Whenever a student's phone was confiscated, the teacher added the date and class period when it happened after his or her name.  That way, we had a record of which students frequently had their phones confiscated.

Furthermore, this allowed us to see which teachers did and which teachers did not confiscate phones.  In a Google Doc, you have the option to "See revision history" under the File menu.  This option shows which contributors of the document made which changes and when - in our case, which teachers recorded the confiscation of phones.

One final note: I tried playing with creating a "Form" on Google Drive.  The problem I ran into was that when I tried to open it again, it opened as a spreadsheet.  Perhaps I am doing something wrong, or perhaps Google still has some kinks to work out on the Form option.  However, it looked like an easy way to create a test or a survey for students (or anybody) to take.

Did I mention it's free?  It's free.