Free Online Applications

Zoho

I highly recommend Zoho to my coworkers for their use, and their students use. The Zoho Office Suite is a Web-based online office suite containing word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, note-taking, wikis, customer relationship management (CRM), project management, invoicing, and other applications developed by ZOHO Corporation. It was launched in 2005 with a web-based word processor. One of the strong points of Zoho is that you can use all the Microsoft office programs online (free!) and you can collaborate with your fellows online. Zoho applications are divided in three groups: Collaborative Applications, Business Applications and Productivity Applications.

v  Collaborative Applications: chat, docs, discussions, mail, meeting, project and wiki.

v   Business Applications: assist, books, bug tracker, campaigns, creators, CMR, invoice, live desk, market place, people, recruit, report, site 24/7 and support

v  Productivity Applications: calendar, notebook, sheet, writer and show.   

Sumo Paint

            Sumo paint is an easy and fun image editor tool; you can use it online without having to install nothing in your hard drive. You can edit and share images as a professional just like Photoshop. Sumo has many of the same tools of Photoshop, but Sumo is more addressed to work with illustrations than with heavy images. The advantages are that first, it's free, second, is easy to use, third, you can work online making it easy to share.

Google Sites

Google site is a very interesting place where you can create awesome websites that can be very useful in your instructional design. For this assignment I created an ‘’Annotated Websites’’ with the purpose of have a place where I can find resources and references with the information that I need for work in my projects. I am currently working in a project about Emerging technologies and Technology integration in the classroom. So, with this website I can find all the information that I will need in just one place. This site has two pages; the main page has a vast list of sites with technology integration articles with links and a detailed description of what you can find in each page. The second page has a list of web 2.0 applications with a description of each tool.

I also plan to use this site to integrate in my lesson plan as a tool to engage my students in researches of different topics. Further on I’ll incorporate more information about others themes that allow students use as a support site.

Here is my link: https://sites.google.com/site/instructionaltechnologyedt5410/home 

Bubbl.us

This concept map represents the elements of a novel, structure and plot. My idea with this concept map is to explain to my seven grade students in a simple ways the basic elements of a novel. I planned to use the example for a literature class.   

Description of the concept map:

Conflict and Character within Story Structure.

The Basic Three Act Structure:

Act 1 (Beginning), Act 2 (Middle), and Act 3 (End) refer not to where in time in the story they lie but instead fundamental stages along the way.

In the Beginning you introduce the reader to the setting, the characters and the situation (conflict) they find themselves in and their goal. Plot Point 1 is a situation that drives the main character from their "normal" life toward some different conflicting situation that the story is about. 

In the Middle the story develops through a series of complications and obstacles, each leading to a mini crisis. Though each of these crises are temporarily resolved, the story leads inevitably to an ultimate crisis—the Climax. 

In the End, the Climax and the loose ends of the story are resolved during the Denouement. Tension rapidly dissipates because it's nearly impossible to sustain a reader's interest very long after the climax. Finish your story and get out.

Reference

http://www.musik-therapie.at/PederHill/Structure&Plot.htm

Jing

In this computer-based task my K-12 students will use the technology tool Jing, to make a tutorial on how to solve a math exercise. But first I’ll show them a tutorial about what they have to do.

The main goal of this task is that my students can use their critical thinking to construct their knowledge integrating technology tool in the lesson.

European colonization of the Americas

View European colonization of the Americas in a larger map

For my idea for a lesson that would incorporate the use of a map, I created a map using Google Maps for my K-12 class of History. My map is about European colonization of the Americas. This map describes the routes followed by European colonists and some relevant facts of that history period. This a lesson in form of an interactive lecture in which I’ll explain to the learners different history facts about the European Colonization  of the Americas, people and places involved and the relevance  of this history period to the world today. 

The students will be able to see the different routs taken by the expeditionist , the first places discovered and the time period. The learners can make question and interact with the teacher while they are listening to the interactive lecture.          

HPI and Podcasting

Reflection

            Achieve, through people, increasingly successful accomplishments that are valued by all organizational stakeholders (p.35). This is the vision of the Human Performance Improvement that we find in the chapter 14 of the Trends and Issues book. I can relate this vision to my professional practice because as a teacher I hope to achieve successful accomplishments through my students, when my students make a good performance that’s an achievement for me and all the educational stakeholders.

            Human Performance Improvement involves the behaviorism approach that I constantly use in my professional practice. Behavior is individual activity whereas the outcomes of behavior are the ways in which the behaving individual’s environment is somehow different as a result of his or her behavior (p.136), to stimulate (reward/punishment) my students to achieve the desired results is an important part of my instructional design.

            I can see many opportunities where the ideas developed in this chapter could help me in my practice. For example: the Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model. Although this model is not intended for k-12 education the behaviorism approach in it, can be very helpful for my practice. In the model, we can see the stimulus as a relevant and frequent feedback on adequacy of performance, the response as organize work processes, and the consequences for poor performance.  The part of the stimulus in the model can help my students to be more involved in the class, through feedback, reward or punish depending on their behavior.

Podcast:
 

Grammar girl: Quick and dirty tips for better writing

This is a very useful podcast about good grammar and writing, and the author is very charismatic. The duration of the podcast is 8 minutes.

Mignon Fogarty is the host of Grammar Girl and founder of Quick and Dirty Tips.  Mignon was a magazine and technical writer, and an entrepreneur.  Mignon has a B.A. in English from the University of Washington in Seattle and an M.S. in biology from Stanford University.

The podcast episode that I chose is called: Where do I use commas?  This episode has the next segments:

Commas: Are There Firm Rules or Just Guidelines?

In this segment the author talks about the different uses of the comma, and what makes them confusing.

Don’t Put a Comma between a Subject and Its Verb:

This segment explain why you should not put a Comma between a Subject and Its Verb

Pauses Do Not Equal Commas:

Here the author explain the myth of putting a comma everywhere we pause

Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Appositives:

Here she gives us an easy example to help us remember the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive appositives.

Here is a link to the podcast: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/where-do-i-use-commas.aspx

Niagara Falls

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Stressed Students' Gallery

Changing Education Paradigms

This a very interesting short video about the Paradigms in the Education System. This RSA Animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson.

A History of Instructional Design and Technology

This is the link to my photobucket:  http://s1327.beta.photobucket.com/user/ilainnafulgenci/media/CIMG0261_zps5cb0003e.jpg.html?sort=3&o=10

Provide a whole class with laptops and wireless internet service access 24 hours a day, every day of the week seems like a very good idea, but the reality is other. As we have seen in the chapter three of ‘Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology’ the technology innovations along the years had not been the solution to the educational problems. As we have seen in the History of Instructional Design and Technology; computers have not fulfilled the prediction made in the 1980s, which say that computers would revolutionize instruction.

In this specific case (providing teachers and students with 24/7 access to laptops, curriculum materials, and wireless internet services) had little effect in the manner in which instruction was presented in the teacher’s classrooms. These results may be due to three possible factors: 1) Teachers resistance to change, 2) The cost associated with purchasing and maintaining these technologies, and 3) The lack of adequate guidance to the teachers.

The first reason why the project had very little effect on the teachers’ instructional practice was the teachers’ resistance to change. Over the time we have seen that teachers are afraid to change, afraid to leave their comfort zone and dive into new areas and try different things related particularly with media and technology issues, for these reasons they resist change specially top-down. The second reason is the cost associated with purchasing and maintaining these technologies. This is a very serious problem because once made ​​the investment in hardware and software is very important to know how to give proper maintenance or such investment may be lost easily, computers require specialized maintenance that teachers are not prepared to provide most of the time. The unconscious manipulation by some students help make the problem worse, so the cost associated with the purchase of laptops increases significantly because they have to pay technicians to provide adequate maintenance of the systems and medias.

The third reason is the lack of adequate guidance in how integrates this technology into their instructional practices. Teachers often are in the position of not being well trained in the use of some method or technology, this is a problem of great proportions since is not very useful to have the means but not master the method. What can they do with laptop and 24/7 wireless if they can’t integrate these tool into their lessons properly?

Some strategies that could have helped this project to be successful could have been the development of teaching guides for the integration of these technologies into their lesson plans. If teachers had had an adequate preparation, probably they would not have been afraid of change and the unknown. Also With proper training technical problems educators could have given basic maintenance to the laptop units and thus save on the costs of technician support.

Social Bookmarking

I knew nothing about social bookmarking before this assignment, so I had to read and research a lot to get an idea about what it was, to watch the video ‘social bookmarking in plain English’ helped a lot because is clear, simple and consist. That video shows what you need know about social bookmarking in just couple of minutes.

Now that I know what is social bookmarking for, I can tell the great value this has, not just for sharing your favorite web page addresses with other, but it is also very important as a place to store your bookmarks online.  Social bookmarking is a very useful tool when you have to work in other computer that is not yours. Before knowing about social bookmarking I used to send my web addresses to my e-mail, but that is extremely uncomfortable. You can also keep saved your information in case of lose your data base. Last year my laptop stopped working and I had to buy a new one, so I lost all my bookmarks.  But now I know the way to keep them safe.

I think that social bookmarking can be used for the teachers to share interesting information with students, pages with content related to the assignments or important articles for students’ learning or just to socialize sharing common interests. On the other hand I think that this tool is not very appropriate for K-12 students because their level of interest when investigating and being autonomous is not the same as the more mature students.

Here is my Delicious: https://delicious.com/ilainnafulgenci

Trends & Issues Instructional Design and Technology:

            I did not know they were struggling so hard to have a definition of our field, and I didn’t know we have so many different definitions, so it was a surprise to find out this. My biggest surprise was the discovery that the field of educational technology is also called Instructional Design and Technology, it was a surprise because I realized that I like that term more than the term we use now, because it imply the word: design and I believe that the EDT have a lot to do with the design.

            It was a bit shocking to realize that the book's authors are right when they say that many professionals in the area of educational technology are not able to clearly describe their field to others. And it was more shocking to realize that I'm also struggling to have a clear definition. For me the EDT field is related with media, technology devices and computers, but the field is so much more than that. As the authors say ‘the field of instructional design and technology (also known as instructional technology) compares the analysis of learning and performance problems, and the design, development, implementation, evaluation and management of instructional and non-instructional processes… (p.5). I agreed with their definition because involved more than just tech and describes very good our field, I also like the term IDT more than EDT.