It’s Elementary

Come have a listen as we discuss Gaming in education with our guest, Tom Turner, we talked about why and how you can use online and computer games in education. The discussion points were:

1. Defining different types of computer games
2. Educational opportunities and learning objectives in these games
3. Barriers to using them in the classroom
4. Games that will likely never be in a classroom (first-person shooter games, e.g. Halo, GTA)

Our next show will be on September 8th, 2008 at our usual time 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern at Edtechtalk

Download audio here.

This show featured Clif Mims, a professor at Memphis State University, and Bethany Smith, an Instructional Technologist at North Carolina State University. Both of them work with pre-service teachers to help them learn about how to effectively use technology in the classroom.

We started off with our backgrounds, and what we were required to do vis-a-vis technology in our pre-service. Then we looked at these essential questions:

• Are pre-service teachers being well prepared for entering k12 classrooms today.?
• Are pre-service teachers bored in college lectures? Does this affect entry into the field?
• What are your recommendations for best preparing pre-service teachers?

Bethany felt that teachers needed to have a PLN through Ning, or another service, to go to. Clif thought they needed to see examples of teacher who are using technology successfully. Alice felt that with the advent of more scripted/prescribed curriculum, teachers needed to see what project-based learning looked like. It was a great discussion, and the text chat log below includes comments from teachers who are taking a class on education technology.

Link to Audio at Edtechtalk.com

It was a great show with just the shows hosts Lisa Durff, Maria Knee, Alice Mercer, and Jose Rodriguez sharing what they’ve been doing this year in their classrooms, and the obstacles they faced. Points of interest:

• Technology is not a something separate, but an integral part of our teaching
• We use it to help kids make connections to the rest of the world
• Some issues were how to get kids used to writing, and not just playing on computers, how to plan and allocate time on the computers, and how much choice to give kids.
• How annoying, and brain-dead e-rate filtering programs are to deal with.

Download audio at Edtechtalk.com

With our Guest Steve Hargadon. Steve shares his insights about tagging with us.

Our discussion included use of tagging in blogs, pictures, in social bookmarking, at conferences, and with our students.

Steve talked about the purpose and structure of tagging.  We use tags on content we produce so that it is useful to others on the net.  The use of tags in social bookmarking such as del.icio.us and diggo are examples.   We are able to see how others tag content on the web.  We can tag our own content using similar taxonomy or create our own.  Steve reminded us that there is tension between using standardized tags versus a more independent free flowing tag system.  We can use technorati and or Blog search engines like google to make sense of all the content.

At NECC 2007 session specific tags were proposed and adopted by the community.  This standardized form of tagging allowed for aggregation session specific content. The same system is also used in classroom 2.0 to  standardize the way blog posts and other content is tagged.
You can download at It’s Elemenatary #11.mp3

Our next show will be on January 14th, 2008 at 4:00 p.m. Pacific / 7:00 p.m. Eastern. at Edtechtalk