Richard Smith-Podcasting

Richard Smith-"A podcast is an audio recording that is saved as an MP3 file and made available on the Internet through RSS." (Jonassen Marra p. 160) Pod casting in the classroom will be great for schools, no matter the income, for instance: A teacher can make a series of recordings of him or herself teaching the lecture in case the teacher knows that they are going to be gone for a couple of weeks, so the class doesnt miss out on anything.

 Podcasting is alike in some of the previous web apps weve been researching about in the fact that some are downloadable, can be shared from device to device, it is different in the fact that podcasting cannot be spread throughout the internet, it is only meant to be shared to one or few individuals at a time instead of being public information easily heard or viewed via you tube.

I own an ipod and an iphone, i love both of them and would and could use them for anything, i have used my iphone to record a teachers lecture and it helped me learn.  I would also allow my students to do that to me, i could also teach a few lectures for students to watch in case i cant be there for some reason which will be a great tool, online communication tools are becoming increasingly important for class room use but at the same time the tools need to be for the good and not the evil.

References:
Meaningful Learning with Technology, 2008. Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Marra, R. M., and Crismond, D.

Richard Smith

web 2.0 blogging-Richard Smith

Wikis and blogs with students would be useful for a class like this, where online activities are essential.  Otherwise outside the class wikis and blogs would not be really useful for my subject area of physical education, other than using wikipedia to get anatomy pictures or make my students blog about the class outside of classtime, as in a homework assignment.

Socialbookmarking is very interesting but i dont think i would ever use it or have my students use it, it is a very interesting idea but my class will be in a gymnasium so access to internet and computers is not apart of my teachings.  Voicethread would be a fun thing to try out, I would like to try it out one time just to see how it went and see who would comment on my voicethread.

"we show that bridges participate more than nonbridges in both synchronous and asynchronous communication modes."  Tapped in looks like a very useful site with lots of links to different books and sources that would be great for teachers to have, it has up to date stuff on technology to help keep teachers fresh in the teaching game.

Schlager, M., Farooq, U., Fusco, J., Schank, P., & Dwyer, N. (2009) Analyzing online social networking in professional learning communities: Cyber networks require cyber-research tools. Journal of Technology Education, 60(1), 86-100.

Post-Richard Smith

Assessments and eportfolios

Richard Smith
etec 424

Assessment activities are used to produce feedback on students and to show their knowledge and progression.  Some assessments are tests, others are just check-ups as you complete through a series of events.  Technology based assessments are used to make the data easier to manage and makes it able for the teacher to provide good feedback more often and quicker. The quicker the student gets feedback to quicker the student can respond to the feedback and the more often the feedback the better the results should be.

E-portfolios are bodies of work that address certain learning outcomes, they help teachers and students by keeping stuff organized and collected in a way for easy visibility.  Computer based tests are tests done on a computer, whether the answers be multiple choice or open ended.  Computer based tests can impact valitidity and reliability mostly in a negative way, because students who like to cheat on exams.  If equipped with the right capabililty a teacher can set up a test to where the student cannot exit the screen for any reason or the test is forfeited.  Also if the student is not being watched they could use their book, or use a partner to take the test with them, so the test wouldnt be testing their exact knowledge, which is the point of a test.

My personal opinion is computer based testing should not be allowed, I am more of a hands on type of person so when I teach I will walk around the room making sure nobody is cheating, but if I have to use computer based testing it will be more challenging because the views of the room will change and make the angles harder for the teacher to be completely aware of whats going on.  I am interested to see how this e portfolio turns out, Ive collected stuff and kept it throughout the semester, but never on an e portfolio, so I'm interested to see how it works and whether I would like to use it for my classroom.

Jonassen, D. (2008). Meaningful learning with technology (pp. 218-239). Upper Saddle, NJ: Pearson.