Journal Response

My experience with Google Sites:

http://sites.google.com/site/bhannagroup/

First I was happy to know that I don’t have to know HTML in order to have my website and that Google and other sites now made it easy for anyone to have his website. It is not only easy but also free. I followed the instruction of the website and the Help to add or remove data and pages from my website. But my understanding for the purpose of having website was not clear, so I had maybe only little about me and I concentrated on presenting lessons to my students to demonstrate my ability to apply what I have learned in class 563 because it was only in that class that these website was introduced to me. In previous classes I learned to use publisher but I knew that in order to use it as a website, it is not free, so it stopped at that point. In Short, I used Google site for my webpholio because it is easy and free.

This is the course I am introducing to my students now in DLI

By the end of this course I plan to have these artifacts in my portfolio and I will use this list as a starting point for ideas for information and items to include in your portfolio:

1. Table of contents
2. Resume, including continuing education, special committee work and awards and special recognition
3. References
4. Letters of recommendation
5. Transcripts
6. Educational philosophy
7. Classroom management theory
8. Personal goals
9. Sample worksheets, games and tests
10. Examples of lessons - units or projects
11. Photos of your classroom in action to illustrate your lesson examples
12. Examples of students' work
13. Final results of projects or committees you have been a part of
14. Optional: short video showing you in action in front of the classroom and one-on-one with students
15. Optional: screen shots and addresses of school or classroom websites you have created
16. Optional: computer disks and print-outs of programs you have written or modified
    I might also try a new free website richer in options than I one I used.

In the end, I will difinitly add to my portfolio the reflection I should add to any of the material I use and the justification of using them according to the 8 standered.

Half of the Presnent & All the Future

Metiri Group. (2009). National Trends Report: Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) Round 6, Fiscal Year 2007. The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). Washington, DC. Retrieved May 17, 2009, from http://www.setda.org/.

I read a report called Enhancing Education through Technology, with an emphasis on “Focus on Technology Integration in America’s Schools". It is about a program called NCLB IID, No Child Left Behind, Title II, Part D.

The purposes of the NCLB IID program are to: (1) improve academic achievement through Technology, (2) assist every student in crossing the digital divide, and (3) integrate technology into teacher training and curriculum development resulting in research-based instruction.

Trend 1. Integrating Technology Leads to Positive Academic Results

This figure represents Federal NCLB IID national funds (in millions) by year.
This report shows that The number of states focusing on the integration of technology into specific academic content areas has remained relatively strong despite the significant cuts in NCLB IID funding over the last few years.

Figure 3 below shows the number of states focusing on specific core academic subjects in Round 6 (FY 07). These numbers have been relatively stable over the past few years.

Trend 2. Virtual Learning Options Increase for Students and Educators

From the following Figure, one is recognizing the value of continuous involvement by educators in learning communities, which provide expertise, resources, exchanges of ideas, and opportunities for professional discourse on key issues facing today’s educators.

From this report, I concluded that Technology in Education is increasing and it is one of the main factors of student better achievement. If Technology is half of the present Means of Education, it is, for sure, all the future's. <

Multimedia for Teaching

Rapid Rote:

This is a program that you can use to creat your own vocabulary list. This video can be used for faculty development to train teachers how to add their list of vocabulary related to the subject material they are teaching and present it to students in an appealing, interactive program. In this program I used CamStudio program that I downloaded for free to recored the screen while I comment.

USA Official Days:

Here is an Arabic version of the Official Holidays in USA. I used Power Point file about the lesson with arabic text. I used SmartBoard program recorder that also cptured the screen and my voice reading the text.

Attractions of Monterey

In this video I used a program called coolsoft to turn a powr point file into avia file. I then used Windows Movie Maker to add music and to record my voice to the file. The lesson talks about attractions of Monterey in Arabic.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Wesch, M. (2007). Human Futures for Technology and Education. Retrieved May 28, 2009, from http://www.educause.edu/.



In this article Michael Wesch released a video on the history of the Web called "The Machine is Us/ing Us." The video quickly tracks the transformations of the Web from its beginnings as a place to retrieve information into a vibrant user-generated and user-organized platform of RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, social networks, and folksonomies that encourage, enhance, and capitalize on collaboration.

At the video's end, Wesch suggests that these transformations require us to begin rethinking virtually everything, from authorship and copyright to our sense of identity and selfhood. These new technologies also have profound implications for education.



What possibilities and challenges do they bring to our teaching? What should we be teaching to students who are habituated to a new media environment where Google and Wikipedia are always at their fingertips? How are these technologies changing the way students learn and assess information?

In short, we need to rethink how we teach, what we teach, and whom we think we are teaching. For this presentation, Wesch creates another video in the same genre as "The Machine is Us/ing Us." Like the earlier video, this video quickly tracks the important moments in the history of education and attempts to capture the possibilities and challenges of the current moment in such a way as to pose and clarify some of the most important questions facing us as educators today.

Our students are socializing, communicating and experiencing their world in dramatically different ways than many of us can even fathom.

Education in India

Facts about India

Map of India

Mazurek, K., & Winzer, M. (2006). Schooling around the world, Debates, challenges, and practicing. (PP. 192-204)
Terrin: 2.4 percent of earth's surface area, yet 16.7 percent of planet's total populations. It is often said that India is a content not a country.

People: India is the second most populous nation in the world (around 350 people in a square kilometer). the population is not less than 600 million. While India is only one-third the size of Canada, it s population is about 27 times that of Canada.

Religion: The majority are Hindus with %12 moslems, 2.3 Christians and 1.9 Sikhs.
Language: Hindi is the official language of India. English is an alternative official or "link" language. There are 400 registered local languages. English is understood by only four or five percent of the totalpopulation.

Economy: there is a noticeable quick increase of exports and imports, along with a remarkable growth in manifactoring, banking, telecomunication technology and information technology.United States is the biggest trading partener of India. India exports human resources and knowledge to North Africa. However there is still a long way to go down the path to prosperity.

Culture and Politics: Inspite the fact that India is a country with a great diversity, the nationalist right-wing and the socialist left-wing together with the indian voters do not seem to mind globalization. This is what they beleive in: "Do not stop the globalization train, just slow it down and give us a better step-stool, because we want to get on."

Schooling: The modern Indian education system is 140 years old. since 1857, when the British colonizers established the first three universities-Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. India now has 242 universities and affeliated institutions.

Education System: India has to deal with an inadequat supply of teachers and underfunded schools. In primary level, Pupil-teacher ratio, in 1998, was of 1:71.9. Resycle Education : video from CNN

1. A UNICEF, 2002 study reveal inequalities by both level and gender in primary or secondary school.
   
2. the litracy rate increased from 52 percent to 56 percent. the latest data shows that %64.8 of the population are literate.


3. Free public schooling by constitution with many private and for-profit schools that take formal "donations".
   

Elementary School: Great success for the indian government in this field. %94 of the rural population in India have elementary schools. %84 have upper primary schools and school is free up to the age of 14.

Secondary School: Secondary education is also free. In addition to bublic schools, there are also institution for gifted and talented

Pre-university education(grades 11 and 12): usually offered in community colleges unless the student was talented. the gifted students are given scholarship awards following writtin examination.

CBSE Schools:Central Board of Secondary Education has been established by the government to follow a uniform school education by providing a common curriculum that adress the cross-cultur and the cross-linquistic aproach.the unifide schools educate children of parents who have job assignments requiring frequent travel and relocation.

NOS: The National Open School provide distance education for school dropouts and children unable to enroll in regular schools. 300,000 are enrolled in open schools.

Universities:

• The University Grants Commission (UGC), oversees the standards and implementation of higher education in India.
• There are several research and teaching institutions that are directly under federal jurisdiction, and there are also bublic and private universities in the provences, but all universities are controlled by federal policies.

Distance Universities

India has good experience in open universites. They are currently nine open university with Indira Gandhi National Open University being the second larget Open University in the world after the Television University of China. Video conferences along with other technology are utilized and degree programes are offered.

Adult Education

India has an extensive and well-established adult education network. Sixty percent of the students of this network are women.

Education for Women

Currently, Education for Women'sEquality spread over eight provences. It deals with female enrollment, retention, and employment. This body is responsible for curriculum issues relating to gender bias.

The Use of Blog in Education

Clyde, L. (2005). Educational Blogging. Teacher Librarian, 32(3), 43-5. Retrieved April 11, 2009, from Education Full Text database.


A blog is more than the online equivalent of a personal journal. Though consisting of regular updates, the blog adds to the form of the diary by incorporating the best features of hypertext: the capacity to link to new and useful resources. Blog posts are short, informal, sometimes controversial, and sometimes deeply personal, no matter what topic they approach.


9-11 and Blogs
Blogs came into their own only after the events of September 11, 2001. Blogging not only allowed us access to the event; it made us part of the event. And with that, the form had indeed finally come into its own.
In general, ‘blog’ used to mean a personal online diary, typically concerned with boyfriend problems or techie news. But after September 11, a slew of refocused media junkie/political sites reshaped the entire Internet media landscape. Blog now refers to a Web journal that comments on the news—often by criticizing the media and usually in rudely clever tones—with links to stories that back up the commentary with evidence.


Students' opinion on Blogging
Blogs and Education
Ø Teachers and schools are starting to experiment with the technology as a way to communicate with students and parents. Blogs are used to archive and publish student work, learn with collaborators, and manage the knowledge that members of the school community create.

Ø Bloggers are doing the same whether they are warbloggers working as professional journalists or teenage high school students worried about their final exams, they use blog to link to their friends and comment on what they’re doing.

Ø Weblogs break down barriers. They allow ideas to be based on merit, rather than origin, and ideas that are of quality filter across the Internet.

Ø Blogs allow readers to hear the day-to-day thoughts of presidential candidates, software company executives, and magazine writers, hear opinions of people they would never otherwise hear. Blogs leads to better understanding of people (and students as part), away from the media/politic.



Five Major Uses for Blogs in Education.( Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell)


First, teachers use blogs to replace the standard class Web page. Instructors post class times and rules, assignment notifications, suggested readings, and exercises. Students would find nothing unusual in this use of the blog. The instructor, however, finds that the use of blogging software makes this previously odious chore much simpler.
Second, Instructors begin to link to Internet items that relate to their course.
Third, blogs are used to organize in-class discussions. The conversation possible on the weblog is also an amazing tool to develop our community of learners. The students get to know each other better by visiting and reading blogs from other students. They discover, in a non-threatening way, their similarities and differences. It puts students in a situation of equity.
Fourth, some instructors are using blogs to organize class seminars and to provide summaries of readings. It becomes much easier for the professor and students to access the readings for a particular week.
Finally, fifth, students may be asked to write their own blogs as part of their course grade. Students read a chunk of a book and post two paragraphs of their thoughts on the reading.


Blogs are so attractive because…
What makes blogs so attractive, in both the educational community and the Internet at large, is their ease of use. These tools offer a new and powerful toolkit for the support of collaborative and individual learning that adheres to the patterns of contemporary information-intensive work and learning outside of formal educational settings

¨ Blog software comes with a personal Website for those who don’t already have one.
¨ The software captures your words in dated entries, maintaining a chronological archive of prior entries.
¨ In the spirit of sharing inherent to Net culture, the software and the personal Websites are usually free.
¨ Teacher can customize some of the features, rather than having to write something from the ground up.
¨ They are also able to set up an additional security system. A private blog, viewable only by the teacher and a singular student, can be set up this way. This allows the student and teacher to have a private means of feedback, as opposed to the public blog open to the public.

Despite the risks, teachers and students alike feel the benefits make blogging well worthwhile, if for no other reason than that blogs encourage students to write. The impact of the blogs on students’ life is that they write a lot more. The also pay more attention when I write in my blog (especially my spelling) since I know anybody can read my posts.

Extra articles
Ellison, N., & Wu, Y. (2008). Blogging in the Classroom: A Preliminary Exploration of Student Attitudes and Impact on Comprehension. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 17(1), 99-122. Retrieved April 11, 2009, from Education Full Text database.

This exploratory study explores student perceptions of blogging in the classroom regarding (a) which specific characteristics of educational blogging (writing an entry, reading other students' blogs, or reading other students' comments on one's blog) are most helpful for understanding course content and (b) other aspects of the instructional blogging experience, such as the process of providing and receiving peer feedback.

Fessakis, G., Tatsis, K., & Dimitracopoulou, A. (2008). Supporting "Learning by Design" Activities Using Group Blogs. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 11(4), p. 199-212. Retrieved April 11, 2009, from Education Full Text database.

A group of students used a blog as a communication and information management tool in the University course of ICT-enhanced Geometry learning activities. The analysis of the designed learning activities, the blog content and log files, as well as the points of view of the students (via a questionnaire and a group interview)