Blog #2

Jason Gaylord
February 1, 2009
Educ 422, MW 1-2:15
Instructor: McCulloch

This week in Educ 422, I learned about the website del.icio.us. It makes cataloging all of your favorite sites much easier and neat. I thought it was really cool because its primary goal for users is to utilize the site for social bookmarking. Social Bookmarking is important to teachers because it allows students to use predetermined sites prescribed by the teacher to do assignments, as well as, allows other teachers to see what their colleagues are using as sites for teaching in order to streamline and come up with more effective and efficient lesson plans and learning tools. Personally, I am excited to use the site once I have a classroom because it will allow me to direct students to the best sites and most academically respected material in the field of study.

Also this week, in the internet assignment, there were several helpful learning websites listed. In my exploration of some of these sites, I found that most of them would be helpful in teaching a class in the particular field I want to teach. For instance, Rubistar would be helpful because it allows teachers to create a standard students need to follow in order to succeed on the assignment or course. As well, it allows teachers to easily assess the performance of students and their progress with the material. Something, however, that I thought would be even more important to students about RubiStar was that it allows students to track and see their progress.

In the reading for this week, I found quite a few helpful tips and philosophies about learning. With regards to the article "Teaching for Understanding," the article explains that students have many preconceived ideas before they ever step foot into the classroom, and with these preconceived notions, each student learns differently than the other. Keeping this in mind, teachers should come up with several ways to change students preconceived misconceptions and as the article explains, a good way to do this is by developing several different teaching strategies with technology. For example, technology allows students to explore many different explanations that challenge their misconceptions, as well as, allows students to find several formats, in which, these misconceptions are busted. Maybe one of the most helpful ways technology can help a teacher explain to students the rights and wrongs about a particular subject is by helping teachers quickly assess the misconceptions students have about a subject or lesson. Summarized, technology should allow a teacher to quickly identify the problems students are having and offer many different learning methods to change their minds, as well as, allow students to participate in this experience bringing the things they learned in complete harmony with the knowledge they already have.

Netiquette, another reading for this week, simply is the correct way, in which people should correspond over the internet. There are several lessons and rules to be followed in Netiquette, but the most far reaching rule, is that the way you correspond in business, is the way you should correspond over the web. For instance, be sure to be clear and not vague in emails. Also, allow some time to pass when responding to an email you think may be provoking because simply put, you may just be misunderstanding the others prose.

Jason Gaylord