Making up a class

In order to make up a class that I missed way back in September when my husband was on his R&R from Iraq, I'm writing this post. I reviewed the Elive session and these were the points of interest that hit me.

1. The passing thing was a silly way to get the class to share their week. It took 20 minutes of class time to do simple introductions and explain the rules. I don't know if it was worth it.

2. It was fun to see the images that people found to represent themselves. It is also interesting in twenty-twenty hindsight that you built on this activity later with grouping.

3. Learning about Elive text tools was something I already knew how to do from experimentation with other classes (my professors ended up with a curious student who just randomly played with buttons on accident :) ) I didn't know, however, about active links in the paragraph box verses the inactive link in the single line box.

4. It never fails to strike me just how broad a subject Digital Citizenship is. Even after this whole semester of contemplating the idea and talking about it, the subject is quite difficult to wrestle with! My Literacy and Language class had a debate over the role of technology in the classroom and these very same topics came up! I put in my two cents about NETS-T, of course, so that other educators could see that there really were guidelines, but technology changes everyday. We need to have a board policy to handle that change.

5. I thought the discussion regarding 'Comment wars' (saying things nicely) was kind of funny. I have been amazed at how chat boxes in Elive sessions have turned into comment war zones! I have left classes this semester really passionate about a topic and gone to Facebook to continue the argument before! We need to learn how to take those comment wars and make them into genuine discussions.

6. NCATE moment: fairness. This moment was rather odd. I grew up thinking that 'life ain't fair' to quote my mother. I suppose that one needs to strive to be fair in the professional world, but everyday I make a decision to cut someone short just a little bit of fair. I can't help it. I wonder why the examiners in UAA are looking for fairness if that is next to impossible?

Avatar Images

Something of interest came from the EduBlogger that I would like to note here: Avatar images! Because you don't necessarily want your students posting pictures of themselves online and with their public blogs, you can go to the sites that the EduBlogger lists and draw your own cartoon character or Avatar image. This can depict the student in place of their face or a piece of their personal life you would rather they not share until they are fully ready to become a responsible digital citizen. I put together one of my own, but I was required to sign up with the website and provide information I would rather just not fill out. So, my Avatar image remains unseen. But, this would be a great idea for students of all ages.

Distance Education and the Bush Alaska Scenario

Damon Hargraves of the Bering Straight School District came and spoke in our Ed Tech class last month on technology in the Bush of Alaska. What I discovered was disquieting and also very intriguing. First of all, as many of my classmates have noted, there is a lot of money for Bush schools that allows for them to purchase the equipment and technology necessary for their students' education plus more than the minimum! Urban schools don't have that type of funding (or at least we don't see it used for such things). The second thing I noted was that this sort of technology could not only link outlying villages, but it could also link the home schooled community to teachers and networks unlike anything ever seen! What the possibilities for open wiki pages and public pages and sites are beyond fathoming. I would really enjoy learning more about this technology so that 1) I can tap into the funding machine that sponsors these ventures, and 2) So that I can reach new students in fresh and exciting ways around the nation and even around the globe!

Picture of the Week

Woe to the Babysitter!

Down for a week

So, the Blackboard site went down with a bang this week. All of my classes were cancelled and virtually no emails could get back and forth from faculty to students. While it was a nice week to get homework done (the stuff that didn't require a blackboard page) and get caught up on classes, it makes me wonder just how much stalk we put into a single server. Whatever would we do if the power went out for more than a week? Whatever would we do if the internet was hacked and all sites sent bugs to our computers? This was just a small outage that required a small percentage of very perseverant IT souls to work around the clock. They managed to fix the problem in less than a week. But, a whole school week was totally cut off for several classes. No homework was turned in and no classes could be held via online Elive sessions.

I propose that we have a back up system that we can go to. It doesn't have to be perfect, just an older system kept in the online vaults for outages such as these. What do you think? Could it be possible?

Board on Money

I didn't have much success looking through the blogs I'm following for any new educational tidbits, but I did attend a Club Ed meeting at UAA last night that I think you all would be interested in hearing about:

Mrs. Sunny Hilts from the Alaska Association of School Boards came and spoke to some UAA Elementary Educations students all the way from the Kenai! She came as an ambassador to tell us soon to be teachers what a school board is and does. I won't go into specifics here, but she had an interesting comment that we all need to be aware of. One of the points Mrs. Sunny made was concerning the budget for schools. She said that right now the school systems are sitting in a large pool of cash. The oil industry has done well and has pumped lots of cash into education as well as the government stimulus packages. The school budgets are rather flush at the moment. Consequently great bounds in technology, resources, and training is available like never before.

The bad news is, this education funding bubble will not likely last forever according to Mrs. Sunny. What she calls 'The Gap' is coming. 'The Gap' is what she estimates as a 5 year period where funding will dry up from the oil and the government and schools will be left with very little money for technology and other perks. She wanted to prepare all of us teachers for a drought in educational opportunities.

I say this for two reasons: 1) to ask if you think her information is correct according to your outlook and 2) to ellicite ideas of what we should do if she is correct?

Standard? What Standard?

This is a nice time in the semester to go back and reflect on the big picture: the Standard. Yes, that over arching Standard in the sky by which we must compare ourselves is upon us once again. The Standard by which I am to compare myself and my current Educational Tech class is the NETS-T 2008. Now, upon reflection, we as a class have done quite well with following along. We have become better able to model technology better in the classroom. We have learned how to set up a lesson using technology, yet not rely on it. We have learned new technologies ourselves and seen their pros and cons. We have reflected nicely on the idea of digital citizenship and looked at our own selves in light of the internet's logs. All in all, we are following the Standard to the letter and are all the more standardized for it.

Please don't get me wrong, this is a great thing at the moment; I have learned tons about the way technology works and how to use it in a classroom setting. However, I don't want to stay in this Standard box forever. As you can already tell, what started as a classroom assignment has led to a blog that I actually use. I keep track of my friends' blogs and blogs that hold interest to me. I am no longer just using this as a classroom assignment obligation. I'm starting to get creative with the way I use my technology. I'm stepping outside of the Standards as I begin to realize the possibilities out there.