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/

How to improve productivity by using technology

As technology manager of a university, I see a lot of professors that do not use technology at all in their classroom. The more advance they go is just communicating with their students through email and they do not use technology not because they do not want to, but because they do not know how to use the technology available. They are not familiar with using technology in the classroom. I spent quite a bit of my time trying to engage faculty to use technology.

Task # 1 To develop online tutorials on how to use technology equipment such as an smartboard, document readers, web conferences. These tutorials can be posted on a web site either in PowerPoint format, as PDF, a video using software such as Camtasia or any other screen capture software.

Task # 2 An “How-to” catalog web page, where they can quickly refer to the most common FAQs with their ansers.

Task #3 Class Capture software and Vodcasts. Teachers can record their classes; they can record video, audio and whatever they use in their classroom PCs to a vodcasts accessible to the student in the class. This technology will not only help teachers but students when they cannot attend class they can always refer any class at any time. I helped the College of Health Science and School of Nursing and it has created a great impact and improved student learning tremendously.

Task #4 Enforce Web 2.0 Technologies in the classroom. It will improve productive, creativity and collaboration among students. Create workshops for faculty on how use and apply Web 2.0 technology in the classroom.

Task #5 Conduct Web seminars to teach technology classes about different topics, such as MS Office products at different levels for beginners, intermediate and advance users.

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%