Weekly Reading

In my weekly reading of the article "The World is Open for a Reason" it talks about so much content is fee and open for learning. Open educational resources have made a huge impact on the educational possibilities of learners. There are several reasons why institutions and organizations freely share online content. Some of these reasons are Information Dissemination, Student Assistance, Supporting Alumni, Sharing Teaching Practices and Ideas, Program, Department, and Institutional Marketing, Goodwill and Global Education Efforts. By sharing many can communitcate with their colleagues. Sometines the motivation to share educational content can be personal. For the most part they desire to attract new students or help the ones that they have complete their courses.

Shawn

Weekly Reading

In my weekly reading on the article "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do They Really Think Differently". I learned that children today are being socialized in a way that is completely different from their parents. Video games, text messaging, emails, watching TV, and cell phones have changed they way today's children socialize and even learn. New research has shown that the brain can be reorganized and changes and organizes itself differently based on the inputs it receives. The old idea was that we as humans only had a fixed number of brain cells that cannont be replaced, but now research shows that our brain cells are replaced constantly. The article also talked about attention spans with children ad if they have changed. The attention spans are short when it comes to the old way of learning, but when it comes to something they are interested in such as video games they will have a longer attention span. So it is not really todays technology that accounts for a short attention span.

Shawn Travis

Last Day!

Today was my last day observing in the classroom, the second day of doing my math lesson for Rombach. I even learned of two interesting sites the host teacher uses every day for the class.

She uses wordcentral.com and superkids.com for the word of the day the children are defining to broaden their vocabulary.

And with that, I need sleep after this long day.

Heather Clark

DONE!

Well, block I and our little Blog group! We have done it! We got through our block I semester and many of us are preparing for block II, and I wish you all the best of luck with that.

I finished off my practicum last Wednesday, and was happy to be done.  I feel like I have learned a lot of things, both to do, and not to do, for my future classroom.  What about you?

As I was leaving, I received hugs and well-wishes from my host teacher and from the students.  They were all very sad to see me go, and I was sad to be going but glad to know I had such a wonderful experience.

MDL in real life

I have been able to use my net book/mobile learning device, all over the place.  Whenever I go away for a weekend, or even just for a few hours, I use my net book to keep up with other classmates and on assignments when I am away from my home.  I have also used it when I was working with my host teacher to create my Philosophical Critique paper.  I had to interview my teacher and I type a lot faster than I write so I brought my netbook to take notes on what my teacher was saying and because of this, I was able to get exact quotes for a lot of my questions.

Overall, I had some reservations about the net books and the cost of it, but it has become very handy throughout the semester and I plan on using it next semester as well!!!

Using Laptop in class

I was observing in the Social Studies class when a student mentioned a resource the teacher did not know what he was talking about. At the same time I had my laptop on and with internet connected for another activity, so I was able to search the word and found the resource he was referring to, what it is, and where it is found. The students were then able to write the resource in their notes so they can use it in a quiz that was scheduled for the next week.

Heather Clark

MLD in School

In my setting I see the students using small laptops like our netbooks to play math games for practice in content, etc. In Social Studies one day, a student was given the opportunity to look up information about Native Americans because he finished the activity for the class and had extra time to learn more about the new topic.

During lunch that same day, two girls were also using the small laptops to work on assignments for their main teacher and to find websites to use. They were having trouble shooting problems, but with assistance they were able to handle the problems with the laptops.

Heather Clark