Monday, April 14, 2008

Jouranl_10

“Can Computers Tutor Students as Effectively as Teachers?” by Ken Luterbach and Jeanie Cole (Learning& Leading with Technology, March/April 2008, PP8-9)

In this point verse counterpoint article, we hear different voices about the effect of the computer tutoring. Ken Luterbach thinks the computer can tutor students as effectively as teachers. On the contrary, Jeanie Cole thinks no computer can replace teachers.
Luterbach shows the research comparison, the students achieved the same scores either in traditional teacher-led instruction or in computer-based training. The struggling students performed a little better with computer-based training than the traditional teacher-led instruction. However, Jeanie Cole thinks students need teachers to provide connections, challenges, and adjustments in the classroom. Students need to connect with other students and teachers. Teachers can praise student and give them feedback as the students work. Teachers can challenge students and move their work to do work of the gifted class. Students can acquire collaborative learning skill through teamwork for their projects. In addition, teachers also can adjust to students’ styles of learning, such as hands-on activities, visual resources, games, physical movement, posters, video clips, and other methods to meet the students’ needs. Therefore, computers are valuable as classroom tools, but can not replace the teachers.
Questions…
1. How can educators integrate the computer tutoring in the effective learning process?
For some projects, teachers can encourage students to explore the computer to teach themselves with questions list from the teachers. For some struggling students, teachers can provide the computer tutor tool as a supplementary tool after school. These students can repeat and focus on their blocks. This will help the struggling students to overcome their difficulty.
2. As educators, how can we meet students’ special needs?
As teachers, we need get to know our students and their parents very well. We need to praise students and take an interest in them. Though this, we can connect ourselves with our students. There are at least seven multi-intelligences. On the other words, different students learn well in different ways, such as visual and musical methods. We need to know the type of their learning styles and provide the activities to meet their needs.

Journal_9

“Storytelling in the Web 2.0 Era” by Glen Bull (Learning& Leading with Technology, February 2008, PP10-11)

In this article, Bull discusses the Web 2.0 Storytelling. Alan Levine made the same digital story(about his dog Dominoe) using 50 different Web 2.0 storytelling tools. All of these tools are free and allow at least two or more types of media- text, images, sound, video, and animation to be combined to demonstrate a story.
Levine suggested some particularly useful tools in different subjects:
1. Slideshow tools
2. Time line tools in social studies
3. Mapping tools in geographic area
4. Comic tools: Toondo is one comic tool
5. Scrapbook tools
6. Media tools in stories through the medium of audio or video
7. Mixer tools with comment and annotate
The Web 2.0 ear offers a wide range of software at no cost to school. This 50 storytelling application is just one example, and Web 2.0 tools will provide more storytelling applications.

Questions…
1. How can educators find the proper tools to do their storytelling?
Since there are many different tools available, teachers should explore the main tools to get to know the features. Based on their specific needs, they can come to narrow down their tools. Some tools are universal while some of them are specific. We can grasp the main tools and add additional features on it little by little later.
2. As educators, how can we decide which version of these 50 storytelling applications is the best one in our classroom?
As teachers, we need get to know our students very well. Students are diverse with their strengths and weaknesses. First we need to know our students’ special needs. Thus, we can tailor our story to feed their needs. This totally depends our students.

Journal_8

“Spotlight: Free Science Resources Online” by Dave Nagel (T.H.E. Journal, March 2008)

In this article, Nagel discusses the tools to sharpen students’ skills and entertain as well. MIT’S OpenCourseWare for Secondary Education is as Highlights for High School. This is a very rich resource with 15,000 lecture notes; 1,800 syllabi; 2,6oo videos; audio clips, and animations taken from actual MIT courses; 9,000 assignments; and 900 assessments. In addition, NASA: Online Science and Project-Based Learning not only provides educational resources by grade level, including videos, animations, simulations, educational opportunities and links, but also includes games, trivia, social features, a searchable subject database, job opportunities, profiles, and a picture dictionary for young members. NASA Quest provides grade-based online resources and helps students to do their projects. Besides these, Smithsonian Institution: Standards-Aligned Science Resources is teacher-focused resources, including materials aligned to state and national standards. It can be searched by state (or nation), grade, and subject area through its standard-aligned materials. It also can be searched by subjects, such as air and space, Earth science, general science, art, literature, and language arts.

Questions…
1. How can students find the specific materials to do their projects?
Since there is tons of information available on-line, teachers should provide some basic key words to search from in the beginning. To certain detail level, teachers can let students to freely choose their interest topics. This will avoid the students off the topic too much and spend too much time in a relative broad area. At the same time, the students have some freedom to control their direction and find something they are interested in. This should be a good balance and combination.
2. As educators, how can we implement this on-line tool to our daily classroom?
As teachers, we can broadly browser the topics in some certain subject by grade. We can find something related with what we are teaching in our classroom now. Then we can choose the most related topics and do some further research. Thus, we can decide the key words we should provide to the students, so that they are in the same area. As we move into detail, we can find out that students can choose their interest topics in which level. Teachers should have a big picture before we assign the projects to the students.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Journal_7: Web 2.0 tool: Microblogging - Twitter

Twitter is a free, easy and quick online service which allows you to broadcast short message to your friends or students and receive messages from your computer or cell phone of 140 characters in length, all those who “subscribe” to your broadcast can see your message, called a “tweet,” and you receive messages from all those to whom you subscribe. It lets you specify which Twitter users you want to follow so you can read their messages in one place.
Twitter is designed to work on a mobile phone as well as on a computer. All Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, so each message can be sent as a single SMS alert. That's part of Twitter's charm.
Twitter is useful for close-knit groups.If you follow your friends, and they follow each other, you can quickly communicate group-related items, such as "I'm going to the pub on Fourth Street, come on along." Twitter is conceptually similar to Dodgeball but is simpler to use.
If you enter items into Twitter, they can be private, so only friends you've authorized can see them. Items can also be made public, which means anyone who knows your Twitter ID can read and subscribe to them.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Inspiration


I created a diagram for the ideas what to do in the Spring break via Inspiration tool. Here it is.

Journal_6a:Inspiration Software Review
Inspiration 8 is a friendly tool to gather ideas to brainstorm. People can throw their ideas on the paper through this tool easily. It help students to learn critical thinking method through this practice.
I went through very single piece of the Atomic Learning tutorials for this software. It took me a lot of time to finish the tutorials. It is clear and easy to understand as a beginner. This is good for a student to learn by himself or herself. However, I also have some input to improve this tutorial section. I prefer the tutorials highlights some important sections instead of the same level. They should have some main functions and some minor ones. Once learn those main features, students can start to do their basic work. Next step, the tutorial has next level important features to learn and so on. This structure can save us time to grasp the main things and leave the minor part later. We always can go back to add some more feature to modify our initial work after we have basic structure done.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

my_movie



Journal_6b:iMovie Software Review
Here is the movie I created in the class EDUC422B. Professor Heil showed us the basic feature from the iMovie software. He also made all of the resources available to us to edit. This is a fun project to play with. I can sit there and play with it for whole day without any complaining. This is a nice software to start to make a movie for a beginner. I can just drag whatever I wanted and put all of them together. It is straight forward. I love to make the movie through this tool. However, when I tried to edit my movie, I found some issues may or may not relate with this software. At first, I put transition time in between for every two sections. Then, I tried to add some music. It always gave me error. I tried many times in vain. Eventually, instructor Jeff helped me to remove all of the transition first, add the music, then add the transition at the end. This could be a problem for this software. But I am not quite sure. It was an observation from my experience during my work. I think this is a very useful tool for any educator with any subject matter. Students love to see a short movie to relate with the topic we want to address. I want to use this tool later more in my classroom when I teach students mathematics or Mandarin. I just love it very much.

Monday, March 10, 2008

journal_5

Journal #5
“Blggers Cafe” by Anne Davis
Learning & Leading with Technology, February 2008. pp17

In this article, Davis introduces the classroom blogging and effective processes to affect learning. First, we create a class blog. Next, students create their individual blogs. Third, students do peer review and comment on others’ blog. Fourth, blog helps students to reflect. Last, be creative on the class blog.
Among those points, the third one impresses me the most. I love the idea to encourage students to comment on classmates’ blog. This will make every student excited to know others’ view. It is good to know the feedback and ideas. Students can be inspired by the comments from their peer. This is a very good way to drive the students move to next levels.
In conclusion, classroom blogging and individual blogging can get students better understandings on their courses. Giving each other comments is an effective way to make the students grow. Blogging is a tool to build a community to learn more and deeper. We should use this tool as much as possible.

Questions…
1. How to choose the link for the class blog?
Teachers should pre-select the main links on the class blog. It should be very safe and clear. All of the material in the class blog should relate and focus on the students and their learning.

2. How to help student to create their own individual blog?
Students can follow a frame work from the teacher to set up the individual blog first. Once they can get into it, teacher should give them some room to develop by their own styles. They have the ownership for their blogs. As long as they follow the common rules which were set by the teacher from the beginning of the class, they can customize the blog with their own feathers. Encourage them to be creative. Let them enjoy the blogs and have fun with it.

journal_4

Journal #4
“Five Don’ts of Classroom Blogging” by Julie Sturgeon

In this article, Sturgeon discussed the rules on the blogging. There are five don’ts: just dive in, confuse blogging with social networking, leap at the freebies, force a sequential style, and leave the blogging to the student. I like the first rule most. The teacher should have a couple of early sessions with students to talk about the proper conduct. For me, this is like we learn the transportation rules before we really drive out vehicle on the road. It takes us some time to learn and master it. However, it is not waste time. On the contrary, we will get benefit from it in the long run. We can not just drive the mobiles on high way without any rules in our mind. That is definitely the last thing we want to do in this world. "The important thing is not to just jump in and blog, but spend the time letting students see samples, understand guidelines, and anticipate blogging and what it can mean to their learning," Anne Davis says. "The time you spend will pay off for you double when you get down to it, because they want to blog well.
On the other hand, there is one do in this article is: recognize what blogging can do for your students. Blog can help students stretch themselves from writing paragraphs to essays. In addition for the writing, students are very interested in working with image, video and music on the web blogging. Besides these benefits, blogging is more handy and efficient than our traditional writing. Students can explore, discover, and create more. They can simulate their plan and get the result right away.
In conclusion, I found there were many good ideas and suggestions included in this article. I am looking forward to apply these rules in my blog when I teach my students.

Questions…
1. How to set the detail rules on the blogging?
I think teacher should have good samples to demonstrate what teacher expects from the students. In the samples, they should include: the format, the way to put comments, and the text related content. If anyone abuses the blogging, he or she will lose the privilege to access the Blog for certain time.

2. How to use the Blog to help the students from writing paragraphs to essays?
Teacher should encourage students to write their on-line journal as much as they can. First, students only can write a couple of sentences. Teacher can read and give positive feedback, “Good job! Keep on going!” Students will write more next times. The peer can review it, “Hey, awesome ideas!” They will keep on writing more and more sentences, to paragraphs, and to essays. Just step by step with a lot of encouragement and comments.

Journal_3

“Speaking Math: Using Chat in the Multicultural Math Classroom” by Janet Graham and Ted Hodgson

In this article, Graham and Hodgson discuss the online discussion on math vocabulary and concepts. They use Moodle as their course management system (CMS) to facilitate the online discussion, synchronous chat rooms and asynchronous discussion forums. Electronic communication allows non-native speakers time to plan out their answers or use others’ responses as grammatical templates for their own ideas. “Students use ‘smile’ to refer to a concave-up parabola” Graham and Hodgson explain, “and ‘frown’ to refer to one that is concave down.” Online communication gives more practice opportunities to the non-native speakers and others who have difficulties with the language of mathematics. The students using online discussion improve themselves to use more math vocabulary than the students in traditional classrooms.
In conclusion, online discussion on math vocabulary is a good tool to use to help non-native speaker to learn the math easier. This online tool can also be used on other subject matters: science, English, history, physics and others. Students get benefits from this electronic communication tool.

Questions…
1. How to choose the questions?
Teachers should select the main and important concepts and vocabulary to discuss. This will clarify the misunderstanding or miscommunication. Every student will have a chance to promote deeper understandings of their math concepts or vocabulary after the discussion.

2. How to do the time control?
If give a big chunk of time to the students to chat on-line, it is easy to lose focus and out of the task. Teacher should assign the students for 15-minute computer session each period. This will allow the students to focus on their task only. Get on the computer and participate the discussion as much as they could. Then the student’s turn is up. Move to next step.

Journal_2

“The Future of Education: learning while mobile” by Mark Van’t Hooft (Learning and Leading Technology, March 2008, pp13-16)

In this article, Hooft discusses the concept of Learning While Mobile. Learning While Mobile concerns the constant mobility knowledge and technology and the learners. This learning is personalized, learner-centered, situated in the space and time, and life long. It also provides a bridge between the formal and informal learning, and a bridge between the schools and society. For example, “Frequency 1550” is a project to merge formal and informal learning. The students simulate that they are the pilgrims in 1550 in Amsterdam and try to find a special relic. The students need to do teamwork to explore the history of the city and develop their own stories.
In conclusion, Learning While Mobile is a way to connect the schools and the society. It puts more control in learner’s hands, and allows the students to explore, create, and access new knowledge through media.
Questions…
1. How to keep the students concentrate on their projects?
Teachers should select the specific topic to narrow down the related knowledge. Because it is very easy to be overwhelmed by the endless on-line information from links to links, students can spend a couple of hours without getting any progress. Teachers should help students to keep on working on their tasks, and let them concentrate on their projects. Teachers need supervise and check the status more frequently to put all of the students on the right directions.

2. Will this Learning While Mobile replace our traditional learning in a classroom?
Although this concept of Learning While Mobile is very valuable and practical to the students, it will not replace the traditional learning in a classroom. It is a good tool to explore more informal learning and connect with society. However, it does not teach the basic skills such as: reading, writing and math. We can only use this as a supplemental tool and can not replace our traditional learning in the classroom.