Flickr Slideshow

Refined Lesson Plan

Subject, grade level, and lesson topic.

a. Subject: Computer Human Interaction / Artificial Intelligence.

b. Grade level: Computer Science Graduate Students

c. Lesson Topic: Develop a mobile application. Students can choose the OS, android, or iOS. Topic is also optional.

Learning goals:

At the end of the lesson plan, student will be able to develop a mobile application. They will learn from the basic operations to advance features, depending on the application to develop. They also will be able to construct a Software Requirements Specification official document. This will be a group assignment composed of 4 team members broken down into the following:

1) Lead Programmer – Focuses on the coding section of the project.

2) V & V Supervisor - Main job is to document the project.

3) System Architect - Establishes the basic structure of the system

4) Designer – Explains the foundations of the software development process.

5) System Analyst – Liaison with the customer. Oversees in overall the success of the project. Makes sure the requirements specifications are met. Designs the workflow of the project.

Understanding or estimation of student interest, prior knowledge, or common misconceptions related to the topic; discuss how your lesson can tap into their interest or address misconceptions

This project will motivate students to develop something that is going to be helpful for them, because at the end of the project they will have the option to upload it to the actual market for the public to use. As a software engineer, it’s a great feeling that people use something that you have developed to make their lives easy or happier (if it’s a game app). This project will also help students to enrich their resumes when applying for a new job on the Technology field. Today mobile technology is a very demanding career, since the growth in this area; several companies are looking for mobile developers. With this project, students will have the basic knowledge on how to build a mobile app. If they get highly motivated they can build a very complex application.

Technology and resources that you are going to use

Teacher :

- Use of Edmodo to submit assignments, project deadlines and announcements.

- Videos on my web site related to mobile development on main site for student to reference.

- Course podcast, each class will be recorded as well as any PPT used, this is to help students to reference to the class given at any time and from anywhere.

- RSS. They can subscribe to the Course web site to keep up with announcements and news about the class.

- An online voting poll will be provided at the end of the project to vote for the best project. The winner will earn 5 bonus points.

- I will create an ePortfolio using Adobe acrobat Pro to store each team project.

Students:

- Website. Using Google sites each team will make use of a website to centralize their project.

- Blogs. Using Blogger each team will have a blog to upload each idea that they brainstorm their project.

- Bonus point if teams actually podcast their projects about what programming languages they used, what OS they chose and why.

- iPeer reviews. Using iPeer students have to provide teammates peer reviews each week on the project contribution.

- Bonus point if they use web conference software (video & audio) to communicate with the client.

- Wiki. Student will have to post their feasible report and the SRS on a private wiki. Only members of the team can view and edit the wiki content. They will grant me access to view only their work.

- Bonus point if they share links related to mobile development to their classmates using delicious or diigo.

- MS Lync. This is a tool provided by Microsoft, is another communication and collaboration tool that serves as IM, desktop sharing, video calls, and/or just audio calls with the use of speakers and a mic.

Concrete list of activities in your lesson in chronological order

1. Day 1. Introduction to the project, explain about project. I will explain about the different OS, advantages and disadvantages. I will form teams this day. I will make use of an online survey to give them the option to sort the most desired position to the least desired position.

2. Week 1. Will tell them the formed groups and their roles. Assignment will be given to research and brainstorm about an application to develop. Results will be posted on their blog.

3. Week 2. I will explain what a feasibility report is and leave them with the assignment to one to make sure the proposed project is feasible within the project time frame given. 6 weeks.

4. Week 3. Start implementing the application. Constant communication with the customer to go over the application and provide feedback.

5. Week 4. Testing application

6. Week 5. Submitting application to customer.

7. Week 6. Final presentation of finished product.

Student learning will be assessed on the following criteria:

- Proposed project runs successfully (no bugs) - 50%

- Project complexity. 30 %

- Code optimization. 10 %

- Documentation. 10%

12th Teacher Networking Technology and Content (TNTc) Conference

This was my first time attending a TNT conference and this one was the 12th!!! From now on I am not going to miss any future TNT conference. They are very informative and not matter how technology savvy you are, even if you now a lot or if you have plenty of experience in this field, at the end of the day you leave whit a very good taste and as I said, even if you have a lot of experience on technology you learned a lot. As you know technology is continuously growing at a very fast pace. I could not say that it grows every year, because companies keep releasing amazing technology through the year. I was not familiar with this conference I thought that we were going to be all in one room discussing about new technology and innovations, but that was not the case, you can attend to all of these available sessions from different presenters. It is hard to pick your sessions since they all very attractive. I guess it all depends on the technology you would like to start implementing in your classroom; those are the sessions you would attend.

My first session was the apple company. Apple as you can see is a company that quality is one of their primary requirements. I have not found an apple product were quality was poor. Another reason why I chose the Apple guys was because apple also focuses on the end user, and they always try to make their interfaces as user friendly as possible. On the apple session they showed us different products one of them was Apple TV which one of its many features that I liked the most is that you can wirelessly stream your videos, photos, movies and you can actually mirror your ipad into a TV. They gave us a website where you can schedule to free workshops about their different products. The URL is apple.com/cielovista. You can also register to a 1 to 1 membership where they basically give personal workshops on any apple product you have bought. The membership costs $99 dlls. They also have free field trips and camps, which they are also for free. You have to keep an eye on their website to check when the next available field trip or camp would be. They also handed several iPad for us to play with.

After the apple session I went to the keynote presentation. He talked about many things but one of the things that caught my attentions is that this guy went to china recently and he bought an iPhone where you can actually have 2 SIM cards, which allows you to make calls from two different carriers. This technology is not currently available here at the US. He also used his iPad to show us how easy is to learn how to play guitar or any instrument. He actually played song for us during his presentation with his iPad.

My third session was about edmodo, an amazing web resource for teachers. If I get to be a professor sometime I would defentely use edmodo, it is a very user-friendly web tool that is similar to Facebook. I liked a lot of features on this web tool, one of them is that you can sign in as a Teacher, as student or as a Parent. All of these modes have their own interface, where as a Teacher you have more control. You can have as many classes or “groups” as is called in Edmodo as you want. You can register your students for your different groups; you can also lock your group so no one can register for your class any more. If your students are misbehaving in the comment sections you can actually set their permission to read-only. You can setup quizzes, polls, assignment, notes and you can also have a calendar. You can send notes or comments to an entire class, to their parents only, to a single parent and/or to another professors. I am amazed with this web resource, I highly recommended.

My fourth session was about games in Flash for android and iPhones. I have a high interest in mobile programming. I think a developer or also called programmer must to expand his knowledge base to mobile programming, because now it is not sufficient to only develop an application that would run only on a single computer, you would need to develop that can be globally used and I mean globally as other sources. In other words, your application has to be web based, it would also need to run on mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, android phones, tablets, etc, etc, etc. After attending this session I was able to see that you can develop mobile apps using Adobe Flash. Obviously as more complex you want your application to be you would need to know a lot of coding, but for simple and basic apps you can use this tool with basically no programming knowledge at all. Adobe representatives gave this presentation.

My fifth session was with the same guys from Adobe, and was about how to create an ePortfolio. It’s a very easy task to do, you can create folders and subfolders, you can run slideshows to showcase your pictures. You backup a website and import it into a PDF. You can easily create forms from Word and have it in PDF. One of the features I liked about Adobe is the security and the compression on the PDF files.


My sixth and last session was another web resource, which I was not very pleased with it. It was basically a tool to simulate post-its online, but the web site was not password protected at all, so all of the information is open to the public, the user graphical interface was not user friendly at all, all of the information was spread out trough on single page and was not organized.

One suggestion that I have about this TNT conference is that they should build a committee to approve the proposals, they should not let anyone to just present whatever they wanted, but overall it was a great experience, I would highly recommend that you attend to the next TNT conference. I bet you that you are going to learn something great at the end.

How you can use podcast in your teaching?

I can tell you how you can use podcast technology in teaching because a couple of years ago a setup podcast and vodcast technology for the College of Health Science and School of nursing. For the podcast there are several ways to do it. One way is with a USB voice recorder, there are several brands and with different functionalities, but there are some key features that you might want to consider.

I recommend that your voice recorder have the following features.

· USB connectivity. This is very important as would make easier to transfer the audio files to your computer. If the voice recorder is USB 3.0 even better, because it will transfer the files faster.

· MP3 format. Make sure the voice recorder saves the audio files in MP3 format. MP3 is an audio compress format that will not take too much space in your computer, especially if your class last more than 50 mins.

After class you can easily upload your class podcast to your website, or to your blob using podomatic or archive.org.

For the vodcast I used an application called echo360, is not free but it offers a wide variety of features. Echo360 is a web based application that helps your organize your podcasts. It records your voice and what ever is in your screen. For instance, if you were doing a presentation in MS Power Point, it would save whatever is shown in the screen, plus your voice. I would recommend buying a wireless microphone, that way you can walk across the classroom and it would still record your voice. One of the great features that echo360 offers is that you can just schedule your class online. Let say that you teach MWF from 1:00pm to 2:00 pm. You can program to automatically create the podcast on a semester basis based on those parameters. For instance, you would tell it, save from 1:00 – 2:00 pm MWF from January 8, 2011 to May 10, 2011. It will automatically start recording during that time frame and it will post it for you into a website for your students, it also has the feature that at the end of the class to send an email to all of your students a link to the podcast, and they will be able to listen or download the podcast.

I could tell you so many stories about how podcast technology helps students. For instance, if one of your students missed a class, he or she can always get the podcast from the day missed, he or she will be able to listen to it and catch up with the class. Podcast technology also plays a huge important role on online courses. No matter what grade level, topic you teach podcast is great resource for your students.

Check out their website and watch the video on the home page, so you can get an idea how this works.

http://echo360.com/

Use of Audio Podcast in K-12 and Higher Education

The use of podcast in K-12 and higher education provides another technology resource for the students to support students’ learning. Podcast technology is an additional technology to provide educational content. One of the many advantages of podcast is that it makes use of XML technology, which makes it a file-based downloads instead of streaming from the web. For the end user is way better to download the file to their computer and the listen to it as many times as they want, because once it is downloaded to your system, you will be playing an MP3 in your computer, rather than streaming it from the web which if you have a slow connections will make it difficult to listen to or you would have to wait several minutes to listen to it.

Another great advantage is that Podcasts can be syndicated with RSS . in my own opinion that is one of the most powerful features of podcasts, because it would allow automatic downloads to your system every time there is a new podcast, you would not have to worry about keep checking if there is a new podcast. As soon as you subscribe it’s all problem-free. The other great advantage is that is portable in the sense that you can listen to it whenever in a MP3 enable device.

TechTips Episode # 1 by Jose Munoz

Technology-integration lesson design

Subject: Computer Human Interaction/ Artificial Intelligence.
Grade Level: Computer Science Graduate students
Lesson Topic: Building an iPhone, iPad or android application. Student can choose any area.

Learning goals:
Apply several teaching styles to match a wider range of student learning styles. Student participation, students will be able to provide feedback when group assignments are given, they will be motivated to perform a more professional and ethical work, because I’ll be able to see their feedback using the online peer review. Student collaboration will be targeted with the aid of Web 2.0 technologies.

Technology to use:
We will make use of Web 2.0 technologies. To begin with everything would be integrated into a Course website, all data and any information related to the course will be centralized into a website. I will have students write blogs when research assignments are assigned, that way their classmate can read other student research documents and provide feedback, this will enhance collaboration among students.

The website would contain videos about some topics related to the course for better understanding, some students learn more effectively using audio and visual material. I think if we teach using different learning styles to have a broader impact of student learning effectiveness, since students have different learning styles. Online surveys and polls would be distributed among students to see their learning results. Whit this asset I am going to be able to see who is learning and who is not understating the course material. When we meet I’ll record the class and a podcast would be automatically generated and uploaded to our course website. This is going to be a tremendous help for students to review each class given, they are going to be able to go back to any class session and go over material that was not fully understood by the student, they will be able to review the slides (if any) or/and that class audio.

I will also provide the students with an online peer review system when group assignments are given, that way they will be able to provide feedback on their teammates and them selves. This will enhance student participation on group assignments. RSS technology will be available for students to keep up with the course activities, homework and announcements.


Scenario:
I would have a team of students on UTEP in a online meeting using a video conference software such as Elluminate or ooVoo or any other web conference software, we will use several features on this web conference, obviously students would be able to use a microphone and speakers to talk with some other group of students on another university around the globe. They will use screen-sharing to go over their research results with the other team, both team will have the capabilities to interact with both screens, they will be able to share applications and the entire desktop as well.

How student learning will be assessed.
The conference would be recorded for future reference and for report purposes. Everything will be password protected, and it won’t be available to the public, only team members would be able to access data and web conference recording for future reviews. This is the latest technology available regarding online collaboration. You can give control to the other team to your desktop, or restrict it to only some applications, such as MS word or maybe MS PowerPoint, you can share documents, make edits and more.

Activity types

TPACK

1) I have always seen many teachers teaching strategies and different teaching methods. I can tell you that I learned a lot from the professors that used a variety of strategies, in the other hand professor that always sticks to on single teaching method, it might work for some students but not for all of them, since students they all learn in different ways depending on what their learning style might be. Some of them understand better when teachers use visual aids, or they could understand better if they used audio materials. I say that a good professor is the one that uses a little bit of everything.

What ever our teaching style is, there is technology available to support it. I think I need to improve my CK and my PK, I think I am good with technology since that is my passion since I was 15 years old I have always been on top of technology and fortunate I know what’s out there and how to use it, the best thing I could do is use it to teach!!! There is a lot of potential especially for students when they are taught using technology, for a variety of reasons, first because nowadays all students no matter what grade level they are, they all like technology, so if we as teachers make use of technology to teach our students, we are going to engage them to learn with more enthusiasm.

2) My ideas on my technology-integration lesson design are endless; I see so many ways to teach with technology. Since I am not currently a teacher I would not know what grade level would I like to teach, but no matter what grade level I choose, I know I can use a lot of technology to use. Besides Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, RSS and web services such as Google docs. I would implement video conferences, web meetings, online seminars also known as webinars, a really nice feature on some video conferences that I have experienced is that you can even record the conference, and than it can be posted for future reference or to make it available for other students or users. Fortunately I have the knowledge to build any kind of software, so whenever I see a need I can build a solution for it. I can build custom-software, I recently built an online application that helps college students to track their hours, so they can find out how much time they have “free” for going to the movies, go to parties, etc etc etc… this tool has helped a lot students to manage their time and helps them to succeed in college. We are trying to UTEP brand it, because other universities are interested on this powerful tool.

Feel free to use this tool.
http://science.utep.edu/timemanagement/

Online Learning

Ideas on using wiki in the classroom.

Wiki is a very powerful resource to teach with technology. I would call it the “All in a box” technology. Wiki help not only the students but the teacher as well, because it allows you to have every aspect of your course well structured. Wiki brings a lot of collaboration into the table; your students can use it as a 1-stop shop, where they can share information with their classmates on what they have learned in the course.

Wikis have several advantages over other Web 2.0 technologies, one of them is that is free, very user-friendly, there is no need to download anything in your computer, and all you need to know is how to use MS Word, if you know how to use MS Word than you can easily setup a wiki site for your classroom. Our role as instructors is to engage and get our students motivated. Students love technology, so we can take advantage of that and use technology to teach.

One way of using wiki in the classroom would be to create a project and have a wiki as the main resource to share their ideas. Forming teams and making use of the “Discussion” tab would help you to track who has been collaborating with the project and who has not. Another way of using wiki in your classroom is to list resources and links of websites related to your field, you could assign a group of student to check some websites that they think they are relevant to the course have them write a report on why they choose them and a brief paragraph describing each source.

One way of using wiki in the classroom would be to create a project and have a wiki as the main resource to share their ideas. Forming teams and making use of the “Discussion” tab would help you to track who has been collaborating with the project and who has not. Another way of using wiki in your classroom is to list resources and links of websites related to your field, you could assign a group of student to check some websites that they think they are relevant to the course have them write a report on why they choose them and a brief paragraph describing each source.

Another way to use wiki in the classroom is to use the wiki as a FAQ page. You could even make it a class project and assign them to create an FAQ page related to your subject. Have them explore and answer the questions, because they will be sharing and learning from the same FAQs. You could also use your wiki as a Calendar to post exam dates, quizzes, holidays or any other school event.

Here some other ideas on Using wikis in the classroom.

Educational Blogs - week 3

These are some the blogs I'll be following...

http://huzzah.edublogs.org/

http://www.leekrausonline.com/

http://mrssmoke.onsugar.com/Educational-Blogs-You-Should-Investigating-2787268

Using blogs in your classroom

Weblog or also known as blogging, which is basically a conversation. It’s a human connection. It does not matter how you call it, but it does matter how you make use of it. Blogs are a very powerful tool when we talk about education and student learning, because blogs are very constructivist for learning. The benefits are endless and to begin with, in my opinion one of the most important aspect about weblogs is that the content is on the web or maybe you have now heard about the term “Cloud”, which basically is the same. Content on the web is searchable and accessible to everyone. Blogs in the classrooms connect students with other people around the world through chats or emails. Another benefit of using blogs on the classroom is that students enhance their writing not only with text but with pictures, audio and video, which will make more attractive for other students or experts in the field that can comment on the student’s blogs.

We need to be very careful about introducing Weblogs into our classroom, specially for elementary students, we do not expect elementary students to create blogs, but you can ask them to just find information about a certain topic, that way they start having a feeling about what research is about. Middle school students in the other hand, they might be already experts about topics they really like and all of this is the result of using blogs, but we want definitely to make use of blogs in our classroom on older students, for numerous reasons. Once there is a blog out there, they do not just read it, they analyze it, reflect on it and then they provide feedback, by that point they are already collaborating and sharing ideas with classmates and people outside of their classroom, who might have more expertise.

Blogs brings a lot of collaboration among students, because is not only about writing but also about initializing a conversation, some might agree some might disagree with the blog author, but the most important aspect here is that they are sharing their ideas more effectively. They share their opinion about the topic covered in class or about an assignment, they help each other by providing links to site related to the blog. They do not just write but they actually communicate with their classmates. Blogs will also help the student to become more organized, one of the features I really like about blogging is that it allows you to archive your blogs either by date or by categories, making them easy to access and always available for other users.

Some students tend to be shy in the classroom when is time to participate, blogs eliminates the shy on the students and gives them the opportunity to share and discuss in writing the ideas that in an actual classroom they would not be willing to speak. Blog gives them the opportunity to enhance their research skills as they actually analyze and study the “data” before actually posting.

Google Reader

Google Reader is an amazing tool to keep up to date on latest news. Not just for technology but any site that provides RSS subscriptions, such as the New York Times, Microsoft, BBC News, Weather feeds, among others. Google usually emphasis a lot on the “user-friendly” feature, that is one of their goals, to make it easy for the “standard-user” and I think they have done a pretty good job. Google technologies are very user-friendly and very reliable. That is why Google Reader is one of the most world wide used RSS aggregator out there. If you like blogs this tool definitely will make your life easier.

iGeneration Report

Just by reading the title “Teaching the iGeneration” I immediately knew what they were talking about. The famous “i” means the current generation of digital technologies popular with kids and young people ( the iPhone, iPad, iPod, iTunes and so on).

Now our “phones” or "cellular phones”, they are not just a regular phone, they are actually a mini-computer, where everything is possible, besides to use the phone to make calls, you can now, send SMS text messages, you can read your emails, browse the web, view files, pictures, listen to music, among other features.

I as IT manager need to keep up with all the latest technologies out there, and it amazing how technology grows exponentially. The main point here is not to teach with technology but to use technology to communicate or provide information in a more powerful and efficient way. Once we as instructors get more familiar with technology, we can use quality-time in the classrooms more productively.

The iGeneration is dipped in technology, let’s take the advantage of that hunger to explore technology and use it to bring student’s attention that we can get our students/end-users more involved in learning.

Take a look at the following video, it's call iPhone everything...