Light at the End of the Tunnel

About 15 years ago I was invited to NCAR’s computational math and science fair. The keynote speaker that day was the director of computer science at NCAR/UCAR, Bill Buzbee, (also my father-in-law). That day he spoke of a new innovation called the World Wide Web and how it would be changing our lives. He even took me up to his office to show my how I could access NASA’s web site or look at his family picture online. My wife and I just shrugged our shoulders and said, “So?” Fifteen years later no one can imagine their lives without Google, EBay, Amazon, or Wikipedia.
I guess the real question we should be asking is: “what will we as educators be begging for in five to ten years”? Some of the tools we played with in this class will die away because they have little demand or are difficult to use. Others will become part of our everyday tool boxes in the classroom. Clarity of foresight can help, but we should be as up to date with the technology as we can because our teaching experience will change regardless of whether we’re prepared.
As I approach the end of the requirements for this class I realize that most of the apprehension I had was of my own imagination. (Some of it was real, however). All of it prepared me some for the changes that are surely coming my way.
Finally, one of my constant gripes had to do with the collage of user names and passwords that I have now created. My approach to solving this problem was to write some of them down on pieces of paper and stick them in my school bag. I was recently informed by a fellow student of this class that Yahoo has a way of storing and entering those codes in automatically. Guess that’s one of my next steps.

Skype Rules!

Skype is what we predicted back when we were in elementary school writing about the future. No more talking into an impersonal receiver, now we can talk face to face. Telecalling! Next stop, "Beam me up Scottie". On the practical side, I can call family in California or Germany for free with the added bonus of seeing their faces. Maybe that's too personal in some cases.

Social Bookmarking is Too Social

I don't know what I did wrong, if anything. After I created my bookmarking tags, I started getting random stickie notes showing up on my desk top, from random people who had nothing constructive to say. Eventually they stopped showing up, but it scared me. Who were these people and how did they leave a stickie on my computer? I guess I worry that someone is going to get access to something they shouldn't. Or perhaps someone is going to contact a student or one of my kids when they shouldn't. I guess a good course of action would be to learn and know the online security protocols.

On the bright side, this online bookmarking could become an excellent tool for those of us who use more than one computer or for collaboration between teachers of the same disciplines.

Lost in the Dark Recesses of the Cyber Universe

When I initially signed up for this course I thought that there would be some in-class instruction. What I discovered is that the instruction would be mostly myself trying to figure out what to do. There is a steep curve when learning these online tools, far more time and effort than I was expecting. If a person had a working knowledge of the tools, then they could spend their time more efficiently and use to to actually design their classes. I spent so much time just trying to navigate and figure out how to use the tool that I didn't put a lot of effort into how it could actually help me. And then when I thought I had if figured out, I was thwarted because I didn't know how to download a file or create a link. Frustrating.

What in the world are we doing in science class?

Welcome to my Blogarama.
In this blog page I plan to give insight into the content standards and benchmarks we cover in my 8th grade science class. Units of study will be briefly discussed, objectives explained and specific benchmarks indicated. My hope is that both students and parents will begin to connect the hard work done in class with the learning objectives we hope to achieve.

For starters, check out my web page at: http://fc.thompson.k12.co.us/~ericksons/
for a look at what we are learning now.
Happy learning
Mr. Erickson