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.