Stefanie Lauer

High School Ace is the academic homepage for high school students. It is free of use to the general public and provides many educational resources for high school students. It is known as “the trusted web guide to free quality educational resources for teens.” It has a dictionary, encyclopedia, rhyming words, and even study guides to prepare high school students for college.

It has a question of the day that is updated every day for students to try and answer, which expands upon their knowledge of different subjects.

Students can click on a number of different subject areas, such as English. If they look up a book on that site, it will redirect them to a new site such as http://www.wikipedia.com. This is helpful for book reports, and more information on books that students may be learning about in class.

Overall, I believe that this technology would be very helpful to high school students for a number of reasons.

The BC Podcast Classroom is a list of multiple podcasts that a fifth grade classroom from New Jersey has put together. They have used the podcasting technology to make their reports more interesting, and to be able to share them with people around the world.

The podcast that I listened to starts out with music, and then a young boy begins to talk about February being Black History Month. He explains that his classroom took awhile to research many important African Americans in society and then begins to talk about one.

They cover multiple people in groups of three usually, and they always list the date of birth and death. They also list at least a few important facts for each person. It is very entertaining to listen to these young children talking so joyfully about people they researched.

For example, a young boy and girl begin to talk about the first man that the class researched, Jesse Owens. He was born on September 12, 1913 and a grandson of a former slave. He was the best remembered Olympic star. They take turns saying important sentences and they communicate back and forth about it, while sometimes finishing each other’s sentences.

Two young boys and another girl introduce Bessy Coleman. They tell how she was the first African American woman to get her pilot’s license and fly across the English Channel. She not only proved that African Americans could accomplish great things, but woman could as well.

The podcast ends by saying that it is important to remember that all of these African Americans have helped shape society for the better.

I enjoyed this podcast more than the last two that I researched, because it was great to hear students enjoying learning so much. Not only did they learn how to research and report their speech, they also learned equality of others.

To listen to this podcast go to http://bcpodclassroom.podbean.com/2007/03/12/black-history-month-spotlight//. Or to listen to more BC Pod Classroom talks go to http://bcpodclassroom.podbean.com/

Patrick Ledesma led a speech about “The Technology Specialist as Teacher Leader,” at the K12 Online Conference this year. He talked about exciting projects such as blogs, wikis, and podcasts that teachers can use to help students benefit from technology.

According to Ledesma, “technology leadership is often a balancing act.” In order to achieve it, one must manage the hardware environment, administrative coordination, teacher professional development, and teacher collaboration. Once this is done, teachers and students can be successful in using technology within their classroom.

Technology specialists also need to be able to understand themselves and what they’re good at, define their role, and understand the needs of the school.

When technology specialists are overworked they need to be able to know how to manage the environment. This way they can prioritize when multiple teachers need technological help.

They must also coordinate and collaborate with administration. This will help set school goals for the entire year. They should collaborate with all the other technology specialists that have anything to do with the school as well. Setting goals will allow time management to become easier as well.

 In his speech, Ledema spoke about blogs, wikis, and podcasts. Through my Technology Integration class, we are already working on blogs and wikis. I, however, have never made a podcast or watched one. A podcast is a digital media file that is given over the Internet for playback on personal computers.

One can tell the difference from a podcast and other digital media because a podcast is able to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically whenever new content is added. For more information on podcasts, visit  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting

Overall, Ledema’s speech would be a great help to new technology specialists, or ones who are not quite sure how to balance all of their work yet.

To watch the presentation, go to http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=186

Alan Levine met two others, Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman, through weblogs in 2000, and did an edublogs tele-conference in July 2003 and came up with a presentation which was given entirely in a wiki. They have never met physically.

I believe that the main point of his keynote in the K12 Online Conference 2007 is that there are so many more collaborative tools out there today that more people need to learn how to use.

Back in 2004, all they had as a technology to connect things together was blogs, wikis, and RSS. Awhile later, web 2.0 began and that helped them have tons of more free tools to work together on creating their presentations.

Over the last few years just to name a few, they’ve learned to embed content, remix, filter, and disrupt other people over the internet. He states that the embed tag has been around since mid 1990′s, but it is still greatly used to insert from one web page into any other webpage without having to go back to the original site. He states that http://www.youtube.com is one of the most common sites that uses this, but http://www.slideshare.com is another that uses it as well.

Throughout his speech he mentions many different websites such as flickr and picnik. Picnik allows you to pull images from facebook, flickr, and multiple other sites. Then once the picture is uploaded, you can add logos, text, and edit the images in multiple ways. Once it is edited, it can be saved back to flickr for a completely new and edited image. He says “this is all because these websites have these communication messages.”  These are just a few of the multiple websites today that connect with others to make collaborative technologies easier for everyone.

When people put their content out into the internet, many others can add to it, or leave comments for the person that created the content. This enables people to have a wider range of pictures, videos, and content to look through when they need to find something.

In his keynote, he also talks about Stephen Daily’s newsletter which enables him to bridge and connect with different communities throughout the world. His domain varies and it’s helpful to many people because he can contextualize content.

Alan’s keynote was interesting, because I have never heard of many of the websites that he shared such as http://www.documents.google.com which enables people to upload documents and have others edit and change them. I had also never heard of http://www.slideshare.com where people can upload presentations which could be extremely useful to others.

I also had never heard of http://www.wiki.com, until just today when my professor assigned us a project to do on there. Alan also uses this site quite often, and shows many different useful tools during his keynote.

Alan ends with saying that if “everybody has an effective voice, they become a valuable member of the conversation.” I believe that technology is allowing many more people to be looked at as valuable, because they can, as he says, “communicate much more effectively and rapidly.”

For more information, go to http://morethancooltools.wikispaces.com/

Clarence Fisher was a speaker at the K12 Online Conference this year. I listened to the keynote of his speech by going to http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=150.

I believe that the most important part of his speech is that education can change people’s lives. He states that Classroom 2.0 is about “redefining what happens in classrooms.” After all, the world has changed and so the classroom needs to as well.

Students today do not need to sit and listen to lectures all day; they need to be prepared for the future. Their geographical location does not matter as much as their education. Clarence Fisher believes that Classroom 2.0 is the best way to ensure that student’s are able to meet their future needs.

He states that pedagogy and tools, especially colloborative ones, are the way educators can make sure they are teaching children what they need to know. In his classroom he says that he starts out with blogging, moves onto flickr and podcasting. This year they are using voice thread which is new to him and his students.

I had never heard of a voice thread before he stated that, so I decided to look up what it was exactly. A voice thread is a website where people can upload pictures and be able to  zoom in on them. People are also able to comment on them by either text or microphone, and view other’s libraries. It’s a way to have group conversations around pictures and transform projects into collaborative works of art.

Clarence Fisher ends with a quote from Will Richardson’s blog “Teaching today is a collective effort, not an individual accomplishment.” He states that “learning today is a collective effort,” as well. He believes that “learning is something that is networked. Learning is something that we do together.” This can be accomplished by many new educational technologies. He says that a great way to learn new techniques to teach is to focus on what blogs and sites children go to online. He believes that this is something that is “vital and a missing piece” from educational technology today, and I do as well.

On October 11, 2007 I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Betty Faye Siegel deliver an impressive speech on education. The speech was held in the Alumni Memorial Union at the University of Findlay between 7:00 and 8:30 p.m.

Dr. Siegel was President of Kennesaw State University for over 25 years and is an internationally known educator and speaker. She addressed many different education topics ranging from what types of students you might expect in your classroom, to the different ways teachers can become better educators for their students.

I believe that the main message from her speech was, in her words, that “teaching is a heartfelt commitment.” She believes that teachers need to “think in the terms of the heart of education, not the business.”

She also taught us how she believes there are four different arenas in which teachers live: 1.) Professionally invite others, 2.) Professionally invite yourself, 3.) Personally invite yourself, and 4.) Personally invite others. She went onto explain that for 1.) teaching needs to be a moral, ethical type of leadership and social responsibility instead of a collection of courses. She also said that 2.) teachers need to know more than just their subject in order to keep their student’s attention and respect.

3.) Dr. Siegel addressed that often times what keeps us bound is no the actual problems but the idea that we cannot overcome it. She said that in today’s society, things that keep people bound are looks, age, time, and wealth.  Teachers, as well as others, need to be “psychologically young,” as she put it. And 4.) she stated that “teaching should be an ethical enterprise in order to unlock the potential in everybody.”

I agree with Dr. Siegel on many of her points. I loved the way that she spoke with  passion for teaching. Her speech made me all the more determined to become the absolute best teacher that I can be.

ThinkQuest allows students of many different ages to connect, create, and share their writing online with other students around the world. On this collaborative website, students work in teams to make educational websites that the rest of the world can view. Although the website began in 1996, it is constantly updated, with the newest version being updated just this year.

While they’re doing this, students are learning beneficial ways to research, write, and use their technological skills. They also are forced to learn how to work in teams in order to make their website as good as it can possibly be.

Students that enter the competetion part of this website are able to earn cash prizes to use towards highering their education. It is free to enter and made possible by the Oracle Education Foundation. Even if students do not win one of the cash prizes, they still are considered a winner and are published in the ThinkQuest Library. As of now, the library holds over 30,000 articles that are visited often.

For more information, to view the library, or to enter the competetion visit to the ThinkQuest Website.

Hyper Studio 5 is a good way for students to create projects collaboratively. Students across the United States are now beginning to use it more and more to create projects that will keep them focused.

This software can be used for all different grade levels and subjects. It has the capability of letting students upload and add videos to your projects, as well as music from virtually anywhere. Students who have used this project state that they enjoy being able to incorporate pictures with the text that they write about their different subjects.

At  http://www2.ncsu.edu/midtech/lambert/TIME/student_samples/hssamples/hsprojects.html, you can view many different projects that middle school students have created using Hyper Studio 5. They range from a project on the Richter scale to statistics.

You can also learn more about Hyper Studio 5 and how to purchase it at The Mackiev Website.

Pinnacle is the top consumer video-editing software company in the United States. It is used by people at home, as well as in the workplace. But one of their major focuses is on using it in the classroom.

Pinnacle Studio Plus Educational Edition was recently updated to this new version just earlier this year. It offers a way for children in kindergarten through 12^th grade to capture videos. The Pinnacle website states that with the help of Pinnacle, students will be able to “become better speakers and better listeners. Self-confidence goes through the roof.” It is also tells how it can be used to help make book reports easier for children to pay attention to and learn about. Pinnacle also could be used to make history documentaries.

The picture to the left shows students excited about answering questions while using Pinnacle. It’s an excellent tool to keep students informed and up-to-date on technology.

At the Pinnacle Studio Plus Educational Edition website , teachers can learn more about all the advantages of Pinnacle and purchase the software.

Digital cameras have many uses, in business and personal affairs. But now, they can also be used to help educate students in classrooms.

There are so many different ways that pictures can help students grasp concepts better. For example, as stated at Education World, a teacher could take pictures of students dressed for their future career, and use these to personally illustrate a career report.

Another way to use digital cameras in the classroom would be to put students in groups or pairs and then let them walk throughout the building with a camera. Assign them the task of finding geometric shapes, and then make a book out of their pictures in which they must define each shape.

For an English class, a teacher could make the students take photographs and then write a short story to go along with their photographs.

For an elementary class, the teacher could take pictures of easy-to-read signs and create an “I Can Read” book for them to share with their family.

In our technology integration class at the University level, our teacher used a digital camera to snap each of our photographs. Then he put them all on the computer, and we had to learn how to format them through Microsoft Word.

As you can see, digital cameras are not only limited to certain subjects and classrooms, but instead have a variety of uses in all curriculum areas.The use of digital cameras is not only a fun way to engage students in their work, but a great way to allow them to stay focused on the assignments. Many students these days have shorter attention spans then they did 50 years ago, so teachers must find alternatives that allow them to stay focused. I believe that digital cameras are a good way for students to be able to grasp concepts easier, while having fun at the same time.