Webkins

Over the Christmas holiday I learned how popular webkins are.  My nieces and nephews had several different webkins and they were able to show my how the online portion works.  After a visit to the mall, my husband and myself bought our first webkins  ”quackers”.  The kids showed us how to register him on the website, how to earn money so we could buy him things, how to play the games, and how to send messages to them.   It contains a lot of real life lessons.  For example, my nephew, earned a lot of kins cash (money in the webkins world) so he could buy a bed for his virtual room.  He finally had enough money to purchase the bed.  One thing he forgot to do was to make sure the bed would fit in his room and much to his dismay, it was too large.  His only option was to sale the bed at a garage sale for a lower price.  A real life lesson learned.   Another observation I made was that when you register you webkins on line you enter a number that is just like a credit card (4 digits, 4 digits etc).  I also found one of the games looked and played a lot like a slot machine.  Just a couple of observations.  If you have a chance check it out. 

Update on class blog

I just wanted to give a little update on my class blog.  I must say I felt it was an overall success.  I learned a lot and know what I can now do to make it better.  I am going to continue using it with my history classes.  Now that the holiday’s are over I will be able to blog a little more often.  I plan on posting some ideas for what I am using in class right now. 

History Blog

OK!  So I have finally decided to start a blog for my history classes.  I was hesitant to do this because of several different factors. 

• It is always a challenge to take my students to the computer lab
• I can’t leave it up to them to do it on their own time
• I had them create a wiki last year and it was not that successful.

 With this said, I decided to just go for it.  I am going to have them come to the computer lab on Fridays so they can post to the blog.  I am going to require them to post two thoughtful posts…the first one on a video I posted on my vodpod.  I am not sure what they will do for the second post yet.  Check back after November 30^th to see my kids postings. 

A High School for a new Millennium

In my leadership class we talked about how our schools need some serious revamping.  Our schools are still set up like they were back in the Industrial Age instead of the Information Age we are currently living in.  I read an article along the same lines titled, “High Schools for the New Millennium”.  This article was written by the Linda and Bill Gate Foundation and places a large emphasis on the importance of small schools.  I think people are so scared of moving in this direction because of the cost when in reality it would save money in the long run. An interesting correlation that was made in the article was that if a shipping business failed to get a third of it packages to its customers on time…the company would probably go out of business.  Compare this to a school where a third of the students don’t graduate year after year and the school continues to stay open.  This gave me a lot of insight into how our future school MUST (not should) look.    

6 Tech Trends for the Next Five Years

The article “6 Tech Trends for the Next Five Years” was given to me in my leadership class.  I really liked this article because it focused on the top trend in education.  Because things change so fast with technology it is often hard to keep up with all of the new trends.  This article gave me some insight into what I should be focusing on. 

·        Reality Virtually

·        Wireless Predictions — Mesh Networks That Heal Themselves

·        Web 2.0: Seeing the Benefit of User-Created Content

·        Cell Phones — Boon or Bane to Schools?

·        Revolutionizing High School

·        Handhelds: The Inevitable Revolution

 

After reading this article and looking over the top trends, I can see I have a lot of catching up to do.  I have looked at virtual reality but am not sure how I feel about it.  I believe the entire world will one day be wireless.  I am a huge fan of web 2.0 technologies and am excited to see how this evolves.  Cell phones-all I can say for now is that hate them in my classroom.  I am all for doing some serious revamping of the current high school situation and I think handhelds are not going away and we better see what we can do to adapt them in the classroom. 

Hopefully I can keep with all these new trends

Trends in technology

We are creating a presentation about some trends in technology.  My group decided to focus on knowledge acquisition.  The hard part about the project is that we don’t have a lot of time to meet together.  I was looking at other blogs for ways we can collaborate on-line.  Elizabeth had some really good links Preezo and Spresent. posted on her blog.  (I love to look at Elizabeth’s blog because she always has such cool new stuff).   These presentation tools were really cool and something I would like to use in the future.  Because we are on a time constraint we are using the old fashioned Power Point.  Because this is a trends class I thought it would be nice to use and new “trend”.  I will say we will be creating our voice on audacity and uploading that to our power point and I have never done that before. 

Kerpoof

I found about the webiste Kerpoof and played around with it a little.  It is kind of fun and even has a teacher section.   You can make pictures, movies, or a stories.  I wanted to try it out, so I made this picture.  You can pick from different backgrounds, add all the little pictures and even add words.  It was kind of fun.  Not sure it will work with my high school kids but I thought I would share. 

The Technology Fix-Summary

 

In conclusion I would like to summarize what I thought was most important in Pflaum’s book. 

A vision must be had by the administrators and the technology coordinators. 

Technology should be a tool to help learn content-not something they spend the majority of their time on. 

Students should be limited when they search the internet.  They should have database to choose from instead of just letting them go for it. 

Data collection should be made easier by using technology and then be sure and use the data. 

Let kids learn different tool as they grow.  Don’t try and teach them everything in elementary.

As long as you have the vision…the money will come.  Those who believe in technology will find resources to help them out. 

 

I thought this to be a very insightful book about where we are going wrong with technology in our schools.  The best part that he used real live examples of what he witnessed.  Administrators should read this book before they try to make the shift to technology. 

Part III-Too Troubled to Focus

This section focuses on those schools that don’t have a clear focus thus they don’t have a successful technology program.  Alexanderville School District only has 14 out of 60 teachers who are committed to technology.  They once had a vision but that left with the administrators who are long gone.  Porter Elementary School and Fisher High School both lacked money to keep their programs going.  Pflaum found that even if a school has all the technology in the world, it can not make up for the social inequalities that exists. 

Part II The less focused

The book is divided up into three sections.  The first section (which I already blogged about) is the schools that have commitment and focus.  The next section (which I will talk about now) is the schools which have less focus.  St. John’s high school was looking for a change.  They decided that the change begins with each student having their own laptop and because it was a private school they were able to pull this off.  This new focus on technology even drew more students to their school which in turn means more money.  Longfellow elementary had the same situation: money for technology and an administrations vision for change.  The problem with both of these schools is time constraints, limited space, and immature systems.  Because these schools have the necessary vision for success I feel they can work through their issues.  It is just important that we keep the vision and don’t give up on technology.