Web Tools

I admit, I spend way too much time on the Internet.  My mother has told me that I'm an information junkie; I love the "paper" trail that can be followed from web page to web page in order to explore the vast sea of knowledge I am not familiar with.  I even catch myself reading up on things I have an abundance of knowledge about already just to see if I missed even the smallest detail.  Seriously, I might have a real problem.

That all being said, I was surprised with how few of these tools I had already worked with.  Perhaps I had only worked a "general" tool that does not go as in-depth as something listed (i.e., a specific blog site versus the concept of a blog overall).  That being said, here are the 5 tools I found most interesting or intriguing (in no particular order).

ClassDojo-I could use this in the classroom I work in as a reminder for students AND as a set of evidence for their behaviors. Since I work in a classroom for students with emotional disabilities and lacking social skills, interruptions and disruptions of the class work are sadly the norm for some students instead of the exception.  While the total scores would likely not phase students (for example, telling one student he had -10 points for a class), displaying data of every interruption would prove effective in demonstrating to what extent a student disrupts the learning of others in the room (and on the flip side, demonstrate to another student how much he is actively contributing to the learning of others).

• Pro-Accountability and data.  Demonstrates concrete proof to each student how they are contributing in class.
• Con-I could see this tool being retired if a particular student took pride in having "red" items on his record.  I'm not sure of the long term effectiveness of this tool.
  

Screencast-I find this to be similar to Dropbox, except instead of having to supply a password for the account for students to access it content can be posted for students to view individually.  I especially like how in the note the teacher mentioned taking a video of checking over student papers, allowing for proofreading beyond the physical walls of the school.

• Pro-Allows individual or grouped viewing, students can interact with select content as designated by teacher.
• Con-A pay-for service.  There is certainly a great deal of available space, but depending on what content is being uploaded those 2 GB could be gone fast.

Adobe Education Exchange-Self-explanatory; a sharing of resources across all grade levels and curriculums.  Allows teachers to explore each other's work and display their best lesson ideas.

• Pro-A vast selection of resources.  If you can think of it you can probably find it.
• Con-Too vast.  It would be all to easy to skip over a lesson or resource because you are not looking close enough.  If something is not specific enough by the time you adjust it to your needs you may have been better off writing a lesson yourself.

Poll Anywhere-Allows students to answer quick polls in class.  Teachers can quickly develop polls, allowing modifications to lesson on the fly.

• Pro-Easy to set-up, instant assessment.  Can be used as a quiz or information gathering prior to a unit.
• Con-Requires the use of an electronic device.  Could lead to problems of cell phone usage in class.  Also may restrict the number of classrooms that can use this tool.

Typing Adventure-Online game used to teach typing technique.

•  Pro-Gives students a chance to practice proper typing technique outside of school.
• Con-Has no record if students are using technique or are "hunting and pecking" (like I do!)

Microsoft Excel

Excel is a mystery to me.  I've never really seen a need for me to use it, as I associate it with number crunching and calculation and other things that I didn't need to do very often.  I did see it as a way to organize contacts and text (such as in the mail merge function), but that was just putting things into a grid.  In the undergraduate class I mentioned last week, I used Excel more than in the past. 

The class was built on developing our own business, products, and sales and then tracking the imaginary data we came up with.  My business was a pet shop that sold dinosaurs exclusively, using technology that was present in Jurassic Park (hey, the professor said we could do whatever we wanted as long as it was appropriate).  In the end this made the project more difficult for me, as my imaginary products were in the thousands of dollars for one unit (it was a dinosaur egg after all), making my calculations all the more difficult to do.

This project taught me that Excel was more than just a fancy calculator due to the number of formulas and procedures that can be included into a spreadsheet.  As a requirement for the project I had to develop charts, graphs, and "future" business projections based on the data I had created.  All that being done and said, I STILL didn't have any use for Excel besides a fancy calculator to crunch some numbers and then make a pie chart off of those numbers.  It can serve as a useful tool in a classroom for student expectations (at one point last year I was tempted to make a pie chart of assignments completed versus assignments incomplete for a particular student in order to show him how little homework he had done, but my better judgement decided against it), but again, besides numbers Excel meant nothing to me.

The crossword assignment this week adjusted my thoughts somewhat.  I am starting to see Excel as less of a fancy calculator or just as a simple grid and more so as a grid with hundreds of little boxes that I can manipulate to perform whichever task I can come up with.  It could be a color by number to develop math facts or a word search generator.  I'm still extremely unfamiliar with all of the potential functions of the program (and honestly, a bit intimidated too, look at everything in the "formulas" ribbon!), but I'm hooping this course and the development of this webquest can help me get a better understanding.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word and I have an interesting history.  For the longest time if at all possible I avoided Word, preferring to use one of the "splashier" applications available via Microsoft Office.  I had to make a poster? Publisher.  I have to set up a series of pictures and captions? Powerpoint.  As far as I was concerned Word was only necessary in the case of having to write a paper for a class, otherwise I considered it to be relatively useless.

Well, things changed.  I took a course on Computer Applications during undergrad and as it turns out, the first program we explored was Word.  I learned a great deal about some of the capabilities that Word has even as a designing program for flyers, menus, and other items that I would have considered best created in Publisher or Photoshop.  As it turns out, there were still plenty of features Word had to offer that I never even heard about in that college course.  As for the different features that Word has to offer, I consider the citation tool, the comment tool, and the captions tool as the most effective for the work I have done over my many hours of using Word.

As a history major in undergrad, citations not only had to be completed for every source I used, but also had to be inserted in the document as footnotes (as per the Chicago Manual of Style).  Unless it was a repeated source and I could just throw an "ibid." into my citation, it was initially a pain to insert a footnote, write out an entire citation, mark the page number, return to my thoughts in the body of text, and then repeat the process for the other 20 or so sources I'd have over 10-15 pages of text (and do this entire process several times a semester!).  With the citation tool I could "pre-load" the citation before I even included it into the body of my work so when the time came to include it I could just add a footnote, click on the source in question and move on.  This process likely saved me hours of time over the years.

The comment tool was useful for peer editing and having other evaluate my work before handing it in.  I first discovered this tool my junior year when one of my professors used comments on a Harvard outline for the class's main paper (she crushed it by the way).  Once I learned the finer points of the feature I found it most effective to get ideas from a friend whose opinion I valued highly as both a historian and a writer.  Since she had graduated earlier, getting a chance to have her read my work my senior year was complicated timing-wise, so comments allowed her to say everything she needed to say without having to decipher a long e-mail or make an extended phone call. 

Captions were useful for the aforementioned junior year paper, in which the professor requested we use tables and graphics in our paper to support our points.  Since I relied very heavily on a few specific tables, captions allowed me to designate which exact figure(s) I was referencing.

So I have come to learn that as a document producing tool, Word is just as effective as the other programs I once considered to be "splashier."  There are some features I don't care for (mail merge is one of them, as I'm incredibly OCD and don't mind the tedious process of doing each letter individually), but at this time, especially working in a school and creating worksheets, I consider Word to be one of the more valuable programs I use.