Week 8 blog-Latest Tech Trends

Pick any latest tech trend (ebooks, augmented reality, cloud computing, social networking) and discuss how you feel about it in personal societal use/ educational use as a teacher.  This is your feeling about it.  DOn't go all research on this. :)

Cloud based computing is my favorite.  I am very active with equity and inclusion in my job and life and I find that cloud based computing really is one of those things that helps to level some of the playing field when it comes to technology access.  With Google Apps and Open Office available for free now all a user has to do is gain access to a computer and they are then able to use word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software.  This is great because in the past it was virtually impossible because the software could sometimes be as expensive as a low end computer.

I also love that now we have many options that allow us to save our work to the cloud.  While as a teacher I am working very hard to help my students understand that this should be their first choice for saving, even over the USB drive because when you log in to the cloud and place your data there you are less likely to have the 'cloud' fail to work for you.  In the days when we used floppy disks, they would have formatting problems quite often and then USB drives tended to also get lost or simply left behind somewhere. With the cloud storage such as Dropbox.com or Google Drive you now really have no real excuse for not having your work if you saved it.

eBooks are still not my favorite but I keep trying to stay current with what is happening with them and watching the reactions of the students who are using them to see if they prefer them.  I have heard from both high school students and adults that they prefer the actual physical books where as I think the lower cost of having eBooks certainly makes it an option worth considering.

I have not gotten to the point that I like reading on my iPad vs. a regular book but maybe one day.  As I say, the jury is still out on that one. Another point that I agree with as it related to the eBooks is that it lightens the backpacks and if the books stay so much cheaper, I think as teachers we have to get over our discomfort and promote the new technology to our students who seem to at least not be repulsed by the idea of using eBooks.

Week 7 Blog EDUC 630

Reflect on your own personal use of technology in day to day living . .not education necessarily.  How do you balance the natural demands technology place upon you and your family and the supposed (and realized) benefits they potentially provide?

Oh boy, when I think about my personal use of technology in my day to day living, I tend to be somewhat embarrassed at the number of hours that I actually spend online.  Between school and work and my overall curiosity about what is going on in the world, I am online all the time.  The balance of natural demands of technology and my family is interesting as well.  My son is 23 and lives in Lynchburg, attending Liberty.  He and I almost always only communicate via text and email.  I am not sure where our relationship would be if we did not have technology. I am sure that we would not write to each other…well I guess I actually would have to because that would be the only way for me to get him money, here and there.

My daughter and I text each other quite a bit too even though we live together.  Our schedules are so busy that we don't often have time to keep up with each other so when I need her to know something I will normally send her a text if she is not with me.

I am on Facebook keeping up with friends and the latest information at least 4-5 times a day.  I think most of this is because I have always been a loner and found ways to occupy my time.  This would include writing and reading by myself, with the advancements of technology and having the Internet at my fingertips all the time, I tend to just be online to research various topics all the time.

This is why the online school works for me so well, it allows me to work at my own pace and in my own space.  I am able to log in and get my assignments completed on a pretty consistent basis.  I have to balance my time to make sure that I am working on actual work for class or work rather than being caught up with things that are just interesting to me.  I love to keep up with news and world events and one article leads to another, it's pretty interesting and I am very happy to be involved with technology at a time where the advances are happening so rapidly.

Week 6 Social Networking

Reflect on current social networking technologies and how they might be used for educational purposes.  You can also outline some concerns you have with these technologies.

When I think about the different social networking technologies and how they are being used for educational purposes, I think about our learning management system (LMS) that we use at our school, titled Schoology.  We decided as a school last year that it was time to invest in a program that would allow our entire community to keep up with communication.  Schoology was chosen because it resembles Facebook and as a school we decided that the similarity would ensure that the students would use the program and it has worked. 

Another way that we ensured that students would use Schoology was that the teachers are required to post their daily homework on Schoology.  This means that students who are absent or not paying much attention in class can still have a place that they can access their assignments.  Course syllabii are listed and classroom attendance is kept on Schoology.  Teachers also post the student's grades there.  Each parent is given their own Schoology account that allows them to also have some access to their students progress and assignments.  There are different groups that can be made for communication purposes so if a student is involved in a club and the school newspaper then if they log in to their Schoology account they have one place that all of the information that they need that relates to school is posted right there for them.  Homeroom teachers create groups to keep in touch with students the athletic coaches also form groups in Schoology to remind students of practices and other important events.

The school calendar is posted on Schoology and helps keep our school community in line.  We still have a school website that gives the outside world a look at who we are as a school community but for our internal communications we rely on Schoology.

Once of the drawbacks to Schoology and that we have worked around is that the outside world can not contact our students through this program because it is closed to our school community.  This means that if a college is attempting to contact students that they need a separate email address and there are times that the school would need to communicate with students or faculty and Schoology may not be running so email is the next best thing.  We use Gmail and make sure that each student and faculty member has their own gmail.com account for these purposes when outsiders need to contact us about school business.  The combination of Schoology and Gmail has really worked well and while the students don't all use or check their school email account they do all check in on Schoology.  

Week 5 Synchronous and Asynchronous collaboration

Reflect on your own ability to collaborate in asynchronous and synchronous online environments . .for learning or for professional contexts.


"Synchronous online classes are those that require students and instructors to be online at the same time. Lectures, discussions, and presentations occur at a specific hour. All students must be online at that specific hour in order to participate." (Retrieved from:  http://www.elearners.com/online-education-resources/online-learning/synchronous-vs-asynchronous-classes/)  When I think about collaboration online I think about Google Docs.  When I was introduced to Google Docs, now called Google Drive, it stirred up such excitement within the online educational community because multiple users were able to log into the same document and add comments synchronously.  The Google drive documents allow the users to use the same document while they also are working on only one document rather than every student having their own document.

When I think about synchronous online environments I compare them to regular brick buildings that you have to drive to and be in class together. While you can do synchronous classes online, everyone still must be online at the same time.  Skype and other web conferencing tools allow the students to set up online chat sessions and to speak to each other at the same time from various locations throughout the world.

"Asynchronous classes are just the opposite. Instructors provide materials, lectures, tests, and assignments that can be accessed at any time." (Retrieved from:  http://www.elearners.com/online-education-resources/online-learning/synchronous-vs-asynchronous-classes/)  Asynchronous online environments are like the courses that I'm most familiar with both at Liberty University and University of Phoenix.  These are environments that allow the students to collaborate on projects using things like LiveBinders which allows multiple users to work in the same online environment but when their schedule permits. Blackboard is another tool that can be used for students to keep up with their schoolwork using email and message boards for communicating with each other. Asynchronous collaboration allows the users to leave messages for others and while the students may have to wait on their answers this method of learning can be most helpful to those who would benefit from a more flexible timed learning environment.

Week 4 Educational Web Resources

I love to tell people that I am a 21st Century computer nerd. I love computers and what I can learn using them.  I actually just heard the saddest thing on Friday when I got a text from a fellow tech person who was announcing that due to his recent diagnosis of ALS that he will have to resign his position at his school's technology director.  He also said that the disease has affected his hands so badly that he can not type on his computer and his voice so that the voice recognition software will not work for him either.  I can not imagine losing those two things that I depend on so heavily as a technology specialist and enthusiast.

Now to my resources:  Please reflect on some web-based resources for education . . for living . .  you find useful and why.  Share your secrets here. :)

I have 5 different email accounts.  I have Yahoo! from back in the mid 90's when I first got online, I did let my AOL account go but I kept Yahoo! for my personal email and my Hotmail account for business, when I place orders online and they want an email address I use Hotmail.  Then I got a Gmail account because Google was becoming such a presence and Google Docs was all the buzz in the tech industry, especially in education.  Then last year my job decided to switch to Gmail for it's primary mail service and that means that my work email address is also Gmail.  Last but not least is my Liberty University email account.  I list all of these because I am learning new things with each of these different email accounts. With Yahoo! I belonged to a free Yahoo! Group for my high school reunion that old classmates and I actually used to stay connected for over 10 years.  It is only recently that we all got too busy and have moved on to bigger and better placed on the web and away from each other.  We are the class of '81 so none of this technology was even around when we were in high school.

I also use my email accounts to subscribe to different ListSERV groups so that I can stay current with the latest developments in the Educational Technology field.  Every morning I get new email from Paper.li which publishes "The Arthur Preston Daily", Burlington High School's principal writes a blog, Diigo in Education and Educational Technology Guy who write about things that they have discovered that would be of interest to me in my classroom.   I subscribe Teacher Tip's Newsletter, k12appstech which is a Google Group that Google users can ask questions.

I am a Twitter user as I said before and I use it mostly for professional development. I also signed up for Facebook to keep up with students who I worked with during their years at our school and over the past few years I have used it more to follow others in my line of work or who I meet at conferences, etc. all in the interest of keeping up with what is going on with those who are as passionate about technology as I am.  I don't follow many of the Apple sites surprisingly but that is because although I use many Apple products, I am not really a fan of their cult like mentality.  I love to learn however and am so happy that I have the Internet at my disposal because I am able to find my answers without disturbing people close to me with my question.  The Internet is available 24 hours a day and it is never a bad time to ask whatever question you have.

Although I am working on my Master's at Liberty I find that I do at least twice as much research on my own because I have the web-based tools to do the research with in the privacy of my home or on my own learning device.

Week 3 Presentation Styles

How do you personally view your learning and the use of "presentations" - what works for you as a learner?

A few years ago I ran across a website http://www.learning-styles-online.com/overview/ that helped me discover the type of learner that I am.  I was doing some research for a class and when I discovered this website it really helped me to understand how I like to learn.  I am definitely a person who can be taught things through showing rather than simply giving me verbal instructions. I was not very good at word problems in math class but I could follow a recipe whether it was for sugar cookies or lemon meringue pie.  I did not have problems, I remember in the early 80's I had an old car that my mother gave to me and I had to learn to change my own oil and spark plugs.  My uncle bought me the book Car Repairs for Dummies and I followed along with the pictures in the book with no problem for me it was as easy as any recipe that I had tried.

From the learning styles that are listed on the site, I can say that I am a visual learner who enjoys using my hands to build things and to discover how things work.  I am a very logical person who definitely prefers to work alone or use self-study  to learn.

The Seven Learning Styles

• Visual (spatial):You prefer using pictures, images, and spatial understanding.
• Aural (auditory-musical): You prefer using sound and music.
• Verbal (linguistic): You prefer using words, both in speech and writing.
• Physical (kinesthetic): You prefer using your body, hands and sense of touch.
• Logical (mathematical): You prefer using logic, reasoning and systems.
• Social (interpersonal): You prefer to learn in groups or with other people.
• Solitary (intrapersonal): You prefer to work alone and use self-study.

Fast forward a couple of decades and I am loving technology and what I can do with it.  I like to use videos such as those found on TED Talks, I have used Netflix to find documentary films that I feel will help my students understand different concepts that I am teaching. Often when I am teaching about the history of computers they have never even seen an adding machine or typewriter for that matter so having a presentation, whether it is created in Powerpoint or Keynote it does not matter.  What matters is that the content is clear. Because our students have electronic devices in their hands it is pretty easy to send them to a website to view the images of things that I feel they can not relate to because they have never been exposed to it in their short lives.  My goal in my classes is the help my students think about technology everyday in their everyday lives and to come back into our classroom and show me what they have encountered.  I teach them how to use presentation software by creating a presentation myself that incorporates the various components of the topic into visual and audible content. 

I like to use props also in my classes so that the students that the ability to touch any of the hardware that we are discussing in class.  Hands on learning and electronic presentations via either Powerpoint, Keynote or even HTML websites work best for my personal style of learning.

Week 2 Blog Post

Reflect on your own participation in online communities (where do you go? what do you do? what does your family do?

As I think about my participation in online communities and where I go online, I know that I have a varied collection of communities that I belong to. I participate in Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and even have tried my hand at online dating with Match.com, eHarmony and Black People Meet.com. I am very comfortable meeting people online and while I don't use Linkedin very often, I am a member of the community. I have used Yahoo! Groups to connect with old high school friends and maintained that relationship online for over 10 years until we all sort of grew in different directions and stopped having the time to checkin online. I use Liberty's online community for my classes and at school I am a part of Schoology's online community that connects our students and faculty with parents to share lessons and grades as well as school related social communication.

My son friended me on Facebook but we are not really in the same online circles since he is 23 years old an my daughter deactivates her Facebook page during the school year.