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/