CED 535 - Week 2

This week we needed to explore twitter, photo sharing, and continue to read about wikis and blogs. The purpose of today's blog is to discuss how we can utilize these resources in the classroom.

Twitter - I have had an account for twitter for over a year. I am excited to actually take the time to utilize it. I originally thought of it as just another way of sharing personal information and I disregarded it because I am not that interested in things like that. Since then, I have been taking technology courses and I have been talking to other teachers within my school. I have realized how useful it can be for professional development. It is a great way to find out what resources are out there and how technology is being used in the classroom. This has given me a purpose to use twitter. I could also use twitter to communicate with my students and parents about class events.

Flickr - I have also had a flickr account for years, but again I have never taken the time to really utilize it. It is a great way to store, organize, and share your personal photos. I am actually planning on utilizing it with our girls basketball program this year. I am hoping to have parents upload photos of their daughters to the site. It is a great way to share and discuss all the great things that these girls do. I can also envision using this within my classroom. I think it would be cool to have students take pictures or videos of labs and post them to our class' group. The students could then post comments about what they learned. I think they will enjoy it more than doing a lab write up.

Blogs and wikis - I had the same sentiment about blogs as I did about twitter. I can now see the advantages of utilizing these resources for professional development. I am also interested in utilizing these resources within my classroom. I hope to have the students create posts about a variety of topics that relate to our course. I want them to post lab write ups, questions/concerns, and updates about what they have learned. Since their work will be shared with others, they are more motivated and the quality of work is higher. It is a great way of obtaining authentic and quality insight about the student's content knowledge, thoughts, and needs. It is an awesome way to collaborate and grow as a class.

smgirlsbasketball

Here is a google site that I put together for our south milwaukee girls basketball team.

smgirlsbasketball

It was nice to use things we learned such as google sites, google forms, and flickr to make a practical and useful webpage. Hopefully others will find it useful as well

Week 1 of CED 535

This was our first week of CED 535 - Facilitating Collaboration through Web 2.0 tools. This week we have to read the first 3 chapters of Blogs, wikis and podcasts. We also need to research bloging websites such as: edmodo, ThinkQuest, 21Classes , Blogger, Wordpress, EduBlogs, CoveritLive, ePals, Blogcheese, Global Teacher / Student, MySpace, Xanga, Friendster , and Posterous.

I have had some experiences with these bloging websites. I have used edmodo, blogger, and posterous. Last year I used edmodo for my classes. It was a really great way to share resources with my students and provide a place for the students to collaborate. I have used, and obviously am using, blogger. I used posterous in a different class and I really liked its ease of use. You simply send an email to posterous and it changes it into a post on your blog. Like all the other blogging resources, it is a great way to share and collaborate. This year I really hope to have my students start blogging about their classroom experiences, specifically labs, and what they learned. It is a great way to reflect about their experiences and allows students to make connections to the material.

This year, I am utilizing moodle. It is far more advanced, and subsequently more complicated to set up and use. Moodle is a Learning Management System (LMS) that allows teachers and students to share resource and take assessments. I am really excited to develop my courses and utilize this to it full potential. It is a great way for students to receive extra help, assess their knowledge/abilities, and share and collaborate.

Week 5 of CED 540

This is our last week of assignments for CED 540. This week we needed to utilize google trends to address a topic, issue or problem. We also needed to examine 5 different websites and the data that they provide. Our last assignment was to compare the data from two of the perviously mentioned websites.

The google trends assignment seems like it will be an interesting task. Google trends allows users to see how often a topic has been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. This is a pretty interesting way to get comparative data.

The five websites that we needed to examine data from were: http://www.archives.gov/genealogy/census/research.html
http://www.cdc.gov/datastatistics/?s_cid=cdc_features_001
http://wonder.cdc.gov/data2010/
http://nces.ed.gov
http://dpi.wi.gov/sig/index.html
This allowed us to look at a variety of sources of information and possibilities to obtain data and use statistics.

Our last assignment was to compare the data from two of the previously mentioned sites. It was interesting to look at the differences that could be discovered between two different sources.

Week 4 of CED 540

After a couple of weeks off, I realized that I was a little rusty. I must have let my mind slip deep into summer mode. We had to complete another guided practice worksheet, determine a possible job that might be created in the future, and complete the analysis of our survey.

My group struggled with the guided practice worksheet this week. We were having trouble utilizing the z-score in order to determine specific percentages of a population (not sure if I am accurately describing our issue). We hope to get clarification during tomorrow's class.

Our group did come up with a possible job that might exist in the future. After a little research, we liked the idea of a teleportation specialist. This person would be responsible for installing and maintaing teleportation devices for items and people. This would change the way that we travel and deliver goods. Kind of a crazy idea.

Lastly, our group analyzed the results of our summer barbecue survey. After obtaining responses, calculating the mean, median, mode, range, and standard deviation, we determined that a summer barbecue should be held in a backyard and serve burgers and water. This was a fun project because it brought me back to my science roots and helped me prepare to head back to school this fall. I enjoyed analyzing the data and writing up a complete report.

CED 540 - Week 3

This week we got our usual guided practice worksheet along with a larger survey assignment.

The guided practice worksheet revisited the concepts of mean, standard deviation, and range. I believe the goal of the assignment was to illustrate that we need to look at the range and standard deviation of a sample in order to truly understand the information that we are trying to analyze. This is an important concept and I will try to keep this in mind when I am evaluating student data or when I am having students evaluate any data that they collect.

We also had a group survey assignment. We needed to create a survey, collect data, analyze it, and present our results. This week my group came up with a topic and created the survey. We decided to keep the topic and our questions simple so that it would not be a burden for others to participate. We chose to collect data about a summer picnic. I currently shared it through facebook and I believe my group members are doing the same. We will collect data over the next couple of weeks. Afterwards, we will analyze it and create a visual representation of our data for our presentation. This is an interesting assignment because it gives us creative freedom and allows us to use the skills that we are learning about in this class. I embeded our survey below. Feel free to add your input.

CED 540 - Week 2

This week we completed another guided practice worksheet. The worksheet looked into mean, median, mode, standard deviation, range, and skew. We looked at data and interpreted the results and we also did our own calculations. This was a little hard at first but eventually I got the hang of it. I can see how these calculations will be beneficial when using student data. I can use these to truly identify how my classes are performing based on their assessments.

We also had to look at survey tools. We looked at Captera which is a survey software site that helps users determine the type of survey they need and the software needed to create a survey. This would be very beneficial for collecting data and it saves a lot of research and time.

We also looked at some survey creation software, such as surveymonkey and zoomerang. I don't have any direct experience creating surveys with this software, but my school district has used zoomerang to collect data. It was an easy way to provide my opinion on the topic. I have used other survey tools like polleverywhere and the smart response system. I am interested in seeing how all of these will compare.