week 6 blog

          Personal Digital Assistants are mainly electronic devices that are used to help you get something done. We use them every day in class the biggest one we use are computers, projectors, and TV monitors. They are a great tool in class because they can help a teacher get their point across by using visual aid. You can also use them to help the students follow along while you’re teaching them. We also use them to do assignments, because they make research projects easier to complete. Now that we have computers you don’t have to go the library as much now as in the past because everything you need can be found on the internet.

              We use on line surveys to find out information about how everyone feels about something. We use them in a class room to find out what we should change about our class. Many teachers use them to find out what their students know about the topic they are getting ready to teach them so they know where to start. The Information from these surveys should be used and implemented within good reason. One the rules for writing good surveys is, avoid using question that you are bias to. If your bias to something then you aren’t really as open as you should be. The second to me is avoid long question in order to get actual information using agree or don’t agree format would work better.

            I feel that if used properly both of these tools can be very beneficial to the learning process used by teachers. The hardest part will be monitoring each of your students to make sure that when using a computer or any other device they are only doing their work and not playing games or looking at inappropriate material. The only thing about online surveys is if you’re going to take the time to make one for your students then make sure you’re going to at least try to incorporate whatever you learn to make your class better. You also to make sure that the questions are age and lesson appropriate, its mot smart to have question about puppies when the lesson is about English teachers. Another thing  is don’t try to only use digital assistants to teach the class for you just use them as a  helper and not the only class material.  
citation 
JONASSEN, DAVID, HOWLAND, JANE, MARRA, ROSE M, & CRISMOND, DAVID. (1999). Meaningful learning with technology 3rd edition . New Jersy,New York: Pearson.
       

journal review

Jerome Jones

Etec 424

February 10 2011

Journal Review # 1

CITATION:

Hunt, W., & Coutts, J. (2009). Extension in Tough Times--Addressing Failures in Public and Private Extension, Lessons from the Tasmanian Wool Industry, Australia. Journal of agricultural education and extension, 15(1), 39-55. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

SUMMARY:

The article to me was about the government of certain parts of Africa is trying figure out how they can use different methods to try to get all the parties involved in production agriculture to agree, and give each other feedback and work together for the betterment of agricultural technology practices. That have a lot of different programs set up to try and help solve all the problems, but they can’t get high levels of participation from both sides. The officials of the organizations feel that they have to get everyone from the scientists to the small scale farmers to work together for the betterment of agriculture in Africa.

They are trying to change the agricultural system from being supply driven to demand led. They are even trying to better educate everyone involved, but it’s hard to get the farmers to come to the teaching sessions without some kind of incentives to ensure everyone comes out. This strategy works because many of the poor farmers won’t pass up a free meal. They have to get the farmers, extension agents, and scientists all on the same page, because when new advances are made they need each other to implement everything. This hard though because many of the farmers aren’t as willing to work with the other I have personally heard several farmers say “you can’t tell a farmer how to farm”, but the same can be said for scientist who normally works alone. I feel that in a eat or starve based agricultural system like in most parts of Africa they should all try their best to work together to make sure no one starves and every farmer, scientist ,and extension agent is a equal partner in everything advancement that can help the them all out in the future.

    

PERSONAL REACTION:

This article sparked my interests because the article dealt with problems getting everyone to work towards the same goal, which is getting everyone to implementing new technological advances in agriculture to help fight poverty. This article gave me a better understanding of how many different people are involved in technology advances, and how it’s hard to get everyone to agree on one goal, but it is harder to get everyone too share blame or credit for something new whether it works or not. I now understand that one of the biggest problems they faced is trying to get the well educated scientist and the poorly educated farmers to work together effectively, because scientist are used to working solo while with a farmer everyone helps out and share work. I agree with that because I know I in most cases would rather work alone, and when I’m forced to work in a group I don’t do as well. It also shows me that it takes great management and organizational skills to help both sides coexist, and work well together for the betterment of the group.  

In my previous teaching experience I learned that when you have your students working in groups, the two biggest things you have to make sure is that you have all your teaching material organized and that everyone in each group works well together. If you as the instructor don’t have everything ready then your students will not be on task and that’s when no learning is going on and especially when technology is involved there is a lot of stuff on the computers your students shouldn’t be looking at, so when they are not doing anything constructive bad stuff tends to happen. I also know from experience that not every student you put in a group will work well together some of the students you have will lay back and not do anything it’s your job to make sure everyone does equal shares of the work. Teaching requires many skills and if you don’t posses those skills maybe you should reconsider your career plans.        

week 3 homeworl

          When I watched both videos on the websites the two programs would be great assets to any school that values education, but with many schools being low performance and having shrinking budgets every year many school districts couldn’t afford to buy the software. Even if the schools found away to fund the software their computer are either out dated or they don’t have enough computers to use the programs effectively. The three things I liked the most were how they talked about how safe and secure the websites are, how you could use the software to encourage students and their friends to help each other with their writing projects, and how simple and easy both programs are to use by the students.  I would use inspiration mainly for PowerPoint projects and notes, because of its simple but effective make up students would need very little assistance from you the teacher so you would be able to help every student better. I thought Webspiration classroom would be a great tool to help all your students learn to write and communicate on a high level if you had enough computers for everyone to use.

                 Creative writing or collaborative writing assignments would be the best fit for the use of those technology programs. You can use a program where the students proofread and edit each other’s papers so that you will only have to grade their papers once and grade everyone’s revisions and multiple rough drafts of their papers. You can use one of the programs that were discussed in both chapters that are designed to help with peer editing, revision, and feedback. At my first volunteer job as a pee-wee football coach, I had to teach the younger kids how to block correctly, which was very hard thought I knew how to block pretty well since I played varsity football, but I was wrong. I learned after, working with the children that not one style works with every child you have try to find what works best for each one to be effective.

             I think that all of these programs are very valuable tools that aid any teacher in her goal to help students learn more, but many schools don’t have the money or the resources to pay for the equipment that would be needed to make the programs really effective. For school districts that can afford the software and the manpower that would be needed to work and monitor all this stuff effectively then they should get the software, but the school districts that cant shouldn’t waste their time with it because it won’t be effective.

http://www.inspiration.com/videos/Inspiration,

http://www.inspiration.com/webspirationclassroom

Jerome Jones