T&L – Journal #4 – Assessment

http://educate.intel.com/en/assessingprojects/

Initially, I was surprised to find that Intel offered this assessment library at all. After going through the site, I became surprised to find how much quality stuff was here. I find this site to have much potential for benefit for two primary reasons.

First, with so much to do and such limited time to do it, it is unnecessary for teacher’s to “reinvent the wheel.” This site prevents that. Need a quick way to have students self-assess how well they did on a video for class? There’s an assessment here for it. Need an assessment that can help students assure that they are collaborating effectively within a group activity? It’s here. Oftentimes, I find that resources on the internet don’t exactly fit my needs for my classroom. With Intel’s Assessment Library, you can copy and edit the assessments so that they do fit your needs.

Second, rubrics and self-assessments can be difficult to make, from both a technological and process standpoint. Intel’s Assessment tool makes it easier for teachers to create these assessments. And, as stated before, you could start with a similar assessment that’s already been made and modify it to fit your needs.

In my current role as an 8^th grade math teacher, the assessments that I may find myself using in the future are the Collaboration Checklist, the Teamwork Rubric and the Learning Log Rubric. In the future, I hope to get a job as an Educational Technology teacher. In that setting, I would use quite a bit more of the assessments, including the aforementioned ones and foremost among the ones I’d add would be the Products assessments, especially the ones for wikis and videos.

I also enjoyed reading through the Assessment Strategies portion of the site, I was glad to see such attention to different things to assess and different ways to assess it. There are so many facets to teaching, learning and understanding and Intel clearly understands this and the fact that there must therefore be many facets to our assessments. I found that the sections of strategies on the site represented some of the major skills that a teacher must possess and implement into good instruction and planning:

· Gauging Student Needs

· Encouraging Self-Direction and Collaboration

· Monitoring Progress

· Checking for Understanding & Encouraging Metacognition

· Demonstrating Understanding and Skill

I hope to spend more time with this site over the summer and, through that time

perusing the site, will find ways to implement some of these things into my teaching.

T&L Journal #3 - Digital Libraries

American Memory from the Library of Congress

I was first impressed by the amount of information that must lie in this digital library, which I deduced from seeing the 18 categories worth of resources. The next thing I noticed, which could be very useful in education, is the "Today in History" feature, which I assume uses date tags in the Library's resources to point out things that happened on that specific date. This could be especially useful for a Social Studies Teacher. Today, for example, Civil War era photographer photographed Abraham Lincoln before a famous speech and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born.

The rest of the site contains some fascinating digital scans of papers, documents, maps and pictures from a variety of settings. Most of these documents are at least one hundred years old. Among the interesting things available on this site are a wealth of George Washington's diaries (wow!), 4 of Walt Whitman's notebooks and Civil War era maps. There are also old videos available, such as a 1905 video of the NYC subway system (just 7 months after it opened) [It looks the same as it does now!]. Not all of the resources are old; for example, there is a wealth of resources about September 11, 2001.

Clearly this site has a plethora of visuals that a teacher--especially, but not limited to, Social Studies teachers--can use to complement and add realism to lessons. Imagine being in the 4th grade, learning about George Washington and seeing the actual 200+ year old document from the Continental Congress naming him Commander in Chief. Impressive.

Youngstown State University Oral History Program

As a northeast Ohioan who was born a few minutes from Youngstown State University, I was interested in seeing what this library had to offer. While going through the site, I was initially disappointed to find that it was not a library of audio recordings, rather a library of transcripts of interviews. This could still be valuable and would make quoting easier as well.

Another thing that did disappoint me was that many of the transcripts were not actually available on the site. Once you select a topic that you'd like to view, you are sent to the YSU library page for that set of resources. For some of the resources you can view .pdfs of the transcripts, while for others you have to go to the library to view them.

One particular .pdf transcript that I read was of a Italian immigrant that lived in Niles, OH (a town that borders my hometown and is where my mother teaches). He discussed the life of an immigrant as well as some of the riots with the KKK that occurred in Niles in the 1920s.

It is very apparent that this site could be useful, but only in very specific instances. But, when studying Ohio History or when discussing particular topics (such as the KKK or immigration, as mentioned before), these first-hand accounts could be a valuable and engaging addition to a teacher's lesson.

Overall, the idea of a digital library is a great one. While plenty of information is available on the internet, not all of it is of quality and is trustworthy. Information coming from a library, is clearly trustworthy and of quality. What a great resource.

T&L Journal #2 - Assistive Technologies

For this journal entry I chose to do the Assistive Technologies assignment, primarily because I am often impressed by some of the assistive technologies that are available, that I had never known about. While I am sure that there is still a lack of these types of technologies and places to find them, I am glad that they are actually made and available. I'm sure that there is much more available now than there would have been a decade or more ago. It is good that our society is moving towards providing more of the supports that may be needed. It appears to me that there used to be a one-size fits all attitude towards tools, toys and learning materials/technologies. There was a time when a southpaw was lucky just to get a pair of left-handed scissors! Look at what's available.

We also are fortunate for the internet, which makes these technologies, tools and toys much more easily accessible for the people that need them. After all, they're not sold at your local department store, so where would you find them otherwise?

Website #1 - Adaptive Toy Libraries-Assistive Technology of Ohio - I went to this site first because I was intrigued by the title of "adaptive toys." It interested me not just because toys are fun, but because of my son. While he is developing all of his cognitive and motor skills on pace for his age--6 months--I realized, what would we do if he wasn't? The site discusses libraries for people that need these adaptive toys to try out different toys to see if their child likes them and their use warrants buying one. I have already seen the unpredictability of whether a toy will be enjoyed or ignored, but can't imagine what it would feel like to purchase one of these very expensive toys--supply and demand probably really hurts the people buying these products--just to find out your son or daughter was not interested in it. I was disappointed to find that the only Adaptive Toy Library that appears to be within an hour of here is in Parma. There are none in Summit or Portage Counties, and Parma is the only location in Cuyahoga County.

The site does not contain a list of all of the toys and materials available, since each library is different, but does have links to many of the companies that make the products that they use. In browsing some of the things on these sites, a few among the many that I found interesting were:

• Creepster Crawler - a device that safely suspends youngsters in a crawling position in order to help them exercise, get therapy or possibly learn to crawl.
• Chewlry Chewable Jewelry - a sensory solution for children with chewing tendencies.
• Classroom Light Filters - fluorescent light filters that can reduce the harshness of the bright lights for sensitive eyes.
• MeToo Trikes - adaptive tricycles
• Classroom Support Chair - this chair has a harness to help keep the child sitting upright
• and most relevant to this topic - Keyboards/Mouse/Trackballs/Touchscreens - This page contains information on Achievement Products tools that seek to enable children of special needs to better utilize the most common form of technology - the computer. Especially interesting to me of these options was the Big Track Ball, which seems like it'd be a great tool with technology users with weak fine motor skills.

Website #2 - Assistive Technology to Meet K-12 Student Needs - After viewing a site that primarily related to toys and younger children, I decided to look at one that relates more to my job! The first thing that I appreciated about this site was the definition of assistive technologies, which it quoted from IDEA, "'any item, piece of equipment, or product system, whether acquired commercially off the shelf, modified, or customized, that is used to increase, maintain, or improve the functional capabilities of a child with a disability" (IDEA, 1997, 20, USC, Ch. 33, Sec. 1401 [25] US)." While looking through the provided list of examples of assistive technologies I saw technologies that I know of being used in my school system, such as:

• Large-print books - I've heard my wife, who works as a school psychologist in one of our district's elementary schools, mention the use of these.
• Computer screen, text and video magnifiers - A student at my middle school has such poor sight that he has to have a cart with him in each classroom that has a special magnifying system--which is much like a fixed video camera (like an ELMO projector) hooked up to a computer that uses software to magnify whatever is put under the camera--for him to use for any classwork.
• Audio-voice amplification systems--A student I had years ago had hearing damage, so myself and her other teachers wore wireless microphones that sent our voice to individual amplification systems that were in a headband that she wore.

as well as ones that I have not heard of the use of in my school system, but found interesting:

• Braille printer
• Voice language translators
• Portable word processors - After just reading about the AlphaSmart in Chapter 2, this caught my attention.

It is sad to hear of the special needs that some students and adults have to live with. These websites helped me feel confident that, at least nowadays, the educational system does its best to assure that these students' needs are met.

T&L Journal #1 - Online Technology Resources for Teachers

There is a wealth of teacher resources on the internet. The difficult part is not finding resources, it's finding quality resources. To start my process of finding resources to review, I visited my first site.

Resource #1 - "All My Faves - Education" - http://edu.allmyfaves.com/ - This site was recommended to me by my mother--a 1st through 5th grade Computer Technology Teacher. As with most things that are recommended to me, the site went directly to my mental back burner, as I had other things to tend to at the time. I finally looked back to this site now, more than a month later, as the basis for this journal assignment. This is the Education portion of the "All My Faves" website, whose motto is "Why Search?" The site is designed to be a collection of categorized links to popular web pages. The education page contains categories including Academics, Art, Blogs, Books, Computer and more, including the primary content areas. Each category contains upwards of a half dozen links to different websites within that category. This site could be useful to any teacher as a starting point to finding good resources for instructional uses. While it is not all-inclusive and the provided links aren't necessarily for the best sites on the world-wide web, it certainly is a useful site for finding potentially useful resources quickly.

Resource #2 - "Teacher Vision" - http://www.teachervision.fen.com/ - This site was one of the links in All My Faves' Teachers category. The page is dedicated to providing a variety of resources to teachers of all disciplines, as their motto "lesson plans, printables, and more" suggests. The home page has a few different sections such as a "What's New" to the site section, an "Also on TeacherVision" section that covers contemporarily relevant resources (currently it provides links to resources for the Haiti earthquake, Black History Month, Valentine's Day and the Chinese New Year), a section to sign up for their newsletter and the most useful section--one which allows teachers to search for resources and/or lesson plans by grade or subject. Tabs along the top of the page provide links to certain categories of resources, such as grades, subjects, themes, graphic organizers, classroom management and bulletin boards. When using the section of the page that allows for searching within the grades or subjects for resources, 827 resources were found within the area of 8th Grade Mathematics--my current position--while a total of 9529 resources were found within the 8th grade altogether! Clearly this site's value is in it's ability to make a plethora of resources available at a teacher's fingertips. As the homepage says, "TeacherVision is dedicated to helping teachers save time. Find 20,000 pages of classroom-ready lesson plans, printables and resources." Unfortunately, the site requires a subscription, which costs $49.95 per year. This subscription does give you access to a "library of over 180 printable books, 1,000+ downloadale DK Clip Art Images, Funbrain to Go downloadable games . . . " and 50% off the use of "MyGradebook," but it seems a little silly to pay for these resources when the internet has such a wide array of things available. I will say that I may try out their free 7-day trial when I have the time to look through the resources. Will it be worth the price to simplify the search for easily accessible quality teaching resources?

Resource #3 - BrainPOP - http://www.brainpop.com/ - This site, which I also discovered from the All My Faves site, is a subscription based service that contains resources for teaching all of the main curriculum areas in grades K-12 (While 3-12 is the main focus of BrainPOP, they have K-2 resources available through their service called BrainPOP Jr.). The three main components of the site are instructional cartoons, a "Q&A" feature for students to use and opportunities for students to self-assess through quizzes. Most of the resources involve the likeable, somewhat comedic and informative cartoon characters Tim and Moby, a young man and robot, who take part in most of the videos and are the answer-providers in the "Q&A" videos. Within each curricular area--Science, Social Studies, English, Math, Arts & Music, Health and Technology--the resources are further divided into sub-categories, such as algebra or data analysis in math. While it is a subscription based service, many of the sites resources are free, as I was able to access multiple resources without even using their free trial membership. Some of their other resources include do-it-yourself experiments (with Bob the ex-lab rat!) and a section dedicated to helping teachers use the site's resources which includes a state standards search tool. All of the videos are closed-captioned enabled (a nice assistive technology add-in), play through flash player plug-ins (which makes it easy to use on most any computer) and are matched up with the aforementioned multiple-choice quizzes. These quizzes can be taken before or after the movie and can be taken as practice, where your answers are checked as you go, or as an assessment, where you find out your score & see what you did wrong afterwards (either on the webpage, through your email or as a printable score). The printable quiz results could be useful if a teacher asked his or her students to view a particular video and then take the associated quiz; the students could then print their quiz results in order to earn a grade in the class. Also, the quizzes can be printed out, so that teachers could use them after a class watched a video together. Overall, this is a great resource which could be very useful if used appropriately as an addition to a teacher's lesson plan. It's best characteristic is the fact that students would almost certainly find the sites videos and activities to be engaging and fun.

Resource #4 - MathMovesU - http://www.mathmovesu.com/ - When first visiting this website, I was greeted with a welcoming message that invited me to "explore . . . have fun and pick up some cool math skills" as well as an applet that directed me to choose my character (I selected a guy in a hot dog costume) as well as put in some information about myself. After getting settled in, I found that I (when I say I, I mean my hot dog costume-wearing avatar guy) was able to move about through this site learning math facts, solving problems and, well, exploring. I found that the site was interesting, very user-friendly in a near-video-game-like manner and would be pretty engaging for middle schoolers, especially younger middle schoolers. This website was designed by the Raytheon company--a sponsor of my things involving middle school math--in an effort to create experiences that will engage middle school students in mathematics learning. As their information page explains, "Raytheon's MathMovesU is an innovative program designed to engage middle school students with math whe their interest in the subject typically declines. Algebra, geometry, decimals, fractions & word problems combine with topics kids are passionate about; sports, music & fashion." The site is designed to be used by students or as instructional tools by parents or teachers. It features resources for the parents and teachers to use, such as printable practice worksheets and a classroom guide. I think that this site could be useful for a math teacher like myself, though I would not use it on a daily basis. It could be used occasionally to supplement lessons, but it's best use may be for allowing the students to do self-directed explorations during free time or enrichment times. It could definitely be a great thing to throw in to a lesson plan in a "All students who have their assignment done get to go explore on MathMovesU" kind of way or as something to keep part of a class busy and engaged (therefore, not busy work!) while the rest of the class participates in a remedial lesson, intervention, review or make-up work time.

Resource #5 - Google Docs (Forms) - http://docs.google.com - A surprisingly low number of people--teachers in specific--are familiar with the great tools available through Google Docs. Even fewer are familiar with the most teacher-friendly of those tools--Google Doc forms. Using these was recently recommended to me. While the other resources are neat for sharing files (and the editing of those files) between teachers or members of student groups, Google Doc forms provide a wonderful opportunity for simple auto-collected and auto-organized online homework assignments or information forms. A teacher can make a form with a collection of questions in a collection of formats--text, paragraph text (longer than regular text), multiple choice, checkboxes, choose from a list, scale or grid. The designer can then share the link to the form as a web address with his or her students. After the students complete the form, the teacher can then view their responses in a summary format or in an automatically organized spreadsheet. A teacher could find many classroom management uses for this, such as collecting and organizing all students' schedules and parents' contact information. They could even use these forms for themselves only. For example, if a teacher wanted to organize parent contact records better, that teacher could make a form that asks some simple questions--what parent did you contact, who is the student, what was the date, what was the topic of the contact--and fill out the form each time they contact a parent, thus creating a spreadsheet that would show their history of parent contacts! It could also be used for simple homework assignments: not only would the students not need to remember to hand in a paper, but the teachers wouldn't need to collect or grade a stack of papers, they could just look through the spreadsheet! I am certain that i will utilize this resource in the future.

While searching for my 5 resources, I found that there were thousands of teacher resources out there on the world wide web. Unfortunately, more often than not, they are not exemplary resources. However, some of the good ones can make up for wasted search time! The internet provides us with resources that would never be available to us otherwise - and it's worth the searching!

TECHNOLOGY AND LEARNING Journal Blog

For the Spring 2010 semester, this blog will be used for my journal entries in the course Technology and Learning.

Instructional Applications of the Internet - August 5

Today I got done the majority of the work done on my Instructional Website. I had a few speedbumps in the process that kept me from getting as much work done as I'd like to. Some of them include:

- Figuring out how to get a .swf "video" file created using Jing onto my website, which was created in iWeb. I finally figured out--by searching for it on the internet--how to edit a standard html code and paste it into iWeb to make it work. I am glad that I figured this out because it is a beneficial part of the page, making visiting the web site almost like sitting in a class--on your own time--rather than just reading words off of the page.

- Continued inconveniences with Hot Potatoes. While Hot Potatoes has been easy to use, I continued to have to spend a lot of time today typing in the quizzes, uploading pictures to my KSU FTP, then put them in the quiz, then preview the quiz, then copy the html code, then paste it into iWeb, then resize it to fit the page. It also was inconvenient that there were such limits to the sizes of the quizzes.

Overall, I am very very pleased with my web page. I intend to use it this school year with my students and to share it with the other 8th grade math teachers at my school to use if they'd like.

Instructional Applications of the Internet - August 4

Today I spent hours working on my web page. I spent the majority of the time working with Hot Potatoes in order to include some interactive elements in the page. If it could have been strictly informational, I believe that I would have had the page completed in a only few hours.


Hot Potatoes has some impressive abilities, but can be very inconvenient to use. I don't like that I am only able to have 3 questions in a JQuiz and only 5 matching elements in a JMatch. Because of this, I had to make one Quiz in 3 separate parts, because I had 9 questions to put into it. It's also a little inconvenient to use all around.

I had quite a bit of difficulty figuring out how to include pictures on my quizzes, but finally figured out that if I posted the pictures on my KSU FTP space, then added them to the quiz using the web links, it worked.

I figured out how to post the quizzes to my website by opening the htm files in Word to access the html code, then copying the code and pasting it in to an "HTML Snippet Widget" in iWeb. This is working out well, but could be much more convenient.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to spend very much time on actual informational content for the page today. Hot Potatoes took up most of my time.

Instructional Applications of the Internet - August 3

Today I moved on with the work on my Instructional Website. Up to this point I have spent the majority of my time posting information content and images onto the site. This part was easy for me and represented instant-gratification, because I was quickly able to see a lot of visible progress in the site.

Since interactive elements are required in the website, I spent a while today learning how to add quizzes to my site. After seeing it discussed a lot on our Vista discussion board I decided to use Hot Potatoes to create my quizzes. After downloading and installing the software, I spent quite a while watching tutorials about the programs and practicing how to use them. I am excited about the possibilities that it presents.

I ended the Hot Potatoes experience by attempting to add images to my first quiz that I planned to make, but couldn't figure out how to get them up there. I would add the images from off of my computer and it would say that it worked well. When you finish the pages, it saves them then gives you the "View in Your Browser" option, which is actually just viewing the file on your hard drive not on the internet. For some reason even in this instance the images do not show up. I figured that they would because the images are on the same harddrive. Unfortunately, it didn't work as htm files on the harddrive or when they were posted to the internet.

Tomorrow I will try to figure out how to get the images to work--I will try posting them to my KSU space and then using links--and will figure out how to get them included in my web site--hopefully I can include them in a manner other than just as links.

Instructional Applications of the Internet - August 2

Today I got into working on my website. I have enjoyed using iWeb to create the site so far. It is very capable with the adding of text and images in a manner that is visually-pleasing and fits good graphic design principles.

So far it has worked very conveniently and the site is looking great. I am really enjoying creating the site and am very pleased with its appearance so far. I am excited to see the finished product and share it with colleagues & students.

Soon I will start working on adding interactive elements to the site, such as the quizzes that I will add to assure that I am meeting those requirements for the site.

Instructional Applications of the Internet - August 1

Today I began using iWeb to figure out how to use it to create my Instructional Website. I watched numerous tutorials on its use for creating a website and began experimenting with its functions.

Along with the hour or so that I spent working on that I also spent some time getting all of my website resources (objectives table, storyboard, design flow-chart) ready to guide me through the process of the website creation.

I also read up on the website requirements and discussion postings on Vista to get me ready to go.

I am excited that it seems like a pretty straightforward assignment although there are no clear requirements listed anywhere on Vista.