Thing 16 - Teach Digital

I was very interested in what the college students were saying. I was hearing them worry about their education and wondering if they were getting the right education for their future. I remember thinking the same thing when I got my MA in special education. Am I learning the newest, best practices for teaching special needs children. The songs the same the words are different that's all. What I also heard the kids saying is that there is more than one right way to do an assignment and that the professors were not willing to allow the students to deviate in any way from the peramiters the prof had set. I wonder why? Is it fear? If the student can meet the crideria of the assignment through technology why not? I know as a special ed teacher than technology can and does make a huge difference in how the child does the assignment. Why would that change as my student hits college age?

I loved the sarcasm coming out of the teacher's mouths in The Teacher Movie. Being a bit of a sarcastic person myself I could laugh at the silliness of the whole thing. Sadly in many instances it is true. I do hear teachers complain in the teachers lounge, I do hear an occasional teacher say what do I care I have one year and I'm out....but I think that is true in any profession.

Do Schools Kill Creativity - wow I needed to listen to several parts of this talk over again. I do think we kill creativity in school every day. I think part of the reason I teach special ed is because I view learning differently than other teachers (?) I don't know if that's true but I think about my kids and how they learn best and apply that to their daily learning by any means I can use to get them to learn. The traditional curriculium does not work with my population. Sir Ken Robinson said that intelligence is diverse and dynamic. I agree. The statement he made "We have to rethink the fundemental principals of how we're educating our children" was right on. I just also read an interesting article in a magazine that was talking about A & P grocery stores. It said that the owners kept on running the business the way they had always ran the business even though what made them a success was the way they marketed groceries during the Great Depression. After WWII consumers demanded more variety, bigger stores etc., but A & P wouldn't change because it they wouldn't change what had always worked for them before. So one of the biggest grocery chains in the US became eventually nonexistant because they wouldn't change. I thought, gee, isn't that what we're doing in education in many respects? We need to change what we're doing and teach to a future that we know nothing about. A huge challenge for educators and since we're not encouraging enough creativity in learning (according to Robinson) then who in our future will be creative enough to design a new system?

I constantly think about technology and today's students. I have no answers but I have a lot of questions. Technology is here to stay. Some of it I like, some of it I wonder about. I see my grandchildren and other children walking around with their game boys or hear them talking about all the time they spend on their Wii's and I wonder what is happening to their brains. My grandkids like to spend hours on their Wii, as do their friends. I don't think this is a good thing. I wonder about their brains and how they are being rewired for a new faster way of thinking. Is this good or bad? I do not like how they do NOT spend quality time reading and ask my self will reading just for pleasure become obsolete?

On the other hand, I teach special education. I had a student in my class who needed technology to communicate with anyone. Thank goodness we have the technology to help him express his every thought. Imagine being very young and having to live without being able to communicate your wants and desires. He uses a Dynavox http://www.dynavoxtech.com/ and when looking for his exact system on their web site I see it has already been replaced by new technology. I wonder how often his will need to be replaced or updated. They're quite expensive for the small device that they are. Or I should say his first one was quite expensive. I understand around $10,000. I'm hoping that they have come down in price similar to how computers have.

We recently (as in this week) have had smart boards installed into 5 classrooms in our school. Already one of the regular ed teachers has reported that one of my students seems to have a much easier time viewing the smart board as opposed to the white board. I think that the smart boards will be great if we get the training we need to use them proficiently.

Thing 15 - How to Use Podcasts In School

As I said in thing 14 we have Discovery Education Streaming in our district. I did not use it much and I've heard that other teachers did not use it much either. We were encouraged to use it by our tech people but I'm thinking not many did. I know, for myself, I didn't because something always went wrong when I tried to use it. Either I could not find anything on the subject I wanted...at the grade level I wanted, or it would not download onto my computer or my computer would freeze. It was often frustrating.

I also think time is a factor. It seemed like I'd search forever and not find anything that I wanted. I did not know how to search for podcasts and did not realize there were places like podcast alley to make searching easier. I will need to make a collection of podcasts for the future.

I did like the podcast that Fran has posted on her blog http://comeoninthewatersfine-fran.blogspot.com/ from storynory.com http://storynory.com/2006/05/06/the-gingerbread-man/. I know that my students will very much like to listen to those stories because they love books on tape/cd. I guess they're becoming obsolete. I don't know how much my students will like listening without having a book to look at while listening.

Thing 14 - Learning About Podcasts

I was already familiar with podcasting because our school subscribes to Discovery Education Streaming. It can be found @ http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/index.cfm?z=E0313407-BCD3-F4DA-3BE082E802B78827 . Discovery Education streaming is a digital video-on-demand and online teaching service to help improve students' retention and test scores; it is aligned to U.S. state and provincial standards. I have used several of their video's in my classroom. They have about anything that you could want. I also have used their vidoe's during indoor recess because they have picture books on line and several children in my class would prefer to hear the book instead of free choice.

I also listened to an LD Podcast I found on PodcastAlley. It is a podcast for parents by parents of kids with learning disabilities. They talk about subjects ranging from reading, ADHD, dyslexia, labelling, the laws that govern special education, dealing with parental stress and more. I liked this site because I am always having parents ask me for info or where can they look for others who are having similar difficulties with their children and now I can send them here. http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=29826

I really enjoyed the Vocab Minute from the Princeton Review. I sent that link on to my niece since she will be taking the ACTs later this year and may need to brush up on her vocabulary. I know my kids learn subjects more easily when I put it to song. I once taught a child his phone number to the Spartan Fight Song! It's perfect for phone numbers. At parent teacher conferences I discovered that the parents were Michigan fans.

Thing 13 - Sharing Your Vision

I decided to try Zoho Show. It was quite easy to build a slide show. I liked that you could choose a variety of backgrounds, fonts and sizes. All were easy to select. What frustrated me was the inability to post a picture in my show. It was also frustrating to find that Clip Art selections were very limited.

Since I couldn't insert a picture, I visited the help button. It was not much help. The explanation was rather vague I thought. At any rate I did everything it asked and the download failed, time and time again. So I'm guessing I didn't do it right.....

I did make a slide show stating my frustrations with Zoho Shoe here :
http://show.zoho.com/View.do?P_ID=293474000000005001&P_STIME=0&TP=true&displayall=true&THEME=eighty_greens&USER=pndmcintyre&DOC=Thing%2013
It's not pretty but it's mine.

Thing 12 Productivity Anywhere You Have a Browser

I checked out 30 Boxes It's your life. http://30boxes.com/welcome.php I liked this online calendar. It was very easy to use. It threw me a bit when I diligently typed in all my families birthdays and then scrolled back to August 1st and nothing was there. It does not back date. If you've already lived that date it will next appear in August of 2009. I did have a little difficulty deleating an item. Some of the things did deleat and one did not. I will have to play around with it a bit and see what I'm doing wrong. It only has 3 choices of background colors...not a lot in my opinion and none of them green...so that was a dissapointment.

You can share your calendar with family or friends which I really liked. I could make a birthday calendar and send it out to my father-in-law so he will be able to send out cards to the family on time. I might do with with all my family. We could update the birthday years that we don't all have as well as other important family events such as anniversaries or holiday parties.

I thought it would be great to put all of the school activities on the calendar so no matter where you are you can access the calendar and see when you need to be where. This would be especially helpful with all the IEP's I need to do during the school year. The calendar will automatically email you one day in advance of the event so that you are always in the know.

Thing 11 Zoho

Well, I did manage to post from Zoho to my Blog. However, I do not see how to edit my misspelled words. Also I notide that my little comment boxes are not appearing. I also do not like the looks of my post. I think I'd have to practice with it a bit to get it to look better than it currently does to meet my perfectionist ways.

Do I think that Zoho will replace MS Office someday? Well, yes, I do think it's possible. As fast as technology changes nothing is impossible. I do think that some people will just stick with that with which they are familiar and not branch out into new applications. I think that it will be the younger generation who will make the switch and the older generation dragging their feet along afterwards if they are forced to.

playing with zoho

Playing around with Zoho Writer_{subscript probalby shouldn't go here right?}

The first thing I notice about Zoho is that the fonts are not in alphabetical order. So what order are they in? Is it most popular or what? I like using comic sans but it falls under small font....so I'm guessing it won't let me type comic sans in font larger than 10 pt because every time I try it swithces to veranda.

It is very easy to highlight. I like that. However after you highlight, how do you turn it off? I'm not having any luck yet turning it off. I like that I can add this comment box. That was pretty neat.

Well I'm not sure if this actually turned off the highlighter or just changed the background color to white. And quite possibly I didn't actually highlight correctly. I used the style scroll down key to hit highlight. To get this white background I clicked on the actual highlight key and changed the background color to white. It did what I wanted it to do so I'm wondering if it actually matters?

It looks like increasing or decreasing the indent is pretty easy to do. I don't think it's particularly easy with Microsoft Word.

I always wonder why this feature is here? I've never had a reason to use it. Perhaps when you're doing a rough draft? Oh yes I see you can highlight and activate this feature...pretty cool.

While I haven't spent a lot of time here on Zoho, I think I do like it.