Electronic Contact Assignment

For this assignment I e-mailed a teacher from New York, Bill Ocker, that my older brother is friends with. The e-mail exchanges worked great. He was very helpful and I learned some new stuff about technology and how he uses it in his physical education classes.

My initial email:

Hello Mr. Ocker!

First of all I would like to thank you for responding to my request to converse about technology and education and how you as a teacher use it in your classroom. I am glad I was able to find a physical education teacher to do hold these conversations with because that is my major. I know from my experience with my EDM 310 Microcomputing Systems in Education with Ms. Averitt that teachers now a days have many opportunities to use technology in ways to educate their students. However, I personally believe physical education teachers need to be creative in discovering ways to use technology with their students because most p.e. classes are held in a gymnasium or outdoor setting such as a playground. The technology teaching tools we have learned how to use productively blogs, podcasts, and igoogle home pages. Are you familiar with these?

Personally, I think the overall concept of technology with education is more adapt for main course subjects such as math, science, english, and social studies just to name a few. The only teaching tool I think would be somewhat successful in the physical education setting would be blogs. As a teacher I would use a classroom blog as a communication partnership between students, parents, and myself. Through the blog, students will be able to share their opinions about my physical education class as well as share new ideas with one another on how class projects, games, and exercises can improve and be more fun. Students will learn how blogs can be beneficial by keeping their blogs positive and clean. Also, parents will be able to receive a better understanding of what their children are doing in their physical education classes.

I look forward to hearing back from you Mr. Ocker. Hope your school year is going well thus far!!

Mr. Ocker's Response:
Matt,

I am glad to converse with you about how we utilize technology in our Physical Education classrooms in the Maine-Endwell School District. We are very fortunate in that our district received a grant two years ago to furnish a great deal of our classrooms with Smartboards. We as Physical Education teachers were invited to staff workshops where we were trained on how to utlize this technology in our daily Physical Education classrooms. Smartboards are basically interactive whiteboards. You can connect them to a projector, computer, or camera/camcorder. This year will be the first year that we will utilize this new technology and are planning to do so after the first of the year when our classes will remain inside (most of the time) due to the weather.

Some of the ways we will utilize this technology is to play videos directly from the New York State Physical Education Profile website (http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/ciai/pe/profile.htm) We often use these videos to analyze the skill performances of our students. The smartboards will allow us to play these videos in our classes to help students gain a better understanding of what is expected of them. When utilizing the smartboards we can stop the video, draw/diagram on the screen, and break down the action/skill in a evry slow and precise manner. We have also purchased additional software that contains interactive lessons/activities to help reinforce our instruction while allowing the students to utilize the smartboard in a variety of ways.

We have already utilized smartboards during our football season this fall. We used the boards to watch our game films. We were able to have our athletes actually diagram certain angles and distances on the board during the footage. It was a very helpful resource.

We also utilize computers to analyze Fitness data. Every student in our district K-12 does the FitnessGram Fitness Assessment in the Fall and again in the spring. The students input their data each time into a computer and analyze their results. They then write a Fitness Program that they are encouraged to engage in during the summer months.

One additional way we utilize technology in our district is very similar to blogs. We have a tool called the Parent Portal that allows parents to utilize their home computers to look at their son/daughters grades on a daily basis. Parents actually can log into a pre-registered account and look into each teachers gradebook to see how their son/daughter is doing. they only have access to their childs grades of course but this has really opened up the lines of communtication between parents and teachers. They do not have to wait for 5 week progress reports but rather can see what their child is doing in Physical education on a day by day basis.

Hope this helps and I look forward to speaking with you again,
Bill Ocker
"Go Red Wave"

My Response:
Mr. Ocker,

Wow, sounds like your school district is doing very good with techonlogy in the classroom! That is fantastic your school district was able to receive that grant for the Smartboards. I actually hear of Smartboards about 2 weeks ago when I visited an ACCESS lab at a highschool in Robertsdale, Alabama. ACCESS is an acronym for Alabama Connecting Classroom, Educators and Students Statewide. Administrators and teachers all over Alabama are excited about ACCESS. ACCESS basically offers students to take courses at another school that are not offered at theirs through a webcam and a few other technology resources. Unfortunately I was not informed too much about the use of Smartboards outside of ACCESS.

However, Smartboards sound like they are great to use as physical education teachers. I love the fact that you can use them in a variety of ways, in the classroom and with your football team. The website (http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/ciai/pe/profile.htm) is pretty interesting. I am sure the students enjoy using the Smartboards so they can visually track their progress in the class. I think it is amazing how the Smartboards can stop video, draw/diagram, and break down action/ skill in slow motion. Hopefully schools across your area will be able to use them in years to come.

Like I said, I love the fact you can use the Smartboard with your football team. How is your football team doing anyways? But I am sure your student-athletes can learn what they are doing well and not so well better through this technology. I also think your use of computer software to track students fitness results is super. I just hope students follow through with their program over the summer months. But I guess thats totally up to them! I mean after all, teachers can't do everything for them.. They need to have a little self initiative too!

Parent Portal sounds very similiar to blogs. I think it is very important for parents to be able to see their son or daughters progress on a daily basis. Its good too that it is private and can only see their son or daughters information.

Well thank you for the quick response! You have been very helpful. It is interesting to learn how teachers in other parts of the country use technology to further their students education in the classroom!

His last response:
Matt,

It was nice to be able to share some information with you. This is the link to our districts Parent Portal information if you are interested: http://www.me.stier.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=590

Our JV Football team won our last 5 games in a row (after dropping our first 4 of the season) including a final game victory over a Chenango Forks team that is traditionally one of the best in our area. Our Varsity Football team lost in our Sectional Championship game as a 4th down pass play was intercepted in the end zone on the final play of the game that would have given us the victory. We created a new Website for our Football program this year: http://www.mespartanfootball.com/

I will be coaching a Basketball All-Star team this year...(The Sleepy Floyd Traveling All-Stars) and am looking forward to incorporating technology to keep the stats/video/audio commentary of our games.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions. Feel free to contact me at any time. Enjoy your Holiday.

Bill Ocker
"Go Red Wave"

Duke's Poetry and Documentary Expression

I listened to "Poetry and Documentary Expression", which was presented by Tom Rankin. Tom begins the introduction and explains how poetry includes documentary and vis versa. He explains how poetry and documentary have a lot in common, mainly a connection with everyday life and the culture and creativity of common experience. They also share an attachment to history and an impulse to "fix" both the hear and now passing moments. Poetry and documentary, he says, try to stem the tie of forgetting which Mr. Rankin believes both poets and documentary share and are concerned about.

Mr. Rankin explains Robert Pinsky was born in New Jersey and attended Rutgers and Stanford and taught at a number of different colleges. He has published several books as well.

I was confused with this assignment and do not know if I did it correctly. I plan on seeing what I need to do to fix it and correct it tomorrow.

ACCESS Field Trip

ACCESS is an acronym for Alabama Connecting Classroom, Educators and Students Statewide. Administrators and teachers all over Alabama are excited about ACCESS. ACCESS basically offers students to take courses at another school that are not offered at theirs through a webcam and a few other technology resources. Before this trip I thought the ACCESS lab as a whole would be more work than it was worth. I thought maybe in a few years it would be successful, but right now its just too new to work right away. However, through this trip I learned it is a great resource for students and teachers to further their academic excellence. The ACCESS lab cost about $85,000 to establish and was funded by grants rewarded to the school.

Jill Revette and I traveled to Robertsdale high school to visit an ACCESS lab. Mr. Mitchell, the assistant principal at Robertsdale high school, greeted us in the front office and brought us to the ACCESS lab. He was extremely helpful in explaining the lab and answering any of our questions. He explained that there were a bunch of little things that needed to be addressed for the ACCESS lab to be ran correctly.

All of the technology in the classroom is provided by "Tandberg Audio Science". Some of those things that needed to be changed in the classroom included changing the ceiling lights from regular florescent lights to be grid covered lights. This was needed to deflect that light being recieved from the webcam so that the two classrooms could see one another clearly. Similiarly, the classroom also had to be painted a regular white color instead of the semi-gloss that was there before for correct lighting purposes as well. There was also a three-sided glass piece propelling from the ceiling that picked up noise vibrations throughout the classroom which allowed the students and teacher in the classroom to be heard equally for the other connecting classroom. In the classroom they use portable lap tops instead of putting up computers at each seat. This is because they will not necessarily need to use their computers daily. The lap tops are numbered for the students in case damage is done to them. After they are done using them, they lock up the laptops in the back of the room. There was one high definition television and one webcam in the front of the room as well as one t.v. and one webcam in the back of the room. They also have a document cam which has the power to zoom in extremely close to certan objects put under it. This for instance would be used to show an important object with specific details to all of the students extremely clearly. I thought this was very neat.

Due to schedule conflicts, the ACCESS lab was not available for the students at Robertsdale this semester. Next semester there were be a daily class for students. The class size will consist to about 18-24 students. The teacher that instructs the ACCESS lab has to go through training at Troy University. Also, in front of the classroom is a telephone/ fax machine. In case the teacher has a problem with coordinating the ACCESS lab with another school or any of the technology in their classroom, they can call the "super computer" which is also in Troy. It is a quick and convienant way to solve problems.

EDM310 podcasts

So our blog post assignment for this week is to listen to 4 EDM310 podcasts, including our own and to make a list of suggestions for improvement. Unfortunately, my groups podcast was not available on the website, therefore I am unable to critique my own that much. From what I can remember, I think me and Jill did a pretty good job with holding conversation with one another. We didn't rehearse too much for the podcast which I think ultimately was an advantage because, well, it didn't sound rehearsed! However, I think we could have done a better job of speaking more clearly. We also had a tendency to repeat some material. But overall I think we did a good job for our first podcast. It ended up being pretty fun to do too!

The first podcast I listened was Sara Large and Tina Dillen . They did the same topic as us which was "How technology is used in our classrooms at South Alabama". I thought they did a very good job on their podcast. They sound very prepared and have a lot of material throughout the topics they use. They talked about folitek, ecompanion, as well as blogs and podcasts. They talk about the positive and negative sides of efolitek and ecompanion but they both agree that folitek and ecompanion is a good resource for students in the education field. The only thing they say is a flaw in folitek is the lack of knowledge teachers have with it, which I agree. Overall, I think they did a very good job on the podcast because they thoroughly explained folitek and ecompanion in a manner of someone who does not know what they are could gain a better understanding of that technology.

The next podcast I listened to was presented by Ashley Corley, Brooke Busby and Kimberly Pierce. They discussed how blogs are used in classrooms in the United States. They also talked about how blogs can be used effectively in education. The group explains what a blog is by saying its a contraction of the word web blog. She says the first bloggers were explorers and journalists. She also explains that there are many types of blogs, that blogs are free, and that they have many uses. The group did a good job of explaining quality information. The only suggestion I think I would have for them is to make their podcast more of a conversation between the group members because it seems like they read for most of the time. That being said, I thought they did a great job overall!

The last podcast I listened to was performed by Danielle Tasker , Stephanie Ellis and Jalisa Mobley. They discuss how facebook could be used as an educational tool. They did a good job of explaining how facebook works for those who are not familiar with it. They give information how facebook got started as well. They all agree that facebook is a primarily a social network. The group ultimately decide that facebook it could be used as an educational tool by teachers can use a facebook page displaying assignments, note card information, post and read each others comments about assignments, ask questions on the main dashboard. Overall I think they did a good job of discussing with each other and bringing up quality information but the only suggestion I would have for them is to sound more enthused and upbeat about their topic.

Maine Department of Education/ Mathematics with Technology

The Maine Department of Education podcast is told by Judy Chandler. The topic is Mathematics in Technology. Judy Chandler is a technology integrations specialist, math teacher, and math mentor trainer for the Maine Learning Technology Initiative. She says that some teachers do not embrace technology as a productive classroom resource. She also states that the National Council of Essential Mathematics says technology is essential in teaching mathematics because it influences the mathematics that is taught and enhances students learning. She says we have plenty of technology sources and tools in our classrooms these days that could be used in mathematics lessons. She believes students need more than textbook learning to fully understand and comprehend their mathematics material.

This was an interesting podcast to listen to. Judy Chandler spoke very clearly and easy to understand. With my major of physical education, this podcast does not directly relate to me but I agree with her argument that there should be more emphasis on technology in the classroom in regards to mathematics. Not only math, but all subjects in our school systems should learn to use technology more successfully in their teaching lessons. Mathematics is an important subject to focus on because its an essential subject for children to learn throughout middle school, high school, and college. Technology seems like it could give that extra push students who may be struggling with math need to be able to understand the material.