Distance Education

Pros of having virtual schools:

1. Children that are not ready to interact in a social setting can still participate in a good learning environment.
2. Parents are able to monitor more closely their child's education.
3. If a child were to fall behind, they would have less trouble catching up than they would in an actual classroom.
4. Families that have to travel a lot can still give their child a great learning experience.
5. The virtual schools have really great material, and can give children a very unique learning experience that they may not get in a crowded classroom.

Cons of having virtual schools:

1. Student's may not get the same social skills that they would acquire being in a normal school setting.
2. It may be easier for children to miss out on important lessons because they may not be covered in their virtual curriculum.
3. Students may have a hard time when they finally go to a real school, because they are used to a different learning style.
4. Student's cannot receive all of the same services that they would in a real school. (Counseling for example)
5. It may be difficult for some students to learn when they can be so relaxed and easily distracted in their own home.

I think that you could determine a student's readiness to participate in distance education by their attention span, maturity, and desire to learn. If a student is patient enough to be in front of a computer for long periods of time, then they probably would not have trouble with the virtual school. In order to be able to teach in a virtual school, you would have to be a great communicator because students may not be able to ask you as many questions after a lesson as they could in a real classroom.

Emergent Technologies

I think that one of the most important emergent technologies for education is the use of wireless internet. Although this technology has been around for a while now, as more and more schools equip their classrooms with wireless capabilities it will have a big impact on education. This site, http://www.high-speed-internet-access-guide.com/ , gives a lot of information about wireless. This technology will have an impact on classrooms because students will be able to use labtops to work from their desks, and use internet for homework and lessons. Coupling this technology with the use of E-books could make the use of physical textbooks obsolete in the future.
In some newer schools across America, every student has their own computer at their desk, and the class is geared toward learning with that technology. Students don't use textbooks, they follow along on websites with their teacher. This technology opens them up to endless opportunities of unique assignments and lessons that students without the technology would not have the opportunity to be exposed to.
Another very important emerging technology is the use of e-books, or electronic books. This site, http://www.ebooks.com/, is full of ebooks, as well as information about them and how to use them. Using ebooks could be a very good tool for a classroom. Instead of having to buy 30 books for a classroom, you could just buy the ebook and make it available to all of the students in the class. Not only can this save money for the teacher and the school, it would allow the students to use the book both at home and in the classroom without having to worry about losing or damaging a real book.
I think that this is one of the most important technologies for a classroom, especially if using it for textbooks. College students spend thousands of dollars on textbooks, but if a classroom could collectively buy the e-textbook and make it available to all of the students in the class, the students would be able to save a lot of money, making college more affordable.
Video conferencing is yet another very useful emerging technology. This site, http://www.lifesize.com/, offers a service of High Definition, life size, video conferencing. This is just one example of a site that offers this type of service. Using video conferencing can be very important for a classroom. A class could communicate with other classrooms all across the world to do various collaboration projects, or just to look in on how students learn in other parts of the world. Another thing this could be useful for is if a student had to miss some school for whatever reason, they could tune in to the video conference of the class, and not fall behind as a result.
In the future, using this could be very beneficial to my classroom. This would open the door for my students to have tons of opportunities that students without this technology could ever be exposed to. Using this technology could be like a new age pen pal system, instead of writing letters to a student in another country and waiting for it to be delivered and to hear back, you could instantly talk to your pen pal online and get to see them at the same time using video conferencing. There are tons of things that this could be used for, and this is something that I will try to use in my classroom in the future.

Kiosk

I thought the Kiosk project was a pretty good experience. Overall, it was a fairly easy, but informative assignment. While doing the kiosk, I came up with a lot of ideas of how I could use this assignment in my own classroom someday. In addition to creating my own, I really enjoyed looking at other kiosks, too. Everyone got really creative with their animations, sounds, and supplemental videos. With a little more time I feel that the kiosks could have been even better.

Engaging Students with Concept Mapping Activities

My Ideas:
1. Students could use concept mapping to do a report about the Solar System.
2. Concept mapping could be used as a prewrite assignment for an upcoming essay.
3. Students could use concept mapping to do a project about the human body and its differnt systems.
4. Students could use a concept map to do a character analysis of a character from a novel read in class.

Concept mapping can engage students in their learning because it adds a new, fun element to whatever they are learning. They will be able to put their own twist on a project by designing their own concept map. Examples are, if a student was doing a report about a historic figure, they could use a concept map to inform about important things about that person. Another example, students could become more engaged by using a concept map for an essay assignment because it would be a good way for them to organize their thoughts while getting the chance to use a computer as something other than a word processor.

Concept mapping gives the students a different way to demonstrate their understanding, because it allows them to arrange their ideas visually the same way that they organize them cognitively. This could be very helpful to students who struggle with expressing their ideas.

Blogs in Education

When I ran the search from the different sites, I got very similar results. Most of the sites that came up in the first few spots were the same on each site. The only ones that appeared to be different from site to site were a few that looked like they were probably paid advertisements. I don't know a whole lot about the way that these search engines work, but I would venture a guess and say that they all run similarly, and that would explain the similar results. I think that the blogs being used for K-12 classes can be used in innovative ways. First, they allow teachers to have an online spot to post information from class, as well as other class related business on the web. Second, they give students a place to share work that they have done online. And third, they give teachers from around the world a place to communicate and share ideas with one another.
I didn't have to do too much research on thee RSS/aggregators, as I have had one running from espn.com for some time now. I think it would be a good idea to have students subscribe to an RSS of their choice, as long as it was appropriate and relevant to school in some way. It would give students a chance to get news right in front of them, as many of them may not have cable, internet access, or a news paper subscription at their home. I think that blogging and RSS readers can have a great impact on classrooms. Technology is the new way to do everything these days, and introducing children to technology at an early age only gives them a leg up and a great head start.
The pros of using blogs and RSS readers in the classroom are; 1. Students are introduced to technology, and effective ways to use it to their benefit at an early age. 2. They provide great ways for teachers to share information with their students, parents of students, and other teachers. The cons are; 1. Some students may abuse the priveleges of internet access and the ability to publish anything that they want on the internet. 2. It is a relatively new and different way of education, and some students may not be prepared for it, and could fall behind.

First Post

My name is Andrew Gragg, and I am in the first semester of the Elementary Education program at Washington State University. I am hoping to teach in one of the middle school grade levels, and would like to become an administrator at some point. As far as where I would like to teach, I'm not really sure yet...but I may want to go back to my hometown of Longview, Washington to start my career.