Educational Technology

             For this weeks assignment we were asked to do a vanity search. Which just starts with entering your name in quotes in the google search bar. I was kind of amazed at what I found. The first thing that pops up is my LinkedIn account that I created about 5 years ago and have not really done anything with for at least a year. The next link that pops up is a link to my current job’s website along with my contact information.  The next link is a link to a website called MyLife. Which states my birthday and every city that I have lived in over the last ten years along with the addresses.  Also with only giving them a name and email address you can learn any public record that I have ever had. After that there is the standard Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts that I own.  If you go to any one of those social media accounts you will find that I have not updated things for quite sometime. Even longer ago than my Linked...

Okay for the assignment this week I choose to do content objects because I knew of a few resources online but I thought there has to be more and I really don't have the time to research them much because I am teaching full time.  So I took the opportunity this week to try to find some more resources that I didn't already know about.  It was a great experience and I want to share some of the resources that I found.  So first I think that I need to tell you that I teach physics which is a great subject that lends itself well to simulations.  This was the first one that I explored.  There is the website PHET.  Which stands for physics education technology.  I already kind of knew about this website but I have not taken the time to really explore all that it has to offer until this week. Let me tell you it was an eye opening experience.  It has all kinds of resources that I didn't know about.  I mean there are the simulations themselves which a...

                    So this weeks assignment was to explore different creative tools that they have using technology.  There are so many out there.  There are tools for creating videos.  I explored a few of them.  imovie is an app from Apple that helps you create movies from clips that you can film yourself.  This is a very handy tool. That students can use very easily.  I think that most of my students have some kind of smart phone in their pocket.  Most of them use them to consume content.  Few use them to create content but they are very useful tools for that if you combine them with imovie or splice or filmmaker pro or videoshop.  all of which are very similar in what they can do and you can get each one for free on the iphone.  I think videos for assignments offer a unique way for students to express themselves and it is a wide open field as for options of what the students can do....

Eportfolios For this assignment I am suppose to reflect on the "folio thinking."  Being a science teacher I have not often thought about folios as being something that you could do.  I was never required by any of my science classes throughout the years to make a folio and I always thought that was mostly a art thing.  I would always hear from my friends that were in art classes about their folio and how they needed to make an art piece to go in their folio.   Or that they were making an art piece just so they could show their range in the art.  I ways thought that was a good idea for art.  You could glance through and artist portfolio and easily tell wither or not you would want that particular artist painting something for you.  As I explored the idea more and more and thought about it more and more this week.  I don't know why we don't use it in more fields.  It seems to me like the idea is catching on more and more in universities....

My first post Welcome to my educational technology blog.  I am writing this for my masters degree in physics education.  I think a valuable part of any education these days is the technology that you can use to further that education in learning and teaching.  I have started a blog before and when I was starting that blog I researched the best place to start a blog there are so many different ways to do it these days.  You can start a blog here at blogger.  You can create a blog on wix, or squarespace or weebly or many others.  You can even make a website in google and post it like a blog.  There are many different advantages and disadvantages to the different sites.  Some of the ones that are dedicated to only blogging (ie. blogger, blog.com, etc.) are more user friendly to the person that just wants to blog and doesn't want to customize the look of their blog or learn any coding.  However sites like that are also limited in how you can c...