Week 12 Creating a Professional Web Presence Page

This week we learned about Distance Education. We viewed a presentation and also looked at some websites that offer distance education. I was very familiar with this subject because its been present in my learning here at UF, and more specifically in this class. I did not realize however, that they were starting to use some of these online education forums for students younger than at the college age. Online education consists of fully online classes, and also blended classes, which only have parts of the class online.

I think Distance Education can be extremely beneficial. It makes it easy for teachers to give information to a large number of students, that don't have to be right there in front of them. I think though that for the most part, online learning should be left to college and and high school students. At an elementary level, students need to learn social skills and interact with other students like they will need to do in real world jobs.

Click here to view a link to a website I found through a Google search on distance learning. The website it was found on is Elearners.com. This particular page on the site goes through a large number of the different pros and cons to distance education.

Week 11 Open Source Software

This week we learned more about Open Source Software. I had actually never heard about Open Source until this class so I was a little bit confused at first when trying to understand exactly what it was. Open source software is free and easily available online. Source Forge is one of the Open Software websites. With this website you can search different types of software and download it for free!! The only downside is that if there is a problem with the software, there is no manufacturer to guarantee that the problem gets fixed. There are usually forums though, in which you can write your complaints and suggestions to the software editor.

With software programs being so expensive, Open source software programs can be extremely beneficial to teachers. Teachers already have a limited budget, and minimal pay. The access to free software opens many opportunities for teachers to use these programs.

Click here to view a short video I found on Youtube that helps explain what Open Source Software is. In the video, it shows that for almost any expensive software, there is a free online version. I didn't even realize that Firefox was one an open source software, and I already use it.

Week 10 Tech Tools for Critical Thinking

This week we learned and read about Open Source and Learning Theories. With open source, someone receives software for free with a specific software code. With this they are able to modify it, and make copies, either for money or for free. Learning Theories were created to better understand how humans and animals learn and respond to their learning environment. The three philosophical frameworks of learning theory are Behaviorism, Information Processing, and Constructivism.

Learning and understanding all of the components of the learning theories is very important to those in the field of education. With better understanding of each theory, a teacher can better teach their students and help their students retain information. As was seen from the presentation, each student will have their own learning style and it is a teachers job to help identify these styles and incorporate them into their lesson plans.

Below is a video I found on YouTube which talks about the Cognitive Load on students. In this brief video, the lecturer describes how it can be hard to retain information and understand it when there are all new concepts to be learned. To learn these new concepts, you must relate already known information to the teaching of the new information.
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Week 9 Social Tools and Cloud Computing

This week we learned and read about social tools such as bookmarking and GoogleDocs. GoogleDocs is a free web tool where you can create a document and then send out a link to your peers where they can view that document and edit it all in one place. Social Bookmarking is also an online tool in which you can share your favorite websites, pictures, or videos. With Delicious, one of the bookmarking sites, you have your own page where you can easily add different websites that you like and categorize them with tags. Tags are keywords or phrases that help describe the website you saved to your account. Some of the other social bookmarking websites are StumbleUpon, Digg, and iKeepBookmarks.

Both Bookmarking and GoogleDocs can be extremely beneficial to those in the education field. Bookmarking can be useful for both students and their teachers. For students starting out a research project, bookmarking different websites could be helpful in finding information and organizing it into one place. For teachers, they could collaboratively use socialbookmarking with other teachers to find helpful websites for classes they are teaching. GoogleDocs could be used to aid students in their writing of a paper in which there are several drafts due. Instead of having to continue printing out the drafts, students can jut submit them online to a teacher and the teacher can see all of the drafts on one webpage. Also, GoogleDocs could help simplify group projects so students could more easily exchange information for their project.

Here is a video about BookmarkingDemon which I found on YouTube. This video explains how there are numerous different bookmarking websites and it can become difficult and time consuming to try and put links to your websites on all of them. BookmarkingDemon helps to simplify this process with the use of their software.
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