Week #4 Reflections

Christine Bowen – Week #4

Chapter 1
Chapter 1 was an okay read because it reinforces the fact that technology in general is always changing and education is trying to keep up with what its role should be.  Educational technology seems an appropriate name to me. 

I pulled my district’s policy on students using the network.  It is a two-page agreement that the student and parent have to sign.  There are 20 items in the agreement.  Our technology department titles their course Business Systems & Technology.  I copied the course description below straight from the school’s website.   It is interesting to compare it to definitions in Chapter 1.  

Course Description:

BST I provides basic computer training for all students that are either post-high school education and/or entering the workplace. Students will use a variety of software in Windows, including Office 2007, which features Word (word processing), Excel (spreadsheet),, PowerPoint (presentation slides), and Publisher (desktop publishing). Units include Internet activities, document formatting, and business presentation skills. The curriculum used follows criteria in Microsoft Certified Application Specialist Exams. Students may also use digital cameras and scanners. Open to grades 9-12. Credit .5.

Social Bookmarking

I have worked with delicious in the past in a professional development meeting.   At work, I just save sites to, “My Favorites”.  A pro to delicious is that you can access all of your favorite sites anywhere.  Therefore, I have started to play with the delicious account to see how often I go to it. 

It is valuable to see what sites other people are using.  I really like that it lets you know the number of people that have bookmarked particular pages.  Now, that doesn’t mean the page is good but usually the numbers let me know that there must be something about the site that could be useful as so many people have bookmarked it. 

I am not sure about using this with students.  I don’t know if I trust some of my students (I teach Alternative) to drop sites into delicious from anywhere.  I don’t think they would mess with the Wiki because that posts assignments but I am a little apprehensive about the delicious. 

I did a search on delicious.  My next unit is the Great Depression.  I entered it into the search box and came back with 170 hits.  I will look at some of these this week.  I think it does a better job of filtering things for educational purposes than Google does.  Most of the posts seem to have been done by educators.