Cedu 527 Technology Leadership Week 1

We saw a good video in class about an African (I do not remember which country he was from). He talked about corruption and the need for good leadership.

We are using the moodle again. It seems to me that the moodle has all of the features of a wiki and a management system all in one program. It would be like somehow combining PB wiki with Powerschool or Blackboard. Am I right, or does moodle have other capabilities as well?

Chapter one in Gabriel's book was interesting. It discussed leadership qualities and various types of leadership roles. I think that the qualities mentioned in chapter one would apply to any school leader and leaders in other walks of life as well. I think this book provides some useful information on leadership, but I also think that there are intangible qualities that allow people to be effective leaders. These qualities are not as easily analyzed.

Cedu 533 Week 5

Kristine talked to us about common mistakes people made on the midterm. For the most part, most mistakes had to do with sticking too many tags into the code.

One student used www.voki.com to create a class website. It consisted of a snowman moving his mouth and the teacher's voice. This would be a cool tool to use at school. The dictation can also be translated to other languages.

One student put a youtube video called "One Semester of Spanish" on her website. Having been a Spanish teacher, I found this very amusing. I'll have to show it to other Spanish teachers.

We spent some time in class working on our Stritch GoogleDocs portfolios, which are due near the end of the program coursework.

Kristine presented information about web 2.0, which differs from web 1.0 in several ways. It seems to me that kids and teenagers are very familiar with web 2.0 and we should keep this in mind as educators.

When creating class and school websites we need to make sure they are accessible to a wide range of platforms and browsers. There's nothing more frustrating than not being able to access a web page or information on the web.

Some of the Web 2.0 tools that were introduced during class in week 5 were really neat. The comic creator website, www.makebeliefscomix.com, looked like fun. I run a comic book club in one of my schools and I think this could really be useful.

Cedu 533 Week 4

This week we applied our new knowledge of CSS and Javascript to create a web page. I had some trouble adding the Javascript and am still working on it. The basic HTML assignment was much easier and this one took me by surprise. I can see why some people think this is so difficult. Sometimes, it is. I like learning about it, though. It's good to have some experience working with HTML, CSS, etc.

We completed our report on Content Management Systems. Our small group discussed and wrote about many interesting aspects of 3 different systems that our school district uses.

I'm looking forward to working on the assignment for the 14th, which is to create our own website with some sort of service already available. I think I might use one called "teacherweb". This assignment will really benefit me, as well as the students, teachers and parents in my schools. I am glad we are doing this.

Cedu 533 Week 3

I week 3 we learned about Cascading Style Sheets, Javascript and various other things. The links and material about e portfolios were interesting. Portfolios and alternate assessment and evaluation are becoming more common in all levels and areas of education, as well as business.

The GoogleSites are very nice and easy to use. I am considering using those to create my school web page.

We started to discuss the CMS reports in our small group meeting.