Daily Technology

When I was a youngster, I lived with my family in Brazil because my parents were missionaries there. At first we lived in a major metropolitan area with “modern” conveniences, but on my fifth birthday we moved to city in the interior of our state. There was no telephone infrastructure – no one had a telephone in the entire city of over 70,000 people. We got telephone service when I was eleven. There was television service – one channel. Programs started at 4 PM and ended at midnight. My parents decided not to bother with a TV, so the only time I watched TV growing up was when we were on our short furloughs in the States. My dad got his amateur radio license so he could communicate with our family here in the States. When I came to the States for college, I wrote letters, since there was no e-mail yet. Maybe because I felt I didn’t really know my stateside family, I love the connections I can make with technology today. My son and his family just got moved to California for his work. After being in the habit of seeing my grandchildren every Tuesday, I love that I can connect with them via e-mail (for details that need to be worked out), cell phone (to hear their voices), and Facebook (for the pictures) whenever I feel like it.

I usually do not feel the technology in my life is too demanding. Maybe this is because the sales people aren’t allowed to use the cell phones like they use the land line phones. I check my e-mail and Facebook every day, with my phone if I can’t get on my laptop. I ignore my landline phone if I don’t recognize the number on the caller ID or if I am busy and don’t want the interruption. Since I don’t usually work outside the home, the amount of e-mail I get isn’t unreasonable. My husband, on the other hand, uses his e-mail to keep up with the demands of his job. If he is away from his laptop too long, his e-mail fills up to the point where he can’t access it on his phone any more.

I use technology for communication, as described in the above paragraph, and I use the internet for research and shopping. I like to window shop when I have free time, but mostly I would rather order the things I need from companies that do business online and have my order delivered at my doorstep. In my genealogy research, there are people who have transcribed old cemetery records and posted them on the internet. Even if I had time and could find the cemetery, the headstones would probably be unreadable for the records I want. This service is invaluable to the genealogist. An engineering friend who works with my husband told us a story about googling. He was in a hotel room and the thermostat wasn’t working. He went online, googled the model of thermostat, and fixed it himself. The amount of information available on the Web is amazing.

EDUC 630 Social Networks

The social networking site I am most familiar with is Facebook since it is the one I have joined. I check my news feed every day to see what is going on in the lives of my friends and family. I also play games with friends through that medium. I have long thought that there are some characteristics of Facebook that would lend themselves well to educational purposes: the ability to post pictures and posters, the blog-like nature of the news feed, and the ability to post videos or link to video sites such as youtube. The concerns I have would mostly be safety-related. If someone deliberately wished to stalk or prey on someone else, Facebook is not that difficult to hack. People tend to be quick to accept “friends” they don’t really know. It would also be easy to turn in work that the student had not done himself. There is no surefire way to ensure that the work was done by the student and not an older sibling or a friend. A third issue with Facebook is the distractibility factor. Not only are there all kinds of available games, there are also ads encouraging users to link to a new “nonFacebook” page. As an adult, I can ignore these, but it is more difficult for some of the younger ones.

When I heard about Edmodo, I was excited. Here is a site that uses many of the positive features of Facebook and filters out many of the negative features. There are no ads or games unless you as a teacher post them. There is a code students need to join the site and participate in the class. As long as students are protective of the code, security can be fairly well maintained. Parents can also be given a code which allows them to monitor their own child’s work (including grades) as well as any general teacher posts, but they can’t enter comments except direct posts to the teacher. Security codes can be changed to exclude students from the ability to comment. This feature can be used to teach a student about inappropriate comments – he can read but not write (except to turn in work) for a while. You still have to be on the honor system for work turned in, because from a distance a teacher can’t really tell for sure who did the work. As teachers we would have to trust the parents of our students or, if the students are college or higher, the students themselves. Of course, we do learn to recognize the quality of work each student turns in, so if it changes drastically, most teachers would notice. Edmodo can also be used to work a project with another class doing the same kind of work. The teachers can issue special codes specifically for the project so the “foreign” students only interact in the specific project. But this feature allows collaboration at a distance (even around the world) with students who may have a different culture, even a different primary language, adding an exciting new dimension to the class. An issue for a math teacher is the need for special software on all the computers to allow students to use math symbols. Most word processing software is limited in the symbols available so students would have to write out worksheets and scan them if they don’t have math software.

Educ 630 Collaboration

I used Google Docs for a collaboration assignment in another class. If I could have turned in the final product from Google Docs, the other irritations I felt would probably have been minor. However, since our formatting had to be APA and we couldn’t figure out how to do everything we needed to do in Google Docs, we had to keep saving our changes to a Word document. That meant that anytime one of the four of us did any editing, all four of us had to change our own resident Word document. It was not a “seamless” transfer, either, so I got frustrated with that part. Google Docs does not have as many formatting options as a good word processing software. It can accept documents, tables, spreadsheets, graphics, etc., from many other programs, but the fine-tune editing has to be done before it comes to Google Docs.

A collaboration assignment helps us learn from each other, and I learned a lot from my team. We could chat while we were working if we were there at the same time, or we could work alone and leave messages for the others. We were able to record some of our sessions when all of us were there at the same time. We each had different strengths, so we complemented each other and brought in unique ideas.

There is definitely a learning curve involved in using collaboration to complete class assignments. These are some of the things I would do differently next time. I would make sure each team member had a specific assignment. I would make sure one team member was willing to be the leader for the group, for the times when we felt rudderless. I would make sure we had at least one synchronous meeting early in the project to set the guidelines, including those two I just listed, but also to map out the project so less time is spent “spinning our wheels.”

EDUC 630 Web Resources

I use the internet for many different activities. I use it to stay connected with family and friends through https://www.facebook.com and through e-mail. Through Facebook, I also play games that allow me to interact in a different way with family and friends. There is an educational site patterned somewhat after Facebook that allows a teacher to instruct online. It is called http://www.edmodo.com/. If I were teaching in a regular (traditional) classroom, I would use it to extend my classroom. Since I am not teaching right now, I am learning how to use it by sending assignments to my grandchildren. My grandchildren are being taught at home, so their mother allows me to share in their schooling. Some of the assignments I have posted for them have come from http://nlvm.usu.edu, a source of learning games played with virtual manipulatives, mostly to help with math concepts. This site requires a sign-in and a “java” download, but it allows free access, and I was able to link it to my Edmodo page.

I live in the country, so it is often easier to shop online. I shop quite frequently at http://www.amazon.com/, especially since I received a Kindle for Christmas several years ago. One of my favorite sites for teacher materials (especially for this math teacher who believes in using math manipulatives and games) is now called http://www.hand2mind.com. Another site with an emphasis on the classical model of education is the catalog for Veritas Academy in Lancaster County, PA, http://resource2.veritaspress.com/Online_Catalog_2012. Since I taught in a classical Christian school for eleven years, I became familiar with their offerings in almost every subject. I had used them as a resource for my own home school, many years ago, and always enjoyed the reviews of each book or learning material.

Since I enjoy researching my family history, I subscribe to a site called http://www.ancestry.com/ which allows me to search many databases, including the U.S. Census, to see if I can find mention of my ancestors. I also use the free site http://usgenweb.org/ to complement and add to what I find on Ancestry’s site. Some states have more extensive cemetery listings on http://usgenweb.org/ than on Ancestry.

Of course, no listing of web resources would be complete without mentioning the search engines available. My favorite and most used is http://www.google.com, but there are many others.