CEDu581 Computer Architecture: The Final Week

"Top 10 Reasons to use Technology in your Classroom"

10. As a business education teacher, I may be asked to teach a Web Design class in the future. If so, I will need to brush up on my basic HTML and CSS, but more importantly, learn the web design programs used in our district. After fighting our way through CEDu533, I realize how important it is to have a basic understanding of HTML. However, I also understand that knowledge of programs such as Dreamweaver or MS Expression Web is necessary in order to teach a high school web design class.

9. Use search engines other than Google with students. I am amazed at how interested my students are when using metasearches such as IXQuick. It seems as if they have never used anything other than Google. They are instantly fascinated when they discover the power and results of other search tools.

8. Use presentation software other than PowerPoint. My students loved VoiceThread and MS PhotoStory when creating their business plan final exam presentations. I see tremendous potential in using Slide Rocket in the future. If I loved using it for some of our Stritch 581 projects, imagine how my students will love it!

7. Use online news resources for stock market simulations. My students no longer read newspapers or magazines as I do. They get their news from the Internet or television. As a business educator, I need to be aware of this as I design projects and assignments for stock and company research. In addition, this online news is much more timely than print.

6. Use survey sites such as SurveyMonkey or QUIA to get feedback from students regarding course content and methods of learning. As teachers, we continually strive to improve our teaching methods so that our students can learn more effectively with greater engagement. What better way to get that feedback than online surveys! I have used many of these in my business courses in order to find out what students liked and disliked about certain units. Students love to take the online surveys because they can be set up as anonymous (allowing for honesty) and they are online, which students like so much more than a paper/pencil survey.

5. Explore future uses of other classroom technology tools such as RSS feeds, Google SMS (students love their cell phones and using them for a legitimate classroom application such as stock quotes is such an engaging use of technology), Inspiration, SMART Boards, Web quests, Brain Pop, social networking, and Movie Maker. In all cases, these need to be used in meaningful ways that increase student learning and engagement.

4. Use wikis, blogs, or nings in class. Our district is piloting a new and approved wiki called Connect. In addition, we also have a blog available through our district’s student email service from Gaggle.net. I will experiment with these this summer and develop ways to incorporate them into my 7th and 8th grade Financial Life Skills curriculum for next year. I know that my students will get hooked on our stock market simulation as I introduce it through a wiki (maybe even embed a podcast), similar to what I created in Wet Paint Wiki for our 534 course.

3. Use technology to improve student engagement, thereby increasing learning. I cannot begin to count how many times a school day I am asked “Are we in the computer lab today, Mr. Nitz?” Students are so much more absorbed in our topics when they are done with technology. My action research project proved that point when I found increased learning by changing my accounting unit from overheads/pencils/paper to online/Excel/web-based teaching methods.

2. Offer learning options that appeal to my students’ various learning styles. An example of this was in my Consumerism unit. Here students were required to issue an appropriate product complaint. One choice was to write a complaint letter in Word. The second option, which most students took, was to create a cartoon with dialogue using the http://readwritethink.org/materials/comic/ online cartoon creator. The heightened level of student engagement was incredible, especially with those students who learn best visually! The quality of cartoons was equally amazing.

1. Increase LoTi and authenticity in all classes. Integrating technology into the classroom is a method that increases use of problem-solving. It provides an audience for our students and does nothing but increase the engagement of student learning. When students know they have an audience and understand how to present their work, they become so much more involved and take ownership. I have observed this when my students create their business plan presentations. Students work harder and with greater focus when they know others will be viewing their work.

CEDu581 Computer Architecture: Week 4

As I look at CEDu581 and the projects we have done, I believe I have acquired a much stronger appreciation for people involved in computer hardware and software design. I find it difficult to sit in front of a computer for most of the day, working on these assignments. I would imagine that programmers and designers, people similar to who we learned about in "Revenge of the Nerds," are wired differently than me. I cannot stay focused on one topic for more than 1-2 hours before I need to do something different. It is not necessarily the content, but the lack of movement and personal interaction. In retailing and in teaching, I am so accustomed to being on my feet all day long, working with customers, employees, vendors, and now students, teachers, parents, and staff. Blogging, emailing, and nings are great tools for communication but I guess I still prefer one-on-one, face-to-face interaction. Even when I do research on topics I consider hobbies, I still need to break up the tasks into small, manageable chunks of time, with something physical or social in between.

Our projects have made me realize how little I knew about computer software and hardware. I had never heard of Windows 7 before the Components project. Now I understand what a big deal it will be in several months. Reading my peers' Components projects was fascinating as it gave me a taste of the many rapidly-changing hardware and software topics out there. Just doing the research online demonstrates the information overload we can easily fall into.

Other areas of this class that will help me with technology, both at home and at school, include the following:

• Keeping my anti-virus software current
• Using a more effective anti-virus program
  
• Better understanding of what school district system administrators work with and how important their work is, even though we often feel their policies and procedures are annoying or counter-productive to effective learning and teaching
• Nings are vastly superior to blogs and wikis in terms of flexibility and ease of use
• More frequent file back-ups on my home computer
• Impending purchase of a back-up, portable hard drive
• Purchase of a new desktop computer in the near future with greater RAM and larger hard drive than our current 2002 Gateway PC. I now feel more comfortable with my basic knowledge of what to buy.
• There are other operating systems beyond Microsoft and Apple products!
  

CEDu581 Computer Architecture: Week 3

This was a fascinating week (or 4 weeks) because so much of what we worked on in CEDu581 tied in with what we have just done at Falls North Junior High.

First, researching Windows 7 made me wonder about our school's move from Office 2003 to Office 2007 next fall. I had several questions. I wondered if Office 2007 is compatible with Windows XP. The MS website answered that affirmatively. For some reason, I thought that Vista was necessary for Office 2007. This then made me wonder what our district is doing with our operating system. That was promptly answered by our tech people who said that we will stay with XP next year because our application launcher, Zenworks, supports XP. If Zenworks gets updated the following year, then we will move to Windows 7, skipping Vista entirely. My research on Windows 7, however, allowed me to understand that 7 is really just an upgraded version of Vista. Thanks to the Components and Linux projects, I now have a much better understanding of operating systems versus application software programs.

The second area that I learned a great deal about over these past few weeks is presentation software. My students used MS Photo Story, with fantastic results, as a method to present their business plans. Our district just installed Photo Story in our labs at North and I used this program instead of Voice Thread from last year. Our tech people wanted me to "play" with this program and report back to them. My students loved it because it was so easy to use and I loved it because my students were so engaged in creating their presentations! What an effective method for summative assessment when students cover all aspects of our business units in their Photo Story. My review of the MS Photo Story website was intriquing because the program is a free download and is marketed as "make show-and-tell cool again." As a business education teacher, I love this type of bandwagon marketing.

While working on our Components project, I thought it might be fun to try out Slide Rocket. After unsuccessfully trying to access this online program at home, I did achieve success at school. For some reason, my home computer said that every one of my email addresses already existed, preventing me from logging in. At school, no problem. I like Slide Rocket more than Voice Thread because of its superb animations and easier navigation tools. Slide Rocket also was much quicker to make a presentation with and the log-in was easier.

Finally, I enjoyed watching part 3 of Revenge of the Nerds. I find Steven Jobs fascinating, particularly with the introduction of the Mac back in 1984. I had just shown that famous one-time Super Bowl/Big Brother ad in my marketing unit and it was helpful to me to understand the computer innovation background behind the ad. Competition and how it affects companies and their CEOs never ceases to amaze me!

CEDu581 Computer Architecture: Week 2

Watching the second half of the Revenge of the Nerds video was fascinating to me as I followed along with this historic time line involving IBM, Microsoft, Seattle Computers, Intel, and Compaq. Some of the seemingly minor decisions regarding copyright, company purchases, and software purchases have developed into major corporate and computing history. Microsoft buying the rights to an operating system for IBM for $50,000 (I found further reading at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Computer_Products and posted the cool business card from SCP!) from SCP is amazing. This strikes me as analogous to buying Manhattan for $28 and buying the Louisiana Territory for $15 million.

The reverse engineering done by Compaq is also historic, not only in how it was done, but in its legality. Taking on IBM was gutsy and there are many other people and companies that are doing with right now as they take on Microsoft. Going back through corporate history, I find it amazing how companies who once dominated their industry (Woolworth, Sears, K-Mart, GM, Chrysler, etc.) are either in decline, bought out, or bankrupt. Who will it be next?

I recall my older cousin, Johnny, getting a job with IBM in Rochester, Minnesota, immediately upon his college graduation from UW-LaCrosse in 1975. Everyone in my family was in awe of him and his computing acumen. Even though I had no interest in computer hardware or software at the time, I was impressed with the immediate success he came upon by virtue of his hard work in earning his college degree. Johnny was the first one in my family to earn a bachelors degree and he certainly was a role model for me as I became the second to earn a degree in 1983.

I now have a better understanding of how Microsoft grew to dominate the operating system industry. Because Gates had the rights to sell software to all PC manufacturers in the mid-1980s, his company grew unbelievably fast. Our society's fascination with his management style, software prowess, and wealth is more understandable to me after watching these videos. I am now very curious about LINUX and open-source software and how they affect Microsoft's future growth.

CEDu581 Computer Architecture: Week 1

I found it fascinating to realize that, at age 47, I actually have quite a personal history with computers. As a business education teacher, I tend to always look to where we are going with computers in the future. It was fun and fascinating to look back on my background with computers, going back to Marquette U in the early 1980's to my family and retail use of computers over the years to my current use of computers as an educator. The Computer History Forum that we all participated in was interesting in that many of us share similar experiences, whether that be frustration with the early days of programing to the middle year issues of computer speed and capability to our modern-day issues of more power and applications.

I particularly enjoyed the "Triumph of the Nerds" videos as they really brought home how far we have come with personal computer hardware and software. Again, as a business teacher who works with students on stocks and investing, I now look at companies such as Apple, Intel, and Microsoft through different lenses. It is truly amazing how those companies are so young and yet have come to so far in terms of market penetration and market capitalization. As of the end of today, Apple has a market cap of $109.68 billion and Microsoft is at $178.53 billion. Not bad for companies started by "Nerds" in garages in the 1970s! I certainly intend on sharing some of this information with my future Computer Applications and Financial Life Skills students.

Finally, I found the list of companies from the Computer History Museum to be much broader than I expected. I guess I never thought of Timex and Seiko to be in that category, but it makes perfect sense that they are. Secondly, as a student of retailing, I was interested to learn that Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 and Atari was done by 1996. Sharp was the creator of Ever-Sharp pencils, the first all-transistor desktop calculator, and made microwaves that I have sold and used. At the family hardware store, we sold AT & T phones, GE light bulbs and toaster ovens, Hitachi breadmakers, Mitsubishi portable generators, Philips, Sylvania, and Westinghouse light bulbs, Rockwell drills, and utilized a Siemens point-of-sale system for 7 years. Wow! What diversification for these corporations.

CEde 520: Nitz--Blog 2

CEDU 520 has been both a fascinating class and process for me. I was pleased with how the planning went as we gradually built upon our IRB proposals over the weeks. The PowerPoint struck me as a particularly useful tool for creating the basic outline for our action research. I teach PowerPoint to my 8th graders, using all of the “bells and whistles” such as transitions, animation, and graphics. It was quite different, and informative, for me to do a simple research-oriented outline where the actual content, not the presentation tools, were of primary importance.

The article summaries have been most helpful in that the research we have read provided examples of how to conduct action research. The three general articles that we started with offered a broad background on technological use in education. Now that I have located my final five articles, I have narrowed my focus to business education and accounting-related pieces that help me to better understand technology-based teaching topics in my field.

I used ProQuest several years ago for my certification work, but I am most impressed with the improved ease of searching. I made great use of the search refining, reference list, and suggested topic tools. No doubt I will continue to use ProQuest for future research and reading in business education and classroom technology use.

Finally, I am very pleased with the excitement that my peers and principal have shown for my action research topic. My principal loves to see students offered more choices and my three approaches to teaching junior high introductory accounting provides well-researched options for future curriculum enhancements. My departmental peers are looking forward to reviewing my research in the areas of student achievement and engagement.

CEdu 520: Nitz--Blog 1

Now that we are several weeks into our Action Research Project, I must say that I am very pleased and comfortable with the process. By following the steps and time line, the process flows very smoothly. I am excited to implement my project and evaluate the results next semester. Actually observing and analyzing the differences in my Business Venture students will be fascinating. Between the accounting unit assessments and surveys, I am sure that the results will be enlightening and most helpful for my future teaching and my students' future learning.

The following positives about this experience come to mind:

• The incredibly supportive sharing with our Stritch peers
• Dr. Simmons' patience and timely feedback has been most helpful and even calming as we all dive in
• The support from my administrators, tech support people, and fellow teachers at Falls North Junior High has been very helpful. I am amazed at how many other teachers have done action research in their grad programs and impressed with how willing they are to offer their counsel for mine.
• Gaining understanding about the differences in experimental and descriptive research projects has helped me with our article summaries and with designing my project
• Using ProQuest has been informative. I have already thought of other units that I can improve by reading research-based online journal articles.
  

The following concerns and challenges come to mind:

• I am comfortable with my introductory accounting lesson plans. However, my steepest learning curve will involve designing reliable and valid student assessments and surveys.
  
• Understanding and interpreting the data collected plus the corresponding statistics
  
• Controlling the extraneous variables with a small sample size
  
• Our study team has worked well together and we have each added much insight to each summary. Our articles, however, have been fairly broad-based regarding technology use in education. Working on my own will be a greater challenge; however, I do look forward to learning more about instructional technology in business education and, in particular, accounting.
  
• Will my students in the control-group class feel disadvantaged if they know that my other classes are learning accounting through technology-based learning tools? Will my students even share these differences with each other?
  

General things that I have learned:

• Make sure to arrive well-rested, fed, and focused to our Oconomowoc class as the amount of material covered is comprehensive and important!
• Stay organized!! Use folders or files for our papers. On the computer, use well-named folders in which to store Word documents and bookmarks to get to pertinent class and research-oriented websites and online articles.
• Take an occasional day away from the action research project. This practice certainly allows me to come back recharged, refocused, and thinking of new ideas.
  

CEdu 534: Week 5-Fun and Games with our New Tech Tools at North!

We have learned so much this week that could be used at our schools with our students, if only we had consistent and more open Internet access. Following are some good and bad issues I had at North Junior High with our newly-learned technology tools:

• Our Internet service was so slow on Friday that it was unusable for my Financial Life Skills (FLS) students with their stock market simulation and related online assignments. Even this morning, I could use it effectively only for my e-mails and Word document work. I could not even update this blog, whether I was in IE or Firefox
• I discovered earlier in the week that my FLS WetPaint wiki had all of the cool widgets (stock ticker, digital clock, YouTube video) blocked. Apparently, our district filter caught up with me after about a week. I had hoped to use this wiki with my class but it will take a herculean effort to get everything unblocked.
• I was pleasantly surprised to see that I could get to some of the online tools that I tried out yesterday at home. I could access the Money Ning I am using for my paper, and All Things Web 2.0 and managemyideas.com for my other paper. I look forward to trying Money Ning soon with my FLS students and managemyideas with my Business Venture students next semester. I am curious to see if eventually these sites get blocked by our automated district filter that our tech people seem to have difficulty handling.
• I now use my RSS feeds to bring the most current investing news to my 1st hour FLS students. My breakfast includes a scan through the various RSS stock and company news feeds. The information is much more current and comprehensive than my previous newspaper reading.
  

On a personal note, I have used Diigo frequently as I access the above websites from home as well as school. It is so convenient to have bookmarks consistently organized and available from any computer with Internet access. I even shared my Black Sox links to help a Loyola of Chicago history major conduct her research on the 1921 and 1924 ballplayer trials.

The News & Observer from Raleigh had this interesting article about a parent denying her 8-year-old daughter Internet access at school. Fascinating piece about differences in viewpoints on the importance of online educational tools. Check it out at this link: Parents, schools at odds over Internet

CEdu 534: Week 4--Podcasts are Fun and Easy!

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I just created a podcast using GCast! I was amazed at how simple it was to log-in, record on my cell phone, and create a post that I have placed in this blog. The only thing that didn't make sense was how to post the podcast on Blogger. The instructions given by GCast were much too detailed and referred to elements of Blogger that do not exist. I finally just copied and pasted the code into the "Edit Html" tab and it worked! I believe that the GCast instructions may need updating.

I found myself very comfortable talking into my cell phone. After listening to the podcast, I discovered that I am my own worst critic. No doubt a second cut will be better. Before I do that, however, I want to test the podcast at school and make sure it works. Who knows if it will be blocked?

GCast podcasts are not blocked at school. I love Tom's idea of using podcasts for sub days. Because we don't have the ability to embed into our school websites, I might be best off to embed a Gcast into my Wetpaint wiki. I would place the URL for the wiki into my links on my school site. Using a cell phone is a great way to quickly create a podcast the night before or the morning of a day we are absent. Our sub and our students then would receive the guidance they need for a productive day in our absence.

CEdu 534: Week 3--RSS and Blogs!

Well, I just figured out how to make a link to my RSS feeds on my Blogger profile page. It took some work and messing around. After "playing" with Bloglines and Google Reader, I must admit that I feel a bit overwhelmed. I do like Google Reader better in terms of navigation and loading RSS feeds. Bloglines does not feel user-friendly to me as I had difficulty in understanding how to load and edit feeds.

Below is a button from Bloglines for my blog. However, I don't understand its purpose as it doesn't link to my feeds.





Oh well, time to move on to other things. I have added more feeds to my Google Reader aggregator. It has been fun and informative to look at recent blog postings, baseball updates with the pennant race this weekend, and business education and finance sites. I can see where my students could make great use of RSS in Financial Life Skills. Keeping current on particular companies, industries, and economic news should be highly engaging and make for great class discussions. I was amazed that students at North have a feed sidebar. I tested the feeds at school this morning, using a student log-in, and was amazed that there were no filter or blocking issues. I was pleased to see how easy it will be for my students to add feeds and then read them. I know they will love this as we start our stock market simulation.

I have been frustrated with creating my wiki so far. I tried Wikispaces first but was not happy with the way in which graphics and formatting were added and modified. Next, I tried PBWiki, knowing that we have had good results with it in our Stritch program so far. However, as I attempted to build it this evening, the site became inaccessible as Firefox claimed there is a site or server problem. I will try again tomorrow but I was all fired up to get the wiki going. I have many ideas of what to add to my NorthFLS wiki and want to try it out.

Speaking of frustrations, I also lost the last section of our research paper for this week. For some reason, Google Docs was unable to save my work. I did save what I had in a Word document but still lost the ending. I think the best approach to take for this problem is to write and save a document in Word, then copy and paste it into Google Docs. No doubt Google Docs is great for its collaboration abilities, but it still is online and may have occasional connection, server, or saving issues.

CEdu 534: Week 2--My Use of Blogs!

I must admit that I have never read blogs, except for those of my peers in this cohort, until this week. To start with, I checked out Bill Michaels' blog at Newsradio620 website. I heard him mention it this past week and, with all of the commotion about Ned Yost's firing, I thought it might be fun to check out. His blog itself was interesting to read with excellent graphics and hyperlinks to related online articles. However, I did not see a method in which to reply/comment.
I dug deeper and checked out a hyperlink for "Message Boards." Here I found SportsBubbler.com which included 2,685 threads and 94,238 posts, just on the Brewers Message Board alone. Wow! Upon further investigation, I saw that person who posted had a profile, often an interesting username, and the number and rankings of their posts. Fascinating stuff!

I also checked out the NSBA Board Buzz blog, hyperlinked to a weekly e-mail I receive called Legal Clips from the National School Boards Association. As a business education teacher, one recent posting caught my attention. Called "Mortgage crisis emphasizes the critical role of financial literacy for today’s generation," this posting offered helpful resources for teachers, not just business educators, to use in teaching their students about spending, saving, and borrowing habits. I will search further for similar business education and financial literacy blogs, especially those that contain postings about current economic and business news.

CEdu 527--Week 5: Data Use and Instructional Leadership

This past week, I found many ways in which to observe and implement what we have learned in CEdu 527. The interpretation and use of test scores in Menomonee Falls was a popular topic this week around our town and Chapter 6 of our text helped prepare me for the beginning of school in three weeks.

First, as Megan and I prepared our Virtual Data Retreat worksheet, I began to understand how our district uses this data. The WINSS website was particularly informative as I learned how to observe trends and look at subgroups in the various content areas. Because Menomonee Falls did not meet AYP in reading and math for 10th graders with special needs, testing data immediately become of personal interest. The timing of this class could not have better as, in the last few weeks, I have received letters from our administration, read articles in the newspapers, and attended our district annual meeting. In all of these, test data and interpretation and courses of action to improve these test scores were all hot topics. I am very glad to see that excuse making was kept to a minimum and that concrete measures were recommended by our administration in order to improve our work with students with disabilities. On a side note, I also used WINSS to help my wife obtain demographic data about her youthful parishioners at her new church in Janesville. It was fascinating to compare not only these demographics, but also WKCE test results of Janesville, Menomonee Falls, and Marshall, the town we lived in from 2000-2005.

Chapter 6 of our text served as an excellent preparation for me with opening day of school only three weeks. I found it helpful, reinforcing, and motivating to read again about meeting all of our students' needs through effective instruction, curriculum mapping, differentiation, assessments, creating community, communication and relevancy. Our superintendent also stressed these best practices last night at our public budget hearing and annual meeting. I look forward to beginning the school year, using many of my new resources as well as continued, and even better, use of past best practices.

CEdu 527--Week 4: Change and Leadership

During this week, I have thought about different situations in life where I was involved in change and leadership. The recent death of the pastor who confirmed and married me particularly brought this home. Pastor Opem encouraged me to become a leader in the church I grew up in. He understood how to do this as a process. First, he asked me to teach Sunday School and serve as a lay reader. He then gradually moved me into positions of leadership such as Sunday School superintendent and lay preacher. As a leader, Pastor Opem recognized how to develop new leaders, but only over an appropriate time period. In addition, he orchestrated the change of a building program. He followed many of Gabriel's adaptive leadership techniques, some of which I have used as Little League president (building a 4 diamond complex) and my wife has used as a pastor (church building projects). When I go to his visitation tomorrow evening, I will be thinking of his leadership and mentoring skills.

Several things from our work this past week were very helpful. First, the Analysis of Change Activity made me realize how important it is to plan ahead, anticipate potential problems, and reflect when involved in the change process. Second, Gabriel's chapter 5 offered so many practical ideas for improving our school climate, morale, and community. His section on how to work through the many problems with our current high stakes testing environment was helpful and made me look forward to helping students in the future with my business vocational license. I also found many tips on how to support my fellow teachers. Even though I am not a department chair, I can still serve as a teacher leader by supporting my peers through collaboration, hallway presence, recognition, social activities, help during difficult times, and communication.

CEdu 527--Week 3: Applying Our Leadership Skills this Week

This past week, I have been in Florida, serving as a coach for my daughter's 16U fastpitch team. I have been able to apply so much of what we have learned in this class in my role as coach for our girls and a leader for our parents. Organizing side trips, meals, line-ups, finances, and schedules has been very interesting and challenging. Using Gabriel's tips on building consensus and mediating conflict has been most helpful on this trip. 13 high school girls, 2 overwhelmed house moms, and parents ranging from hands-off to meddling have provided me with many opportunities to try out what we have learned thus far in this course. I have actually enjoyed the process and the results and find myself quickly growing as a leader.

I have also been able to help my wife as she assumes the leadership role as pastor in her new church in Janesville. The "Who Moved My Cheese" video offered insights into how parishioners might react to the changes going on in their church. In addition, I have offered some of Gabriel's suggestions ("build support by identifying your supporters" "let someone else propose the change" "sit on your hands") regarding some upcoming potentially difficult personnel changes.

As a developing leader and teacher, I found the Beloit list and the Tune In article most helpful in acquiring a better understanding of what people of different ages and generations know and how they have grown up. Helping my dad learn how to use his new laptop in the next few weeks will certainly test my skills on how to relate with and teach a traditionalist (born in 1937) technology tools that are completely foreign to him at this point.

I look forward to applying what we have learned in this course and applied this summer at Falls North Junior High this autumn.

CEdu 527--Week 2: Using What We Learned this Week

In the past, I have wondered how an elective teacher can be involved in using data to improve our district's test scores. After my discussion with our principal, reading the "Guide to Using Data in School Improvement Efforts" document, and reading and replying to our online discussion board, I think I have some ideas.
First, my offer to serve on our next data retreat was enthusiastically received by our principal. Since our 10th graders did not meet AYP in reading and math, I believe that I can be of service to our students by learning more about how to incorporate reading and math standards into our business education curriculum. In addition, I can use my marketing background to help our data retreat group delve further into the demographics involved with our student groups that were low in advanced or proficient test scores.
Second, I plan on serving as a mentor to the maximum of three students again this year. I will request that I be matched with students that need extra support with their core academic areas. Even though I am not an English or math teacher, I can certainly collaborate with teachers from those core content area in order to assist my mentees in areas that they are struggling with.
Finally, our principal gave me a copy of the English Language Arts state standards that will receive greater emphasis this year. Many of these standards can be reinforced through reading and follow-up analysis in our business education curriculum. I have used the Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition for pertinent articles in my Business Venture classes. This could easily be expanded into Financial Life Skills. In particular, Standard A.8.4 (Read to acquire information) stresses comparing, contrasting, and evaluating articles, charts, and tables for accuracy and usefulness. I could easily add lessons that deal with this in our investing unit in FLS and marketing concepts in BV.

CEdu 527--Week 1: My School Leadership Roles

This has been a fascinating week of class in that reading my classmates' replies was so enlightening. All of us appear to be teacher leaders in one role or another and have also experienced a lack of leadership at times with peers or administrators. Sharing and comparing with each other has been most helpful in learning more about leadership.

I felt myself becoming a teacher leader last fall, my third year at Falls North Junior High. Believe it or not, my sense of leadership arose from DodgeBall. I was beginning my second year on our 8th grade WKCE committee. We were looking to find a wrap-up/rewards activity that would motivate our students as well as allow them to blow off some steam after several days of tedious, yet necessary testing. As we were brainstorming, I brought up how well DodgeBall worked as a rewards activity when I was subbing in Marshall. I also mentioned that our new Falls business manager, Jeff Gross (he formerly held the same position in Marshall), and our Marshall superintendent, Dean Gorrell, had participated in a staff/student DodgeBall tournament. This was a big hit in Marshall so I volunteered to organize and lead this in the Falls.

Even though it was a great deal of work, as Gabriel warned in his book, the effort was well worth it. Students and staff loved the competition and team building and we plan on doing it again this fall. I received many compliments from administration, staff, and students and suddenly found myself in a new leadership role, that of DodgeBall commissioner. Our 8th graders were motivated to work hard and get through WKCE because they knew we had a fun and physical activity as a reward. They loved creating boys only, girls only, and coed teams. The team names they created were hilarious and some teams even made up team t-shirts and outfits, similar to the Ben Stiller movie. Our guidance department, with funding from our very supportive principal, made up champion t-shirts that students often proudly wore all of the way until the end of the school year. Our PTSA even jumped on the bandwagon by asking me to organize a DodgeBall tournament for their Friday Frenzy student activity afternoon in February.

My commissionership allowed me to also work more closely with our principal, associate principal, and superintendent. There were legitimate concerns regarding workman's comp if a teacher were to get injured. However, I assuaged those concerns by making sure that all of us "older" teachers had done proper stretching with a warm-up led by one of our highly-regarded phy. ed. teachers. No one got hurt, everything went very well, and I will tweak a few things for this fall such as the sound system, team creation, sign-up deadlines, etc. As a teacher leader, I tried to be very observant during the event so that next year can be even better.

In conclusion, I want to list other areas in which I am a teacher leader:

• E4E Committee: This is a district committee that supports our voc. ed program and connects our staff to the business community. As a former retailer with a voc. ed. certification, I have been able to effectively contribute to this group.
• Softball coach: No doubt that I love this leadership position and learn so much from my fellow coaches.
• Business Education teacher hiring committee: I bring my interviewing and hiring experience to this group and am gratified that our selections thus far have lived up to their tremendous promise.
• Informal technology coach: My fellow bus. ed. teacher, Tami Strong, and I happily serve as teacher leaders by assisting our staff with hardware and software issues, particularly with how they apply to classroom learning.

CEdu 533--Week 5: Building a Website is Addicting!!

After working on my final project Website over the last several days, I found myself hooked on the process and greatly enjoyed the results. Learning how to make tables, using ImageChef and ClockLink, changing hyperlink colors, and linking to investing websites has been an enlightening experience. I now have a much greater appreciation of the work that goes into creating Websites and view sites with a more critical eye.

My only previous experience with HTML is with Classzoom, our district's CMS. The help link in Classzoom allows for only the basics such as underline, bold, and italic. This final project helped me learn more creative HTML options such as alignment, color hex values, ordered and unordered lists, and table hyperlinks, padding, spacing, and borders.

Over the weekend, I will make greater use of graphics in my final project, while always keeping in mind that my audience is my 8th and 9th grade students. I look forward to using this project in my Financial Life Skills classes this fall and eagerly anticipate my students' reviews (positives and negatives) on being introduced to a stock market simulation through web-based learning.

CEdu 533--Week 4: Thoughts on Websites for School Use

As we enter the last two weeks of this course, I am thinking of ways to incorporate what we have learned into my business education classes at North Junior High. Here they are:

• The embedded Google Docs custard demo was fascinating in that I could poll my students on their thoughts about our courses, their research on stocks for our stock market simulation, or sharing their findings when comparison shopping in our budgeting and consumerism unit.



• The website I am creating for our final project will serve as an introduction to StocksQuest, the free online stock market simulation we switched to last semester. Not only could I instruct my students on how to create accounts and execute trades, but this website and linked pages could also be used to teach students about relevant stock and investing terms and strategies. I will be evaluating age-appropriate sites that pass the rules we created in our "What Makes a Good Website?" group project.
  

On a personal note, I checked out the Microsoft Office Templates for Teachers link on John's blog. Our district did not allow the necessary Media ActiveX Control for downloading the Education Credits Tracker or Substitute Teacher Instructions template. I will try to download these useful-looking templates at home. It will be nice to become more organized in these two areas. Thanks for the tip!

Ced533—Week 3: Reflections on Web Design after a 3 Week Hiatus!

After wrapping up the school year and thinking about what we have learned so far in CEd533, I have come up with the following observations:

• I certainly look at websites with a more critical eye now. In particular, I was checking out my daughter’s summer fastpitch team site. As a coach, I sent sponsor information to the web designer. When I checked a week later, the site had not been updated and, in fact, the home page still said it was 2007. I will bring this up to our program’s head coach and let him know that we need to achieve a much higher level of currency.

Here is the link: http://www.worldseriestc.com/home.html

• My brother runs a gas barbeque grill assembly shop and retail outlet in Butler. The two manufacturers that he represents have websites, one of which he would like our study group to critique. As a business education teacher, I will enjoy reviewing this site with my group. I may have more of a managerial approach whereas my group members may have more of a consumer perspective. Both are important to consider.

Here is the link: http://www.modernhomeproducts.com/

• I look forward to learning about CSS, Java, content management systems, and helper software such as Dreamweaver. Many of my business education peers teach Dreamweaver and I need to have a basic understanding of it, whether obtained in this course or in my own work this summer.
• I wonder how easily I will pick up HTML again after being away from it for several weeks. I finally started to grasp it in Week 3 and I am curious how my retention will be. In addition, I have done our HTML work at my school. However, now that the school year is over and I have turned my keys in, I hope that our home computer will work well for my web pages. I did have some difficulties with Filezilla and graphics at home back in Week 1, but that may have been my inexperience more than anything else.

CEd533—Week 2: Wow! HTML is the Hardest Thing I have Tried in our Program!

After a week of playing with HTML and FileZilla, I have a much greater appreciation for those who work with HTML. I am SO looking forward to using an editor in the future. Overall, I struggled with file naming, proper placement of code, and creation of and the URL of a second website linked to my first. I was fortunate to receive help from Tom, Megan, and Jenny of my study group and from my children, Jeff and Beth.

Here are some random observations:

· I never thought of a jump drive as a “portable desktop” until my study group helped me understand that I could save the Filezilla folder and HTML Notepad documents on my jump drive without needing to save them to my home or school computers.

· Also, I was able to download my FileZilla folder to both my school and home computers. I was surprised that it worked at school. At home, the graphics did not load so I did my Web/HTML work in my classroom. As the week moved on, I just used my jump drive and deleted the FileZilla folders from home and school.

· For whatever reason (maybe being 46-years-old?), I did not initially understand the process of opening the Website and the Filezilla files and updating my site. I am OK with the HTML: it is the file and folder sequence that did not click for me. I think I just needed some repetition and help and then it stuck. I will assume that there are easier ways to create Websites!

I was very frustrated with HTML for the following reasons:
· I did not understand where to place the HTML tags in the NotePad document
· I did not understand why I need to resave my NotePad htm documents with different file names
· I do not understand how I can make text BOLD in my Classzoom school website but I cannot do it in FileZilla.
· I could not figure out how to embed my VoiceThread video from our last class into my personal Website.