Tech Play 4 - Information Literacy

As a future instructor, I believe that the Information Literary of my learners will be a key indicator of how well I am doing as a learning facilitator.  I have found that there are many tools available to teach information literary to students.  The following are four of the tools that I found and my evaluation of these tools.

1.  Research 101@EMC - This Eastern Michigan University tool is a customization of the University of Washington's award-winning, interactive information literacy online tutorial.  After reviewing the six units in this tutorial, I think this is a very good tool that I would definitely use to teach my students information literacy.  This tool fits into the Research & Library Skills area of the NFIL infographic.  What is useful about this tool is that it is an excellent tool for teaching students good research and library skills.  For this reason, I feel that although it does not teach any of the other areas of the NFIL infographic, this is one of the best learning tools for the area of the NFIL infographic that this tool does address.

2.  Wikipedia: Beneath theSurface  is a video about what is a Wikipedia, what Wikis are about, and how relevant, truthful, and reliable or not Wiki information can be.  This will teach students about this information source that is widely used for research.  This video should also instill some Critical Reading and Thinking skills in students.  I think that this tool would fit in the area of Critical Literacy on the NFIL infographic for the lessons it would teach students about evaluating information that is derived from using Wikis for information sources.  I think that because of the lessons that could be derived on Critical Literacy, this would be a very good tool to include in my toolbox.

3.  Carnegie Mellon University has a set of lesson plans to aid in the development of information literacy skills for K-12 instructors.  Not being an instructor yet, I could not judge how effect these lessons plan would be, however from what I can assess of the tools,  they would seem to be very engaging and interactive tools for teaching K-12 students.  On the NFIL infographic, I believe these tools would fit in the area of Media Literacy for the computer literacy skills that K-12 students would gain from them.

4.  YouTube has a number of Information Literacy Videos.  I found this one Info Literacy 10. EvaluatingInformation Sources to be very informative, thought provoking and would recommend this one to any of my high school or Higher Ed students. There is a whole series of videos on information literacy.  Although I did not review all of them at this time, if the rest are as informative as the ones I watched, then the series would probably cover the complete Information Literacy infographic.  I would certainly review all of them before presenting them to my class as a source.

Tech Play 3 - Creativity Tools

It is amazing how many apps there are out there for creativity. I have an iPad Mini which goes everywhere with me. I often download and try new apps. Many of them of them are free apps. Some I pay for because they are what I consider to be necessary apps. Their purposes range anywhere from travel, banking, news, weather, reading and what I considered utility apps.   I have a couple of apps which I considered to be utility apps but now I will classify them as creativity apps.   Moreover, this tech play has shown me there are so many more out there that can be used for creativity. The one thing that I might consider to be a negative for some of them is the price. However, if I was a parent of a school age child, and an app would help my child learn more efficiently and have fun doing it, I would consider it a good investment.  A couple of the apps that I presently have on my iPad that I will now refer to as creative apps and instead of being utility apps are Notes Plus which is an apps that I used to take quick notes during meeting or when an idea comes to mind, iBook which I considered a library app, and Wolfram/Alpha which is a knowledge and answers app.  I also have Skype which I have used on occasion to do a Visual Phone Call with my daughter in Tulsa.  Now that she also has an iPad, we use FaceTime instead of Skype.  One of the Analyzing apps from the Tech Play was an app called GoDocs for GoggleDrive.  I have been using Dropbox and SkyDrive for the same purpose.  Another cool app that I have downloaded is MyScript Calculator which can be used to do math calculations by hand which I think would fall either in the Analyzing or Understanding range.  All in all, I think the technology that is and will be available for creative educational tools will continue to grow at a rapid rate.     

This post is the ePortfolios class assignment.

I explored a couple of ePortfolio sites. I looked at ePortfolio.org. Unfortunately, this site is no longer accepting new accounts or renewals. I also played a little bit with Adobe's Creative Cloud and Behance, however it seemed geared more towards Digital Artists and Illustrators. I also looked at desire2learn.com. After reading some of the posts in the ePortfolio Tool Q&A, I decide to try Portfoliogen. I found this to be a very easy to use and educator oriented. Thanks Classmates!

Here is my link on Portfoliogen:

http://www.portfoliogen.com/DavidMTyler/

Some of the affordances of this tool that I see are:

1. The ease of use - you don't need to know HTML or website design.
2. It gear toward the educational community.
3. It is free!
4. For a small annual fee, you can expand it capabilites.
5. It's web-based. Any one with a web brower can view it. I tried it on several different platforms (desktop, tablet, mobile phone) .

Tech Play 1 - Blog

Content – The student work I would be addressing is basic computer technology.  I would start with Basic computer theory.  This blog would be a way for me to communicate and reinforce what I presented in previous lessons with my students.  I would be a means of communicating to those who use this technology on a daily basis and need to achieve a deeper understanding of how computers and their attached peripherals talk to each other.  I would also address how information is transferred from one computer to the other on the internet and more.  The blog would be a way to communicate in an informal setting other than the traditional classroom.  The level of understanding that I would be trying to achieve would be Comprehension where the students would be able state the main ideas behind computer technology and summarize the basic technology that enables computers to communicate.

Pedagogy – I am developing into a strong supporter of the Constructivism learning theory.  For this Tech Play / Use of Technology for Education, I believe that the Constructivism learning theories would play an important role in this use of this technology.  Students today live in a digital environment where just about everything that they use in their daily lives is a type of digital technology.  By using a technology such as blogging, that is used in some form or fashion by many people (Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler, Intragram are all forms of blogging just to name a few) and especially Students (even the Baby Boomer generation uses Facebook) my Pedagogy would be to build on any existing knowledge of technology in the form of educating my students on what happens on the backend of a technology that they are already using many times a day.  With this pedagogy, I would incorporate Active Learning by including ways to ping an IP Address of another computer, Discovery Learning by giving my students links to research and Knowledge Building from what they would learning from my blog.

Technology – The affordances of a Blog site can be the communication between student and teacher, student to student, and parent to teacher.  Also information sharing between all of the parties, visual information sharing in the form of videos and pictures, and links to other websites with pertinent information.  Additionally, collaboration between students on projects and possibly parents becoming involve in this informal interaction.  Blog sites are informal by design; therefore the off-the-record interaction can be both positive and negative.  Students may feel a certain freedom to interact with the instructor in a way that they would not do in a formal classroom setting.  However, some students or even parents may take this as an opportunity to express disrespect and lambaste the instructor, other students or even other parents for what may be a difference in opinion.  Nevertheless, the affordances of open exchange of information out way the potential negative possibilities.