Saturday, April 19, 2008
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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