This week in lecture felt informative, practical, and applicable. I was glad to share with my fellow students a simple way to make lecture learning interactive. It was also helpful to be shown a safe and reliable way to share videos with students.
Mouse Mischief is a free PowerPoint software application by Microsoft that allows up to 25 students to control a cursor and select answers to teacher's question using their mice. All that is required are the mice, a projector, Microsoft Powerpoint, and a USB hub. I was surprised by the ease of use and the differing types of questions that teachers could use to gauge student comprehension. I have yet to design a lecture using Mouse Mischief, but I am intrigued of the idea of combining my formative assessment ability with my art skills to make a learning experience that is hopefully more engaging for students. The goof-off to thoughtful answers ratio by my students would be the deciding factor if this application would be a common part of the instructional aspect of my teaching or merely an occasional component. I hope Mouse Mischief proves to be the useful and inexpensive way to allow students to use technology along with the teacher that it seems to be.
The other presentation I would like to comment on demonstrated a network service called Vusafe. This is essentially Youtube for a classroom environment so all the distracting advertisements, inappropriate comments and content are gone. This allows for educators to feel comfortable that their students are not exposed to things that are irrelevant to the content of the video or are beyond their level of maturity. This seems like a no-brainer, especially for junior grades. I do have my skepticism however as the presenters were unable to demonstrate the website to us as they had not been granted access from the company that hosts the videos. How does this company make money without charging schools for the license or having advertisements? What drives them to provide a quality service to educators? For some reason I have doubt that it is out of the kindness of their hearts. If I were a teacher, I would definitely ask the principal to see about a subscription because I think their is an inherent quality in videos that are educational and interesting and it wouldn't hurt to try it out, but it seems a little too good to be true.
This week's presentation lecture felt more like a conference of teacher's sharing some of their ideas concerning technology and more progressive ways of teaching. That is probably how it should be though, considering that we are coming to the end of fourth year already!
Glad to get your reaction to last week's presentations. Yes we now are looking at what works in classrooms and since we seem to be entering a new era in education we should be looking at futuristic ones. I liked Mouse Mischief too and since found some good videos that give an even clearer picture of what is involved. (See Resources, Tech Literacy, Live Binder in Sakai). Also the session on safety was very important as we need to always be aware of safety in cyberspace. Perhaps you are a bit cynical on why someone would do something for free on Web 2 but Ithink actually that is the nature of Web 2 - collaborative. In any event you are showing critical literacy by asking the questions. Good for you.
ReplyDeleteYour blogs are interesting but you still need to connect a bit more to the literature (or any outside source that you acknowledge as you would in an academic paper). I was happy to see who you were last week so that I now have a face for Hoff. :-) Susan
I have enjoyed this blog and hope you might wrap it up with a final entry that includes more references. Thanks. Susan
ReplyDeleteThanks, I am working on it Dr. Drake. I will have another entry posted sometime this week!
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