Blog #5

Hi every one
By using multi-media/ powerpoint in the classrooms I think teaching would be perhaps more efficient. When you use powepoint you are delivering your information in more that one way. You may have text along with pictures to help your students understand what you are trying to cover. Also, they are listening to what you are saying to them. This benefits both the student and the teacher. It benefits the teacher because it saves time from writing on the board pictures, notes and other important information for their students to copy. If the students don’t understand information it gives the teacher a change to explain by pulling up information that has been saved to use as more examples. Also It is much more organized for a teacher to have a powerpoint because it helps you stay on track and you make sure you cover all the important information you wanted to share with the students.
For a student it may be interesting and useful. Through a powerpoint lecture the student has the opportunity to learn the material in different ways either by reading the text looking at the visuals or listening to the teacher. As a student it helps them stay on task as far as what the teacher is talking about. It would be great for the students who do have access to a computer to copy the slides and add information on to them as the teacher speaks. On the other hand it may be a frustrating situation for students who do not have access to a computer, lead alone the Internet. They won’t have the advantage to get ahead or review the information that was discussed in earlier lectures. For the most part I think it would help out a lot to have multi-media and powepoint in class.

I noticed from the reading that some of the skills demonstrated were similar to the skills demonstrated from other competent category, especially the question cues. I think it’s interesting to see that most of the questions that are given to students are questions categorized as “knowledge” which is considered to be in the lowest level according to Blooms Taxonomy. Perhaps that is the reason why student tend to forget information. Many of they topics they learn in class is tested through their knowledge as appose to their comprehension or evaluation. If students were asked to analyse or demonstrate they would be pushed a little more to understand the material as appose to memorizing it until they have a test.

Blog #3

Hi class, I hope everything is going well for every one.
The article, Oh the Changes We’ve Seen, made me think back about the first time I used a computer and how the use of them is changing in schools. On page four it talks about the computer programs that were available for student to work on as a group such as The Factory and Where in the World Is Carmen Electra, I remember going to the computer labs in Elementary and playing games. Now I see children at elementary schools typing and doing more work than I did at that age.

This week I learned helpful ways to search for information. Before this assignment, I would usually go directly to Google and just type in what I was looking for. Now that I realize there was a lot of time wasted looking though the sites found which in most cases did not help me. The four NETS for better searching was a great exercise that helped me figure out how I can go about looking for what I really need. I though it was interesting to see the difference in the amount of results I would get when I would type in a word in the “with all” category and then minimize the search by adding another word to the “with out” category. The net that I thought was really interesting was the Trim Back the URL. I never really thought of doing that before this week’s assignment. It has happened to me that I get the wrong URL but I never knew that I could trim back that same wrong URL to obtain information that could guide me to what I am looking for.

Blog #1

When I worked as an aide in a second grade class I was impressed to see how much the students were able to do on a computer. One way in which I have seen technology make a difference in learning, is that students get an opportunity to play on computers and learn at the same time. I thought this was interesting because as the child completes an activity on the computer they get to move up to the next level. I’m not sure what these programs are called but I have seen them work on recognizing letters, colors, numbers and even shapes. This helps the teacher because at the same time as they were becoming familiar with a computer, they had their head phones on to hear specific instructions that guided them through the activity.
This week I got the overview of what I was going to learn through out the semester, which made it seem a little intimidating. Something significant I learned this week was that there are so many things I have to learn about computers. Also as difficult as I think it may be I can get the help needed in order to complete my assignments. I learned that technology could make my job a lot easier for me and that if used correctly it could be very efficient for both the students and teacher. I realize that as of this class I will be using the computer a lot more than I have ever used it before.