Week #14 Reflection

One thing in Chapter 31 that made me perk up and say “Wow”, was the instructional system called ELM-ART. It is a web-based adaptive interactive textbook. It takes the learners knowledge, preferences, and interests into account when setting up an instructional environment for the individual learner. Talk about differentiation at its best! I love how the program is designed to adapt its instruction to the individual and hopefully, make textbook reading more meaningful and interactive for the students. This is a textbook that I would not have to pull to pull tooth and nail to get my students to read and interact with! Imagine the lessons and activities that I could do if my students came prepared everyday with the necessary background knowledge.

To be honest, I really enjoyed all of the activities. I have learned more about some that I already knew about, like blogs and have discovered some that I never knew existed like Jing. If I had to choose my absolute favorite it would be, well that is just not fair to ask! I will probably use the applications like Google Docs and a blog site the most...although they are not the coolest applications we have played with this semester!

Week #13 Google docs and FotoFlexer Review

I reviewed Google docs and FotoFlexer for this assignment.

Google docs is a office suite that allows you to access it from any computer anywhere and save the document you create to be accessed anywhere there is a computer with Windows office products. There are so many things to love about Google docs. You can access it from any computer that is connected to the internet, you can allow any one you wish to have access to read and edit documents that you save. It is free, up to 1024 MB of storage, if you want more online storage you can buy it on a yearly subscription. I did find one downside to Google docs as I was trying it out. I own a Macbook and Google docs is not compatible, so far as I have discovered, with Pages, Apple’s word processing program. I saved a Pages document and tried to open it up on my PC at school with no luck. I was hoping and searching for a program that would automatically convert Pages to Word, but no such luck. Guess I will be saving my Pages documents in Word form, thank you Apple for the flexibility. That said, I would definitely use Google docs with my coworkers and share this program with my students as well. I think that it is a useful tool in both areas. With my coworkers, we can create our common assessments from home and revise and have conversations online with out the need to meet so much face to face to write them. We would be able to save them all on one site that we can access and have them available 24/7 without having to wait to have someone finish a part and email it out. Lesson plans could also be written and saved for viewing and editing. On an interdisciplinary level, my teammates could share their lesson plans on Google docs so that we can plan ahead and make those connections among all of our classes.

FotoFlexer is a fun website that allows you to upload photos and add some finishing touches to them. I could see this site being a place that people who scrapbook online would go to add some flair to their pictures. The really creative could use the site to create neat graphics for just about any occasion or any project. I could see a student creating a really cool comic strip using FotoFlexer. Admittedly, I would use this to clean up photos, much like I do on iPhoto already and that is about it. Although, those with a more vivid imagination and the time could really have fun with this site.