Reflection #6

The purpose of my podcast was to show someone how to make a paper ballon from a regular 8.5x11 sheet of paper. I learned how to make this ballon back in 6th grade from a fellow classmate. I remeber having to ask him to make it multiple times until I got it. I then spent the next few days making one in every class period. Without actually seeing someone make it I am sure I would have lost interest and given up trying. If a picture is worth a thousand words a video must be worth 2012. For this podcast I used jing and a webcam that had been in the back of draw for the last 3 years. With the use of jing it was very easy to make. In the futuer I will need to perfect the lighting and audio. The microphone in the webcam gives poor quality audio. I envision using podcast to define/explain concepts in class that students can then access and review at home or teach my daughter how to make a paper balloon.

Reflection #5 MAPing Information and Social Bookmarking

Reflection #5 


MAPing Information

Last Summer I was taking a graduate course in Topology, which is a math course which dealt with the properties of topological spaces.  Most, if not all, of the course work was proofing theorems about these spaces on the white board in class.  Students would come to class prepared to present their proofs.  After presenting their proof our Professor and the class accept the proof or find fault with it.  One of the tools/methods someone can use in deriving a proof is by using/siting the results of an already proven theorem in their argument.  It happened one day that a student presented a rather long proof and referenced the results of a theorem we had not yet covered in class but that he had found on-line.  It turned out the theorem he discovered on-line was wrong and was probably a theorem a grad student had posted on-line.  This incident reinforced something I learned early, anybody can post something on-line.  Yet another example of this, my wife and I just had our 2nd daughter on January 17th.  As soon as my wife found out she was pregnant she started looking on-line for advice on everything; from what she should eat to how often the baby is supposed to move.  For every piece of advice/direction she found on-line she could find a conflicting example later on.  As you can imagine she spent a lot of time on-line.  If you want to see a gynecologist shake their head start a question with' "I found this on-line...."  We could have used some INFORMATION LITERACY.  In the future before relying on the information I find on-line I will follow the steps presented in the MAPing activity.

I can only agree with Dr. November that given the way people are now getting their information and then basing their decisions on this information it is important that Information Literacy be considered basic skill.  

I chose to dissect the website http://www.ntxe-news.com/, which is a on-line newspaper covering the local counties.  I realize that like any traditional newspaper the main purpose of North Texas E-news is to proved the community it serves with news it is also supposed to make money through advertising, thus it would be wise to dissect it.  However, there is very little information that I got from easywhois or archive.org other that the author's name and how long the website has been around.  What I can say about the website is that given that so many eyes are looking at it and taking in the information it would be difficult for it to continue if the information was consistently wrong.  The website is kept honest by it's readers. 


Social Bookmarking


By far the biggest advantage to using a social bookmarking site like Delicious is that you can take advantage of other's efforts.  Weeding through all the websites that come up when you Google a topic like "Educational Technology" can be tiring and discouraging.  I envision using my delicious account in the future to network with other math teachers and looking for video lectures on topics I will teach in class, hopefully  given by "mature and effective teachers".  Thus, helping my become an effective teacher in a shorter amount of time.         

Reflective Blog 4 - ePortfolio

The concept of an e-portfolio is new to me.  I can clearly see its benefits, the greatest of which are giving the teacher(s) another method of assess whether or not a student has truly grasp the concepts taught in class and allowing a teacher to guide a student where to concentrate their efforts in the future based on what is in or not in the e-portfolio.  This alone would make and e-portfolio a power tool for teaching.
I envision having students, through the use of e-portfolios, show the connection between the concepts learned in class and their environment outside of school.  Thereby showing the importance and relevance of the material.  I always wanted to know why are we learning this?

Reflective Blog 3 - Wikis

One of the things I noticed while observing a Physics class at a relatively small school was the limited resources available to the teacher for in class experiments.  As a student these in class experiments were not only the most entertaining part of the class but also drove home many of the concepts we learned in class.  The purpose of my wiki is to provide students with videos of experiments that either can not be done in class because of cost or because of the time available that would go along with material presented in lecture.  I have added one video so far of Mach's Pendulum.  This is a video that could be used to discuss periodic motion.

As soon as I added my first video I could see many advantages to utilizing wikis; from posting of assignments and class notes to keeping parents informed about what the children are learning.

During my observation I asked one of the teachers if they ever thought of posting class notes on the web so that students could have access to them at home.  He indicated he had but was concerned that students may not pay attention in class or take notes if they knew they could get them later.  I tend to disagree with this view.  I feel students will get more out of class if instead of taking notes they were actively engaged in the class discussion and not distracted by note taking.  Often times in my upper level math class in college I would leave the class with good notes but could not tell you what material was presented.