Week 5 WizIQ Session Results and Book Reading

Setting up the WizIQ account ( http://www.wiziq.com/classes/ ) by registering and selecting a date within the 30 free-day trial was very easy.  The site offers tutorial and testimonial videos via You Tube.  My session partners Cara and Maureen showed up early, and I could not figure out how to force the session to an earlier start. Need to investigate if there is a way to do this or is it just a limitation of the free-trial version.  The sound and video setup via a small pop-up window was also straightforward and done in a few seconds.

We had no hiccups from the bandwidth, no delays, or disconnects.  There was an echo present for all of us to hear when each of us talked, but we figured it was also convenient in case you did not hear it right the first time! LOL!  The video window was small but picture quality was good.  All of our Power Points got loaded in a timely fashion and we were ready to present in a few minutes after connecting.  I gave moderator privileges to Cara and Maureen and we were able to talk and access the screen controls simultaneously.  This worked well because there were just three of us collaborating online.  (Disclaimer: You would not do this as an instructor in a live online session full of students).  Here is a snapshot of our WizIQ session. Cara and Maureen took one of their presentations after we had them uploaded.

Cara presented first and gave us screen shots of one of her online live class sessions. She uses a licensed application called In Sync?  I enjoyed that she made her students present an activity to the other students in the class, giving them the experience of how to teach others using live video from your location.  She also discussed the perils of live online classes and what you need to do from a support standpoint and remediation when students have technical problems.  Plus we finally got to see the color coordinated and quite fashionable headsets!

Maureen shared with us some of her research using NetLogo's sheep population control application and how she thinks it will help her students.  She investigated MIT and their Open Courseware offerings online.  We had done some research also, and all of us were surprised at the lack of content.  When you dig deeper into some of these open course links, you find course descriptions, or a couple of lectures posted for the subject.  We understand what Dr. Bonk is trying to convey in Chapter 5: MIT in Every Home (Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare), but we also need to consider that these open courses, and their content offerings are at the mercy of the faculty member's personal decisions as to how much, or little, gets posted.

Because I spent some time reading Dr. Chen's Education Nation book for this class...my presentation covered http://www.edutopia.org and how they offer (besides a short video) the supporting information and documentation for these school success stories.  The kind of information that school administrators and educators can study to better understand the effort that took place behind such favorable outcome. Open Culture is a "pop-culture flavored site"( http://www.openculture.com/category/education ) dedicated to offering content online linked to iTunes educational podcasts, and iTunes University.  They have an iPhone application, and a channel of their most popular education-related videos in You Tube.  I got sidetracked after this site with the iTunes (http://www.apple.com/iTunes) podcast content of TeachersTV (videos from the UK, and you can not stop watching these...), and iTunes University's participating institutions.  I was impressed with the OER Commons site ( http://www.oercommons.org/  ) and their OER materials simple search. The PA Department of Education's SAS Portal, hopefully (fingers crossed) will achieve the level of content sharing found in this site.  After looking into the Open Courseware Consortium site ( http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ ), I was a little disappointed with the content offered for Education and Technology.  Maybe Lehigh University can join the OCW Consortium and make some contributions!!

TLT450 Esther Karoleski Blog Post - Late Week 3

Since our Pennsylvania young learners are denied the option of "cyberlearning" unless they are home schooled...Open Source software is something to seriously consider when you have young inquisitive children.  Tux Paint is a favorite among young learners (and old ones) due to its simple and straightforward design. Just added in my research-to-do list: the Scratch Programming (MIT) application that shows young learners logical and procedural thinking.

AbiWord is an alternative for learners that are just starting to read and write. Also for the ones that can get overwhelmed with all the functionality in MS Word.  If young learners write their thoughts using a word processor, readers might pay more attention to the content of their work instead of their penmanship.  I just saw this in action last night as a group of parents approached a bulletin board full of students' notes.  They were commenting on their writing and spelling. Nobody mentioned the fact that their fourth grader was writing about the personal qualities of one of their classmates. A powerful exercise for a group of students that came together two weeks ago, to know and learn from each other. I was excited to see the second grade teacher giving all the parents a book of poems authored by her students, until she mentioned that she typed them on the computer herself. I was looking at two desktop computers sitting right there in the classroom.  Sending her an email with an AbiWord link and talking to her is in the works.

The school being referenced here is a small charter school. Exposing them to the open source applications Dr. Garrigan shared with us in class can deliver some possibilities for the teachers and their students, as they embark on their constructivist learning curriculum.

References:


New Breed Software. Tux Paint [Open Source Drawing Software for Children]. Retrieved from http://www.tuxpaint.org/

Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch [Open Source Programming Animation Software]. Retrieved from http://scratch.mit.edu/

Lachowicz, D. AbiWord [Open Source Word Processing Software]. Retrieved from http://www.abisource.com/

TLT450 Esther Karoleski Blog Post - Week 1 Assignment

My professional background is in Industrial and Systems Engineering.  Current and future interests are to minimize the time spent looking for reliable information online by using semantic web tools.  Specially by integrating teacher content searches with the requirements from educational and testing standards.  Not sure if this falls under Learning Sciences or Engineering.
Course goal is to learn how can technology help instructors and learners increase their virtual memory.  Can storage and recall become more efficient when the learner can also rely on virtual storage and retrieval using only partial information stored in our brains.