Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Is It Okay To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher ?

This post is about Karl Fisch, a teacher and technology education specialist at Arapahoe High School in Littleton, Colorado. He won an award form EduBlog Awards for his blog post "Is It Okay To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher ?" It was nominated as "The Most Influential Post of 2007". Fisch did not expect to win anything, he did not even expect to be nominated. He was just responding to a post written by someone else named Terry Freedman. Freedman wrote a post about 'is it acceptable for a teacher to be technology illiterate?'

Freedman also had proposed a set of standards for teacher which teachers need to follow. I liked reading the post it was very interesting. I also believe that teachers need to keep up with technology. Like he said "If a teacher today is not technologically literate - and is unwilling to make the effort to learn more - it's equivalent to a teacher 30 years ago who didn't know how to read and write." Teachers must know whats going on with technology just so they can relate to their students. I would think today that every 8 out of ten students today know about Myspace and Facebook and other cites like it. Teachers now can even use technolgy to communicate with their students outside of class.

Podcast

The First Podcast i listened to was SMARTBoard lessons episode 150. This podcast sounded very professional. It is done by two other teachers. It gave you different websites that you could use as a teacher. You could tell that they had done their research before they started the podcast. It didn't not sound like it was read off of paper it just sounded like a casual conversation between two people. They also read some of the e-mails that they had received from their listeners.

The next podcast i listed to was Kidcast 58 "The Medium Is NOT The Message". It is done by Dan Schmit. He was saying that he was on the Internet listing to podcast and he noticed that a lot of the podcast done by students were done just because they were in a computer class. He says the podcast were done just to show how podcast were done not because the student wanted to do it. He was saying that the teacher should allow the students to do podcast on a subject they wanted to and maybe start doing one every week or every two months or whenever. This podcast was very interesting to me. His podcast sounded very professional also it didn't sound like it was read off of paper.

Third I listened to EdTech Talk number 94 it was done by Arvind Gover, Alex Ragone, and Vinnie Vrotny. It sounded like a sports radio conversation. They had a special guest on this episode named Carol Broos they sounded clear but she sounded like her mouth was on the microphone. She was talking about a DVD she made with other teacher who had won awards. It was pretty boring to me. She was just talking about some video she had did some organization called golden apple.

Lastly i listened to MacBreak Weekly episode 128. It is done by four different dudes this episode was called "I Cannot Confirm Nor Deny". It is usually done by five guys but one was gone off for a sonogram. This podcast also sounded like a sports radio station. One of the men off of this podcast also do the This Week in Photography. I also didn't find this one interesting. It seem like they were never going to get to the topic, they spent like this first ten minutes of the show talking about everything except what the podcast was about.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Sunday, February 1, 2009

International Student Blog 2




The second site i found was http://traillschoolblogs.com/missgail/. In her blog she uses it to communicate with her seventh, eighth, and tenth grade class. She uses it to tell her students about homework and what is due the next day of class. She directs them to websites that can be helpful for them with their projects. This blog came from Traill International School.

International Student Blog



The international student blog I found was http://my-ecoach.com/blogs.php?blog=1451. In this blog the teacher uses the blog to tell her students about her trip in Greece. She always has something educational in them, except for a couple I read. She is a IT teacher from Austin, Texas. She encourages the student to leave comments and ask questions.