1. Tablet computers are very popular, but are they classroom ready?

Vineet Madan, Vice President of McGraw-Hill Higher Education eLabs, argues in this Mashable article, that tablets are ready for the classroom.
While the article focuses on higher learning institutions, the examples would work just as well in K-12 classrooms.

http://mostateteachers.typepad.com/missouri_state_teachers_a/2011/05/6-reasons-tablets-are-ready-for-the-classroom.html

2. What do you do with a Digital Pen?

This technology can be used by students with disabilities for note taking, writing, reading, mathematics,
and virtually any content area. Using the pen for augmentative communication, as well as in-class assessment
is discussed. Teachers can use a recording digital pen to create a “pencast” of a lecture. The
pencast could then be available for repeated viewings by students who require repetition for learning
or those not available when the content was covered. The chapter concludes that the recording digital
pen’s applications and usage will expand as knowledge of the device increases.

link to PDF document

Visual aid in Education

I am the person who in a classroom will use a lot of media to teach, I will go from pictures, PPTs, videos, animations, you name it. I think that the human being understand better through images and retains most of the information when is presented visually. A perfect example would be a movie, how many of us we are like, have you seen this movie? Do you remember when “this” happened? And we start remembering the entire movie, and that’s because we have stored those images and video sequences in our head.  For instance, I bet that those who have read Harry Potter movies would remember more by watching the movie that actually readings from the book.  I am not currently a teacher but as student I can say that I learn  more from visual materials. 

  We can make use of visualization tools to help our students to understand better a certain concept. 

Another important aspect of visualization with these technologies is collaboration. With the use of Web Video conferencing we achieve another level of student sharing and collaboration.  As IT manager on a university I have experience even in Math classes how visualization technologies aids student learning. With the use of smart-pens, or digital boards such as Smart Boards, and sketch/drawing tools, student and teachers can draw mathematical equations and explain the process in writing but “digitally” where this can be later uploaded to a shared space for the teacher to evaluate or simply it can be posted for sharing an example on how to solve a math problem with the rest of the class. 

I love mobile technology and I can see a great trend with this technology in Higher Education, students now use their tablets or iPads to go over assignments, do research and even communicate with other in webinars or other video mobile conferencing tools available for these tablets.

PowerPoint news and alerts

1. Best Presentation tips. This web site will aid you while creating your presentation. these are simple but very helpful tips.

• http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/slides.html

2. PresenterMedia will provide you with resources to enhanced your PowerPoint presentations, you get animations, templates and clip-art for your presentations. All you need to create stunning PowerPoint presentations. Download PowerPoint templates, animated clipart, presentation graphics, and HD video backgrounds. Experience the future of PowerPoint with our New Animated Templates for PowerPoint.

• http://www.presentermedia.com/

Take a few moments to go over these sites; I’m pretty sure you will find something useful out of these sites.

Blogs and Alerts

MS Share Point is a very powerfull collaboration application. You can give it the use you want. For educational purpose I think it can help a lot on the document sharing for this case. I found this very useful tutorial that might come handy.

http://www.sharepointhosting.com/video_tutorials.html

I think everyone have heard about Google Docs, but maybe not all of us have had the time to play around with it. Please feel free to read and view the tutorials in the following website, after going through this you will be able to understand better how Google Docs works.

http://sites.google.com/site/gdocswebquest/

Characteristics of Meaningful Learning

Unfortunately is sad but it is true that School systems now are more test-oriented in order to avoid loss of funding, but the more affected here are the students, because they make a little attempt to understand what they are being tested on. They basically learn how to pass the exams instead of actually understanding the knowledge behind it. As described in chapter 1, tests are individual tasks and they force the students to not collaborate with each other to develop conceptual learning.

One of the characteristics I chose is intentional, because everything we do in life is for a purpose or a goal, everything is goal-oriented. There is technology available almost for everything, but the one I think that supports intentional learning is Google Docs. I am currently developing How-To’s documents to provide to faculty and staff on how to complete certain tasks. Such as how to map a network drive, how to use effectevly Microsoft products such as the Office suite.  I meet with faculty and staff at least once a month. The purpose here is to raise the level of understanding on how to make their work much more efficient and raise their productivity by at least 50%. I use goggle docs, to share different documents where they can easily download them at any time anywhere.  I allow them to provide feedback on how to improve the document for future learners.  The use of Google docs facilitates the ability for the user to have the documents handy all the time.

My second characteristic is Cooperative learning. This is for me on the most important characteristics, because I personally think that collaboration is another way to represent and understand knowledge.  Students do not always understand the same way as the others; cooperative learning will represent what other knows in multiple ways.  In my personal experience, MS Share Point is a technology that definitely supports Cooperative learning, MS share point is a web-based application that is mainly use for collaboration in different areas in the work area or in education as well. One of the neat features I like about share point is the famous Work flow.  This feature allows the user to upload any kind of document to a server and then you need to specify the user that needs your approval or feedback. You get an email confirmation every time a user has either approved, reject or provided feedback to your document, this is process is done for all the users that you specify.  The workflow will complete until all the users have provided the feedback requested. This can be very useful in a classroom environment where you can upload an article and you want feedback from everyone in the classroom the work flow process will not complete until everyone in the classroom provide their feedback.

Week 2 - Blog News alerts

Hi,

I would like to share the following URL, I think this is a very important tool for beginner Teachers or people who would like to get a feeling of how a classroom works, this is an online simulation where you can set how many students you want in your classroom, the coolest thing here is that you can actually set each student personality and performance. It can get as complex as you want.

• http://www.simschool.org/

The second link would be TED Talks, this is a very informative website where you can see video talks of different subjects from people who give conferences around the globe. They have from technology, to science and all kind of subject you can imagine, but technology speaking they have several good ones. Please feel free to take a look.

• http://www.ted.com/