Yodio - OTEN conference 2010

Here is my Yodio report on the September 25, 2010 OTEN conference. I attended the keynote speech by Tim Lauer, principal of Meriwether Lewis Elementary School, Jeffrey Barlow's presentation on "Using Technology in Social Studies Classrooms," and Suzette Lewis' presentation on "World of Warcraft: Social constructivism in a virtual world and applications to the real world classroom." My Yodio is long, and explains them in great detail, so I won't say much more here.


Yodio was a frustrating program for me to use. It didn't tell me when to record the first time, so it started recording half way through my talk, and then it interrupted me in the middle of my second time through, so by the time it interrupted me at the end of my third recording, I jsut decided I'd said enough anyway, and put it up there. I have all these images I thought I could attach, but apparently you can only put one image per track, and there's no way I'm going to try and record this another time, so I just chose the picture of Jane McGonigal giving her TED speech, of which we watched a small segment in the World of Warcraft related presentation.

My take on OETS

After reading through the Oregon Education Technology Standards (OETS), I believe that I can speak to the main idea behind such standards. Our society is moving toward a mobile, technologically savvy population and workplace, so in order to even function in such a society, students must learn how to utilize technology in a variety of situations, and not only use it to learn and critically think, but also learn how to become good digital citizens as well. Since parents are not as up on the latest technology as their children, it's up to educators to make sure that our future generations can use technology in a useful and appropriate manner.

As a language arts teacher, research and information fluency (Standard #3), is a huge deal. All students will be required to write essays and find sources, and anymore, the easiest way to find sources is to search online. Developing these online researching skills will stand every student in good stead, whether or not they go on to higher education, because finding information online, such as finding the cheapest insurance, to quickly finding out a politician's platform, has become a life skill in our society. Also, as educators, we have to make sure that our students can use the appropriate tools for the task, so we must help them be able to analyze the sources they find and evaluate them for their biases and trustworthiness. All of these skills that revolve around research and information fluency are some of the most important skills that some students can learn from secondary education.

Evaluating online sources also relates to critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making (Standard #4), as we teach students about various ways to find information, they must figure out which source is best for the kind of information they need, and which source is the most free of biases and wrong information, and then make decisions based on their findings. I believe a good activity for my students would be to have them each take a Wikipedia article in which they are interested, and examine it for biases, and examine the sources that each article uses, and then see if they can improve it. Not only will it engage them in critical thinking and evaluating, it will interest them in writing and in thinking about how their writing appears when it is available to a wide audience, such as those who will find it on the internet. There are many more practical applications of technology I can see using in a language arts classroom, such as blogging to promote good digital citizenship and outside classroom discussion, but critical thinking and researching are two of the biggest categories necessary for language arts classes.

Multimedia Presentation on Dropbox

I chose Dropbox since I have a lot of experience with it now, and I used Screenr to record this video, because Screentoaster was having an issue with stopping recording. Dropbox is fantastic because it creates an online space for me to store documents and photos, which is very useful in an profession, but definitely as a teacher. I have a folder on my Dropbox that I share with the other members of my content area, and we're going to use it for lesson planning and sharing materials. I can also use it to store my lesson plan and presentations for teaching, and I won't have to carry all sorts of papers around with me.



The only truly annoying part of this experience was that I had to create a Twitter account in order to do this, and I have so many accounts to so many different free web-based programs now, that I can't even keep track of which site I have accounts at. I hope that this comic never happens:

Pretend Data Analysis in Google Sheets

Google Spreadsheet is never a quick and easy proposition for me to navigate. I managed to muddle through it again, but it took me over two hours to make my tables and graph look good. I followed instructions, copying and pasting and separating my sheets, and watched the tutorial so I could remember how to do simple things like finding the averages. I hid columns C-G since they were unnecessary in the original data sheet, but in the 'Below Average' data sheet, I deleted them entirely because the graph was doing strange things, and it seemed to be seeing them. Interestingly enough, embedding the sheets was the easiest part for me. Through much determination, and many views of Tony and Denise's examples, my final charts and graph are below:



I can see how these data sheets would be very useful for analyzing how well my class is doing later in the year. I can look at both the individual, as well as the overall growth trend. I can look at Walter, and notice that he improved the least, but he at least brought himself up from where he was with his last test score. I can look at Renee's progress, and see that, even though she started with one of the lowest scores, she improved with each test. I can also look at Katherine, and wonder what happened, and perhaps go back and review her tests to see why she did so well on Test 7, and then plummeted down again on Test 8, never fully recovering. The statistical anomalies are much more apparent when the scores are all graphed out. My originals can be seen here.