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In this one year that I have spent dealing with educating students in my education classes I have learned so much knowledge. One of the most important things I have learned is ongoing use of new technology that is being introduced and used in classrooms today. Blogging for instance is a great interactive tool that can be used by both teachers and students. The classroom blog can be set up so that the students can see what is going on in the class and what is coming up like test or field trips. A good instructional tool would be the podcast, they can be posted for the students to download them and put them on their ipod. This way student can have their lessons and listen to them whenever they have a chance throughout their busy day. Students also have access to sites such as Wikipedia and youtube which can be used as a helpful source for things they do not understand. Wikipedia is a good starter point for research but should not be used as a reference. Google also has its own tools that are helpful like google docs which lets anyone with internet access be able to get on.
Burp back education was another thing that I learned about this year. Burp back education is when a student just repeats on paper what he has hears from the teacher. Burp back is mainly the teacher’s problem because they do not try to get the children to interact with the lesson which in return the students do not learn anything. The teacher actually needs to put some thought into the lesson and figure out how to make it fun. The more fun and interactive the lesson becomes the more the students will learn. Burp back can also be the students fault to. Children these days have become listen/watchers which means they would rather watch then do. So encouraging the children to interact with the lesson and planning more hands on work will help the learning process to.

The Music from Sand

Booming Sand is something that I can truly say I have never heard of until today. Booming sand is the name that they have given to the sand dooms that put off sounds. Cali tech team did a study on this phenomenon to see why the sand makes this sound. The team discovered that one of the reasons behind it is the layers or sand that makes up the sand dooms. There are two layers to these sand dooms the top lose layer and the damp layer underneath that creates surface tension to keep both of the layers together. Once the top layer dries out that is when cohesion begins and pretty much cause the first layer to shed off. This sends an avalanche of sand down the dooms sending the potential energy into kinetic energy as the sand moves.
The researchers when out to the dooms to test their theory by having five or six different people sliding down at once to try to send the first layer down and make a sound. The experiment was a success then they did further testing that reviled these sand dooms as having a unusual trait that made them different from the rest. The difference is these the sand grains of these sand dooms are all the same size so when they hit each other they hit at the same frequency. The last thing they discovered was that the degree of mobility of the top layer compared to the layer underneath was another factor that causes the sound. They are still doing studies on it though hoping to one day find all the answer to why the sand makes noise.
As a teacher and student it is pretty neat to see the booming sand on video and not only that but to learn about something in another place of the world. It helps us be more knowledgeable about the world and not just what is going on in the United States.

Seeing the world from a new Lens

Today I learned about Infrared lights off of my ipod and it was pretty neat. I knew you could hook up videos to your ipod from learning about ituneU but this was the first time I really ever messed around with it. Then as I watch it I realized how much of an asset this can be to classrooms.
The Lesson on Infrared lights was very education it talked about how they worked and what they are being used for to help out in science. Infrared lights are used to pick up the lights or objects temperature. Each color light has its own different temperature and sets off its own distinct color under an infrared camera. The colder the object is the darker the color it puts off and the hotter it is the lighter the color is. There are also different sizes of lights the smallest of them all are called gamma waves and they happen to be smaller than an atom. Then the largest are radio waves which can have waves larger that then size of earth, neither gamma nor radio waves can be seen with the eyes. Infrared can also pick up things that are stop by visual lights like seeing a persons hands inside a garbage bag. Infrared is blocked by some things though that visual light can get through like a piece of glass or the earths atmosphere, which is why the earth is getting warmer.
The way that infrared lighting is being used today is by firefighters who use it to find people through the dense fog of smoke in the burning buildings. Astronomers are using it also to find new planets around other stars. The planets put off no light and are hard to spot out between all the stars and that’s where the Infrared light comes in handy to spot them out. Infrared lights will be used more in the future and will be able to give us a more complete view of the universe which will finally let us see more than our eye can see.
Learning all of this about Infrared lights on my ipod was very cool. I mean first I did not see it as a big help or big deal but after being able to use it changed my whole perspective. It is like walking around with a classroom full of lessons in your pocket. This helps out teachers to if they did not get everything they wanted to discuss in the classroom or forgot the movie they wanted to show them at the house they could just upload it to itunes and tell their students to get it off their. By being able to load videos and lessons on to the computer has started a new cool way kids can have fun learning information.

iTunes U

iTunes U puts the power of the iTunes Store to work for colleges, universities, and other education organizations, so students can easily search, download, and play education content just like they do music, movies, and TV shows. Learning no longer happens only at a desk. Students now expect constant access to information, no matter where they are. Which is exactly why more and more faculty are using iTunes U to distribute digital lessons to their students. Audio and video podcasts let students study at their own pace, wherever and whenever they want.
iTunes U, part of the iTunes Store, is a free educational media available to students, teachers, and learners. With over 100,000 educational audio and video files available, iTunes U has quickly become the engine for the mobile learning movement. It puts the power of the iTunes Store in the hands of qualifying universities so they can distribute their educational media to their students or to the world. Teachers are using iLife and iWork applications on the Mac to create customized educational materials, such as language lessons that students can listen to on the bus or at home. And with the help of tools like Podcast Producer and Wiki Server IT professionals at your school can help you produce and distribute all kinds of multimedia content on iTunes U.
Administrative access is integrated with Apple ID, and so for student access their own account they need a password for the iTunes U site. This also enables the student to create and manage the content available on the site, while controlling who can access and download resources from it.
I think this is a great idea so now we can all have access to the classroom information anywhere we are. So there are no excuses to teachers for not getting the assignments anymore if the student was sick or out a day. This also helps the student so that they do not get behind in the class.

iPods can Teach

The classroom band on electronics might be over for good now. When I was growing up there was no uses of any pagers, phones, or cd players in classroom because they cause to much of a distraction for students but now they are learning that they can actually help the students education, well not pages but phones and ipods. With the new advancements in technology it looks like students or going to not have to hide that ipod anymore.
iPod and iTunes, mobile learning is changing education in a big way. In Hudson County teachers have been handing out the portable digital players to help bilingual students with limited English ability sharpen their vocabulary and grammar by singing along to popular songs. Also there is the Union City district that will give out 300 iPods at its schools as part of a $130,000 experiment in one of New Jersey’s poorest urban school systems. But these devices are not just being used for their original music purpose with the internet connection that they have student have access to podcast put on the schools websites by the teachers also they can use it for research purposes to. iPod and iPhone devices are becoming people’s portable computers so they can come to class with the Internet in their pocket. Students have 24/7 access to content, so they can connect and study when they want, where they want.
At Duke University they are using the iPods as a place to set up peer reviews and audio feedback on them. Julie and Vicki noticed that when they gave students feedback on their writing, audio feedback was more time-efficient and seemed to be of higher quality than written comments. So listening to things has show to be more education than reading them.
The draw back to iPod education is students using them for other purposes in the classroom or students loading answers or formulas onto the iPod so they can cheat on test. But cheating and distractions are going to happen in classrooms anyway the job is just to limit them by making education fun for the students. I think that using iPods would be fun for the students to so it will limit the distraction and it will be a great information tool to be used.

Dr. Alice Christie

Dr. Alice Christie Use to work at Arizona State University in the College of Teachers Education prior to that she taut for twenty five years in K-12 schools. Her passion is to teach students and educators the use of technology that can be used in classrooms. She does national and international workshops on the use of technology used in classrooms, she also has her own website that I explored with the great information on technology to.
Dr. Christie’s website had great information on how to enquire technology into 21century classrooms. Her believes are that technology continues to expand and grow so in order to keep up we as teacher must incorporate into the students lives. We as teachers need to teach the students how to learn and develop critical thinking skill through the internet and technology to better understand the world around them.
The way to accomplish this goal is to teach the students about the technology that already exist. For instance the emerging technology tools like the GPS which is a 12 billion dollar satellite system that the United States government put into place. The Internet is on of the most valuable that needs to be taut more about though. The internet can help everyone by its use of being able to search information, ideas, graphics, sound recordings, videos, or blogs. To use the internet as a tool effectively though students must be familiar with the tools currently available on it like search engines, online research sources, and databases. Internet communication is also a big important to teachers to and can be a big asset to their classrooms. Well designed websites made by teachers, like Dr. Christie’s, can help students and their parents have a better understanding on what is going on in the classroom.
Dr. Christie’s website was very interesting and gives a lot of good pointers on how to improve a teacher’s classroom by adding a little technology to it. The website also had links so and videos to explore but my computer was acting up and would not let me watch them. The general information on it though was very helpful and inspiring.

Wikipedia Scanner

As I was reading this article it was interesting to learn when I do my research papers that Wikipedia doesn't always have real facts. It is one of the first fact-checking sites to come up when people searching a topic. But this encyclopedia is also maintained by its users. In this case articles can be changed by companies and individuals who are subjects of the entries. Thanks to a graduate student there is now a tool known as the Wikipedia Scanner to help keep facts real.
This new tool gives you proof of why you should not rely on Wikipedia as a source. More than likely the article you read has been edited by an individual with there opinions. Wikipedia calls itself "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", which is another way of saying it is not fact-checked. It is not illegal, the point of Wikipedia is for readers to see facts and to share the facts they know on the article. But if you follow the IP address you'll see that most people who edit the article are not interested parties who want to make sure the facts are straight.
As I continued to read more on WIkipedia they showed examples such a Wal-Mart entry. The original entry stated "The average wage at Wal-Mart is almost double the federal minimum wage (Wal-Mart). However, founder Sam Walton once argued that his company should be exempt from the minimum wage". Someone with an IP address from Wal-Mart changed the entry to "Wages at Wal-Mart are about 20% less than at other retail stores. Founder Sam Walton once argued that his company should be exempt from the minimum wage".
The Wikipedia Scanner was a tool created by a grad student from California Institute of Technology known as Virgil Griffith. It was created to trace the comments and edits on Wikipedia entries back to their source IP address. The entries left anonymous are no longer anonymous on the site anymore. In results hoping to change how the entries are edited with real facts. Watching the video in the interview with Renee Montagne, Wired magazine Senior Editor Nicholas Thompson predicts that tool will eventually improve Wikipedia.