Week 6

Based on the reading I think that the best way I can explain to the reader my experience with internet based education. I realize i'm only touching the tip of the iceberg with this but in the fall of 1999 my high school paid for me to take an internet based class through Michigan State University. It was your basic evolution of telecommunication and communication theory class nothing special. The class had no frills other than a classroom discussion and grade program there was very little human interaction. Fast forward to today where we have a full user interface and alot more personal interaction. In the grand scheme of things it is baby steps but it is really amazing to me how far internet based education has come. It is in always changing environment, having taken my last college class in the days of Windows XP I have already fallen behind the times in the use of Windows Vista. As far as teaching goes it will take time for more teachers to be acclimated with intergrating different mediums into their lesson plans, eventually though it will become commonplace. The use of podcasts and video conferencing are becoming more commonplace in class rooms. I know some classes at WMU have started to use video podcasting for lectures so if a student had a question or missed a class they could just watch the video podcast and not have to worry about getting someone elses notes. As you can see from these examples the possibiltiies are infinite it is just going to take more administrators and teachers to put these concentrations so that all students can experience multi media learning.

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Reflection

I think photo sharing could be incorporated into an educational activity by allowing the students to learn from another medium. Words can only express so much to a student. It's hard to explain the Mayan ruins but to show a student pictures is a great way of letting pictures doing the talking. Not only does a picture say a 1,000 words but it also breaks up the monotony of a student hear an instructor lecture.

The main concern with students using images is first of all copyrights law and that the student has no ownernship of those images. Then I think you would have to live in a hole not to realize how many adult websites there are on the internet and how easily students can access them. As a result of that I think any instructor has to take a hard look at an assignment where students must find any type of images.

A great benefit of image services would be reaching a wider variety of students. I know as a high school student myself as much as someone explained something to me it really didn't make sense until I saw a picture or diagram. So for a visual learner it makes learning that much easier.



I personally have never created a lesson plan so this was a little out of place for me. However, the ADDIE process really stuck with me because it can be taken out of this context and use elsewhere. Even taking it into an athletic realm that I work on ADDIE is a great tool. For example lets say the athletic department wanted to create a new regulation making it mandatory for all student athletes to take 16 credits. The first step would be A analyzing and deciding why the need for student athletes to produce more academically was needed. Then there would be a D design on how this new system would work and still allow the student athletes to have practice and travel time. Then D for develops there would need to develop new regulations on how student athletes would choose majors and minors. Then would be I the Implement process and that is when this program would be implemented and how soon it would be implemented. If the process is stopped before the implementation it would produce no results. Finally the last process would be to evaluate after the process has been implemented and that is really the best way to analyze if your process has worked.

Flickr website

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31068366@N04/

Social bookmarking

I think the value in social bookmarking is being able to share a bunch of links in an easy format especially for teachers. If you are trying to explain why thunder and lightning happens you can provide the students with a series of links of different explanations. For a student I think it can show how much research they have done on a project. It could basically works as a works cited page for any sort of project a student has been working on. I think this kind of tool would be great for middle school age students, you could give them a series of links on a topic and they could write a report from it. In that case you wouldn't have to worry about everyone using different sources and could sort of regulate what was being used. I think social bookmarking could be used for any type of situation where you wanted to present people with an array of website on a certain topic.

After reading the trends and issues is what amazing to see how the definition for technology kept evolving. It seems like that practice should only continue as our civilization becomes more advanced. As far as my career goes I would like to be on the cutting edge of technology in the athletic field. I believe that in order to do that you must having a growing knowledge of technology and how it can implemented in everything you do on a daily basis.

Delicious website

My delicious website is http://delicious.com/matt98912

Use of Wiki

I thought that the Wiki is a great tool for certain projects. I think that for collaboration purposes its great because people don't have to be in the same physical location to work on a project. It's very easy to use. The only part I didn't like is that to the outside viewer its not viewable to see how much work each person has done. To the best of the outsiders knowledge one person could have written the entire thing and nobody would know. I think that as a teacher it would be a great tool for students working on a research paper to show their progress and to show how they reached their conclusion. Since Wiki is very interactive its easy to receive feedback from others and immediately act upon that feedback.