Assessing Meaningful Learning with Technology

I have to say that the clicker idea is one that hadn't crossed my mind. I see it as having a great deal of promise in a more static classroom where students, due to the material being covered, have to listen to lectures. By having impromptu polls over, say, whether the answer to a math problem is 3.5, 3.2, 4, or 3 radians, you can keep a class engaged with following the teacher and learning the material. For an English class, it could definitely be useful to help people review materials like plot points, character relations, and opinions.

This course has been informative in ways I hadn't anticipated, but also very frustrating because of the time constraint (Opening at 8 AM and closing at 8 PM and weekends) and because the email I sent to the professor after eCollege kept messing up somehow disappeared and I lost an entire week's worth of work. I am really confused as to how that occurred, but I know from experience that contacting the tech department will only yield you with one bit of information: how long and when you were on their system, nothing else. At least now I know the professor wasn't ignoring me, she just must have never gotten any of my communications.

I learned a good portion of new technological tools and a couple of techniques, so, should I have to retake this course, I feel confident I'll be more than ready.

On graphical and visual elements, June 30th, 2011

Obviously, the use of graphical and visual elements in the classroom allows students of the sciences approach, explore, and experiment hypothetically with subject material to small to observe, like the basic atomic structure of elements or the qualities of the solar system. The chapter we read also jogged my own memory of how helpful a graphing calculator helped me with understanding things like exponential increases and a bell curve.

However, I had completely forgotten the extreme importance of a graphical representation in a field like History or English. To both of these, understanding geography, troop movements, the political and cultural boundaries of previous eras, and the type of environment and tools people worked with are instrumental to understanding why events occurred the way they did or why a subject was important to a poet and his nation.

I see the huge volume of information provided by both Safari Montage and United Streaming as great potential resources for teachers looking to reach those students who could benefit from visual elements. As an English teacher, I'm actually really partial to the old School House Rock videos Safari Montage  has available. They're fantastic, entertaining little pieces that outline important concepts from all across the classroom that everyone from children to adults can learn something new from. Not only that, but the way in which the information is presented is highly memorable.

I will definitely be keeping both of these sites in my bookmarks, (hello delicious), for future reference.

copyright law

I haven't learned anything new. Both of my parents are teachers in public school, so I've encountered a lot of these kinds of situations that were outlined in the little page. I hadn't realized you could only use 30 seconds of audio, however.

Etec 424 Post One: Introduction

Hello, I'm David Bush. I'm a Senior-level undergraduate in the English department here at Texas A&M Commerce. I love science fiction, computers, technology, medical research, paintballing, hunting, fishing, and cooking delicious food. I have a huge passion for sharing information, whether it be a movie I love or a poem I've written. One day, I hope to solely be a writer, concentrating on producing science fiction and fantasy novels.

I hope to implement technology only where it is necessary in the classroom. The main responsibility of every teacher is to teach their students the materials pertinent to their subject matter. For most teachers, that isn't directly technology. Now, if there is technology that can assist that, then a teacher should weigh how much it would help versus how much it would distract the students. If it'll help more than it'll hurt, I'll turn my technological know-how to address the problem and get it online and working for the students.

I hope to come across some useful tidbits of technology that I haven't seen before. I'm pretty well-versed in technology, but there is always an ocean of unknown developments to discover that just keeps getting bigger. Of course, I hope to then take that information and apply it to my classroom in the future.