Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Digital Storytelling

I did some research and found this website to be very interesting and informative. I think this site described and define what digital story telling really will and easy to understand.

What is digital story telling?

According to Lambert (N/A), storytelling is story we share with friends, family, and anyone when we came across a story which we remember or wish to share. Digital story telling on the other hand is story that uses computers to create media, which show visual moment or drawing image, to tell a stories which we wish to share or encounter in our daily lives, along with wording communication to represent the media.
Reference site: http://www.nextexit.com/dap/whatis.html

I also encounter another site using by educational to tell a digital storytelling. This site defines digital storytelling as a way of practicing using computer tools and experience base computer technology to tell a story.
Reference site: http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/

Many sites suggest using power point to create a digital storytelling because it’s easy and has variety of tools selection to choose from. However, there are many other ways about creating a digital storytelling. But maybe I might use PP because this is the only one I am familiar with.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Global Education:

According to Glen (2011), a site about Global Education. Global Education is a creative approach that bring change to our society. Global Education is the step in changing people's attitude, encourage them to be become who they wanted to be, and encourage them to be responsibility and responsible.
Reference site: http://glen-europe.org/?page_id=17


How do we connect with global education communities?
According to Orlando (2008), Sun Microsystems is one ways to connect with global education. It's a network that create EduConnection.org and OSUM that encourage information and conversation sharing between students and educators.
Reference site: http://www.prweb.com/releases/sun_microsystems/open_source/prweb1543194.htm

Whom did you find for students to connect with?
This site, http://generaleducation.appstate.edu/making-local-global-connection, is very interesting because student are able to make connection with other student around the world to learn about each other cultures by exploring each other multiple strategies.
I also found this site, http://pd.tiged.org/, to be very education for teacher to understand about Global Education before connection with student.

How did you find it?
I mostly Googel everything that I want to find by typing what I needed to find. After typing what I want to find, I would go over each site or document or pdf carefully that was showing base on what I want to find before chose the best one.

What are possible conversation points?
This one is a little confusing, after a couple research, and look at a couple blogs from classmate, I agree with Teresa that possible conversation points is conversation that is limitedless for teachers and students. I also think that it is conversation between people about a topic.

How will your students/your connect?
Well, I am not a teacher now but will be in the future. What I saw is that students are connected during class assignment that are assigned by teacher. Also according to some research that I found, I saw that student will connect when the topic is interesting and fun to make their discussion.

Find at least one unique resource to post.
There are many sites that are unique and interesting about global education. the one that I would chose is Sun Microsystems, by Orlando (2008): http://www.prweb.com/releases/sun_microsystems/open_source/prweb1543194.htm

Education Blogs Following for Week Eight:

This week I chose to follow:

http://adifference.blogspot.com/: Sometime listing to someone's making a speech or talks about something that you like can make a difference in your life. I have never hear of TED talks about Mathematics for math teacher. After listing to some of TED talks about Math that was provide in this blog. I found math to be more interesting and fun to learn (No wonder I always like math even until now!).

wiki.wesfryer.com: I don't know if this is only me or anyone too but I found Mac compute to be kind of complicate and hard to used sometime. However, I feel that this blog did an excellent job teaching us to convert text into audio for free. I did on my sister Mac computer and its fun and easy to follow with pictures showing and support every step to follow.

http://kimcofino.com/blog/: I found this blog to be very encouraging and understandable. I like how Blogger, Kim Cofino, used Blog as a tool to facilitate educator and student to utilize their blogs as a tools to share and connect with other and their teacher about what they are learning. I found Cofino's showcase portfolio to be very interesting. I remember taking a class this semester (summer) and have to create a showcase portfolio. How I wish I have saw this blogs earlier, so I can create my showcase portfolio by following her direction in her blog.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Assistive Technology

What is assistive technology?
Assistive technology is a technology tools or resources that were used for helping those who are disability or needed more than just regular lesson so they can learn and access technology.




I decided to look at an article by Raskind and Stanberry on assistive technology for kids with Learning Disabilities (LD).

According to Raskind and Stanberry (2011), AT is a technology which available for help all types of disability problem. There article focus on learning disability using AT and how AT can be a helpful tools for people with developmental delay.

Their article introduce parents in helping their children's in learning AT. They defined AT for kids with learning disability as a system or equipment that provide learning base and a tools of developing delay skill.
They also provide additional AT tools that is helpful in helping kids with problems in learning disability. Some tools that they included in their article that is supportive and helpful are:
• Abbreviation expanders
• Alternative keyboards
• Audio books and publications
• Electronic math work sheets
• Freeform database software
• Graphic organizers and outlining
• Information/data managers
• Optical character recognition
• Personal FM listening systems
• Portable word processors
• Proofreading programs
• Speech-recognition programs
• Speech synthesizers/screen readers
• Talking calculators
• Talking spell checkers and electronic dictionaries
• Variable-speed tape recorders
• Word-prediction programs
I have look at a couple of these helpful tools and I think it's really helpful for not just children with learning disability but it supports and help learning in just about anyone.

After learning from this article, I know that I can easily incorporate AT along with supportive tools that was provide in this article in my class. One reason why I think supportive tools in this article is helpful because we live in a very diversity country with more children diagnosed with learning disability. As a teacher, we need to be aware of this situation and be prepare to encourage and education them in our best of knowledge.

Reference:
Web: N/A, (2002). Access IT: What is assistive technology. University of Washington. Retrieved from: http://www.washington.edu/accessit/articles?109

Web: Marshall, R. and Stanberry, K., (2011), Assistive technology for kids with LD: An overview. Great school: CA. Retrieved from: http://www.greatschools.org/special-education/assistive-technology/702-assistive-technology-for-kids-with-learning-disabilities-an-overview.gs?page=1

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Tech Tools

I found two tech tools that I am really familiar with, which are PBS and Scratch. I found PBS to be educated sometime for kids and even adult. Same for Scratch, it kind of like a communication tool at the same time you can play game and learn from game that was created by others. I found PBS to be similar with starfall because kids can play learning game and have fun learning math, reading, and writing.

One other tech tool that I think is really interesting is second life. You can created your own world and move your avatar anywhere to others place and experience others ideas or even take class or build your own dream house.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Video Sharing

I shared the common craft video and the link http://www.teachparentstech.org with one professor, my brother, and one friend. I found that my professor think it was very informative and useful since she is not very good at technology in protecting her own computer. She likes it and wanted to share the link with some of her friends and fellow students. My brother think it was cool and interesting but too basic because he is a computer major so he just think it was cool and fun to watch. With my friend, she thinks that it was very educated and informative. She thanks me for sharing the video and the link with her because she can now know how to protect her lap top.

This week I shared the common craft video and the link http://www.teachparetstech.org with three of my sister. One said that she likes it and it helps her a lot with computer and is very encouragement and educated. The other two sister said that they do not like it but it is very informative and think that is fun to watch.

Blog Following:

I choose to read May, Sarah, Brianna, and Teresa's blogs this week. I noticed that all of them also read copyright article 101 for Educators. All of them choose to answer almost the same five questions in week three assignment like I did. After reading their blogs, I found that Brianna and May follow the same format compare to Teresa and Sarah.

Here is a little story written in response to the blog readings:
Last week in class, the instructor passed out three different articles about copyright at the end of class: The Purpose of Copyright by Linda Pallas Loren, Copyright 101 For Educators: Winter 2003, and Copyright for Educators. The purpose of these three article is for us to pick between which one we wanted to learn and get a good understand about copyrights laws and policy. Then write about the article that we choose for next week class meeting. There were a total of six students in the class: me, Teresa, Sarah, Brianna, May, and JJ. No one know what article other class mates are choosing. This week class, we were to share our writing about the article we read. At the end of class, I found out that Brianna, May, Teresa, Sarah, and me choose the same article compare to JJ.