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Showing posts from October, 2016

Week 9 - Evaluation Checklist

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Good day readers! This week I was tasked with developing a checklist for evaluation of web resources. I used the drawing and web processing tools in Google Drive and published my work with Google Sites. After referring to several web resources and teacher pages with recommendations for evaluating web content, I synthesized these into my own simple checklist. I then used this checklist to evaluate five web sites and two videos. Please forgive the spartan look of my Google site. I found Google's editing interface to be severely counterintuitive. The result of my efforts is here: Zack's DooDLeS

Week 8 - My Information Diet

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It can be hard to make diet and exercise a priority when you’re working full time and taking graduate courses, but I know how important it is, so I’ve been trying to make improvements. I’ve been trying to work on my physical fitness by putting more exercise into my schedule and by making healthier choices about what I eat. Most week days I drive 45 minutes to an office where I sit for eight and a half hours, only to return to my car for another 45 minutes to an hour of sitting. That’s 10 hours of being sedentary in a day, not including what I do when I come home. When I come home I’m usually tired, and succumb to the lure of more lounging or even a nap. I did some reading on the subject, and learned that sitting has an extremely detrimental effect on one’s physical fitness and stamina, especially when coupled with a diet containing an embarrassing number of microwave pizzas and Chinese takeout. I discovered recently that I have been taking in a lot of fat and sugar, and these can le

Week 7 - The Creative Spirit of Design

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Jason K. McDonald’s article The Creative Spirit of Design seems to me to be a call for flexibility on the part of the designing educator, and an abandonment of rigid formulas and patterns. As teachers we know that the classroom environment, and many other learning environments are fluid, fickle places. What works in the 8am section of a class might not work after lunch. What works for AP Language students might not be applicable to English Language Learners. We as educators need to be adaptable and open to what McDonald calls the “creative spirit of design”. This has several characteristics: First, McDonald stresses that imagination is an important component of design. Teachers need to be able to imagine not only what is tried and tested, but also what hasn’t been tried and might work within a given context. He says that we need to operate at the very limits of our imagination. When I read this section I thought back to the original innovators who tested early prototypes o

Week 6 - Affordance Analysis

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I don’t know if it’s my recent decision to go off coffee, the exhaustion of my heavier than normal load at work, but when I approached “Affordance Analysis - Matching Learning Tasks with Learning Technologies” I found it completely inscrutable. I sat, in the silent stacks at the library, hoping that somehow my highlighter would magically sense what was important in this piece. I found it really challenging, and silently hoped that this impenetrable prose was not to be the academic norm. I remember the dismay with which my British Literature students approached Milton’s Paradise Lost and suddenly completely understood how they’d felt. I put “Affordance Analysis” away for a few days and came back to it at a different place and time of day. When I gave it another chance, eventually some sense began to emerge. I still found it difficult to parse , but I was starting to make some sense of it. What I understand was that Mr. Bower was simply trying to present a method for matching tech

Week 5 - The Victorian Internet

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As I read Standage's The Victorian Internet, I was amazed at how much the ascendance of the telegraph in the 19th century mirrors the rise of the Internet in the 20th. Like many innovations, telegraph technology was utilized for something other than its intended purpose. And, as with many innovations, it was misunderstood by many. Sending messages to distant locales over wires must have seemed like magic to those with little scientific expertise. The long line of inventors and scientists who contributed to its development had a hard time convincing the government, the military, and the general populace to adopt it for widespread use, but when it caught on it spread like wildfire, and became as ubiquitous as mobile phones are today. In the heyday of the telegraph it was used to order military maneuvers, to conduct business, to send money, to order clothing, to maintain relationships and to solemnify marriages. It created a new careers and a new subculture with its own rituals, in-

Week 4 - Mind in Society

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What did I learn? I learned a lot. Vygotsky's Mind in Society  was a challenge, but there was a lot to take away from it. First, symbols are tools that enable cognition. This separates us from even the highest functioning of our ape relatives. Internalization is the process whereby learners come to know symbols and begin appropriating them. Children engage in what Piaget called egocentric speech. They talk to themselves to aid in solving problems. As they grow, this process becomes internal, and they no longer need to talk through problems. They can conceptualize and visualize things that lie outside their immediate field. Contrary to previous models held by psychologists, development happens gradually and in stages with some types of development overlapping others. Students, as they grow and learn, progress through proportional thinking, operational thinking, pre-conceptual thinking, formal operations, and if they advance far enough, complex thinking. The zone of prox