For Ken ...

Ken and I were chatting on skype and I had never heard of the miers/briggs personality testing. Here is a link should you want to get a profile of yourself.

http://www.atzmi.com/TestIntroduction.aspx

Week 8 Reflection

I have decided that I am suffering from the four nine weeks syndrome ... just like my students. Its something about this time of year between Easter and summer vacation that just drains you, and makes you feel like your being pulled in too many directions at once.

This weeks topic of wireless technology in K-12 sent me back to a paper I wrote for another class a term or two ago. I lot of the papers I found were about using PDA's and very few of those were in a K-12 format. I wonder why this hasn't become more mainstream in K-12 education? It might be purely based on funding, because setting up PDA's to be used on a regular basis is not a cheap project. I also remember finding several articles on setting up wireless laptop classrooms. The problem with either of these options is that no study I could find showed that it had a significant impact on test scores, which is typically the bottom line for funding anything in public education. Any thoughts?

Multimedia Presentation

My multimedia presentation is available at rstustin.podbean.com. See "Tustin Assignment 3"

Week Seven Reflection

Thanks you'all for the chat on Sunday. It helped me get my multimedia project done, which I appreciate immensely. I hope you all enjoy it. My teammates here have had a positive feedback, and our tech specialist is showing it at her meeting which makes me feel that the gigantic headache of working out all the challenges involved were well worth it.

This is the first class I have had were I felt we truly utilized a synchronous environment at Walden. Most of the courses I have had used a more asynchronous environment. So far, I have enjoyed the synchronous atmosphere using Skype. I feel like for the first time, I really know my classmates. At first, I thought I would hate it because I liked the freedom associated with the use of the chatrooms because it gave me time to think, and look at what other people were saying and doing for the posts before I submitted mine.

Week Six Reflection

I have discovered in the past few weeks a new appreciation for just how technical podcasting can become. For example, I have a sony digital camcorder and tons of video I would like to podcast for my classes. However, because our district blocks certain functions of media player, most every application I have tried to use to make videos has HATED these files. After three weeks, I finally figured out that by blocking these aspects of media player, it also blocks other programs from retrieving the codecs to read the files automatically. I have learned a lot about codecs that I never really wanted to know. The moral has become, as long as I use my own personal pc its all good – but try it on a pc with tight security and you’ll beat your head against the wall.

Week Five Reflection

Sorry I am so late this week to do this you'all but it has been one long week. I had applied to teach at a new technology magnet in our district, and had a great interview, only to loose the spot over internal politics. I was very bold and ambitious with my ideas for types of technology, but basically I found out that no matter what I went in and said, I was never going to get the position.

I find that I have a hard time finding where to draw a line and call it an OLE or a WBL. When I looked at the descriptions of most of the OLEs in the text, most of them seemed simulation based, though the simulations had a great degree of learner choice. Things like geometer's sketchpad I wouldn't have thought of because to me they are a type of modeling software. I suppose just like anything else, there are degrees of OLE and one requirement is that there are at least some choices a learner can make.