How Excel could be incorporated into the curriculum....

Wow, that title is a mouthfull! Using Excel spreadsheets in the classroom for special needs is the issue at hand. I know that teachers of special needs have a lot of paperwork to keep track of.
  1.  When IEPs are due, other appoinrments the students have while at school, such as therapists, are calendar items that could benefit from spreadsheets. This would definitely help with organization in the classroom!
 2.   Another use is keeping track of behaviors for behavior programs. How often does a particular student refuse to do work, or twitch in that certain way??
3. A third use for the teachers is to keep track of data such as how accurate the skills of their students are in a certain area. When an objective is for the student to perform a task 4 out of 5 times, a spreadsheet could help put that all together. I think that an administrator would be impressed that doecmentation could be achieved efficiently, giving the teacher more time to actually spend with the students!
4. The students could use Excel in their learning, by making easy to interpret visual graphs of data that interests them. For instance, how many of their classmates like the same movie as them, or song? These questions could be matched to content areas like science, social studies, math, and even music class.
5. The students could be taught how to be organized with their data and this might help them the rest of their lives. If only I had learned to be organized, and put assignments on a spreadsheet, maybe I wouldn't be up past a reasonable bedtime finishing this assignment!
I do hope that this illustrates how Excel could  be helpful and useful in the curriculum, helping teachers and students in their tasks!

As far as the other question goes, about whether I vote for Microsoft Word and Excel or Googledocs, I think that for my purposes as a special educator, Googledocs gets my vote. For one thing, Google spreadsheets seemed like a simpler tool to use. It is more the "point and shoot" approach than the more compicated Excel program. So many choices aren't necessarily a good thing to a beginner! "You can do this, and that, and this and that, if you go here and click on that.......blah blah blah" It all blends into a gibberish and the eyes glaze over......
    I like the idea of sharing with Googledocs and also the editing possibilities, in a structured and measured way. The students would enjoy getting feedback and the more concrete everything is, the better off they are!

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is an interesting phenomenon--I've been thinking how it could be useful in education. For teachers, it could be very useful in culminating materials that they want their students to read. Students could use it as another means of searching the web. It could serve as a means of finding out what is trendy or popular, just to keep up with topics. I think that students could become curious about subjects that interest them, and learn and expand their knowledge---always a good thing. And they could tag items that interest them and share them with others.
     In short, social bookmarking is yet another tool in the techbag of tricks.

technospeak and googledocs

     Those two words in the title of this posting remnd me of other words, such as psychobabble and friending. They are made up to fit what is needed to communicate ideas in our current world. I'm sure many other terms will be thought up as quickly as new concepts come about. This is what is so fascinating about language and its evolution! I think that every generation has its own idioms and that to keep up with the times, the older generation has to learn what the new lingo is. (tee-hee) This is to prevent feeling lost and detached, even left behind!
     I think it is a better idea to straddle both mindsets-to learn technology tools well enough for them to be matter-of-fact and a part of everyday life, and to be able to take time and patience with things. The one thing I will note is that it is frustrating how really difficult the mechanics can be of learning the technology.
    This brings me to the googledocs project. I thought it was a great idea to make up a document and learn how to use it. The only problem is that I had problems with it! In other words, my knowledge and use of the technology was inadequate in some ways. My son has a thorough understanding of and ease of using the cmoputer technology. I would love to aquire his skills. (especially before he graduates and gets a job and moves out!)
     One document copied and pasted into the doc with repeated sentences all through it. So I backspaced through each repeat before sharing and printing it. That was a maddening waste of time. Another document went into a rediculous format, with the text going down one skiinny little column. What a waste of paper! 
    So, to my way of thinking, I didn't have a totally successful time. My son Daniel had to teach me how to copy and paste. Then, when I was adding notes later on, he took the googledoc from Internet Explorer to Mozilla so that it would type better. When this document was in this terrible format, I didn't want to bug him again about revising the format.
    Now my brain is tired. Time to take a break before class. My last observation is this: to some, this class is a breeze. To me, it is challenging and I love it. But it is no walk in the park! :)

The 21st Century Learner

     I didn't comment on a couple of the points in the syllabus and so decided to post another posting. hmmm.... I definitely sound like a digital immigrant there! I loved the articles about the involving the students and agreed with the points therein. After all, they do learn differently--and should! With the new tools at hand, students should be allowed to use them. And if school was always boring, that was always wrong! If it doesn't need to be, it shouldn't be!
   It makes sense for schools to have their own social networking sites and blogs--this way, students would feel more involved and like they know their fellow students. Cyber-bullying and other security probems could be addressed by the school, I would think, if it were their site.
    All of this discussion in these articles and in the textbook were very interesting to me, because of raising Net Gen/Digital Natives, and the feeling that gaps in my understanding are beginning to be filled with new knowledge and ideas.
  
 

Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants

When reading this article, it is a little difficult to get beyond the rather insulting tone the author takes with his generalizing statements about what digital immigrants will or won't do or learn. The statement about how difficult it is going to be for the digital learner to cope with the digital immigrant professors is surprisingly and unnecessarily negative. However, I did eventually get beyond his style of commentary and appreciate what he had to say about how digital immigrants need to change the way they educate digital natives so that maximum learning can take place. Teaching subjects by making them fun, interactive, and in game form is a great idea--but I think, based on the textbook, that students expect more than that from their classes. On the college level, students want their professors to have knowledge and passion about their subjects, teamwork, and social interaction. Therefore, the games would be part of, but not the whole, educational experience. I think that digital immigrants can certainly learn to meet the expectations of the digital native, but that natives can learn to be patient as change is taking place. And that is true even if their brains do work differently! (brains are adaptable also!)

Week One

Practicing posting is a little like learning to read a map, or a set of directions for cooking. Once you are familiar with the subject area, it becomes easier to do the task! I am sure that on this adventure I'll be charting new territory...