Digital Imaging

While most of this week's info on digital imaging wasn't new to me, I did pick up one important thing: Image compression is important. The quality (DPI) of the image is driven by the application. For some strange reason (ignorance, perhaps?), I thought that was taken care of when you resized an image. This might explain the poor performance that I find on some web sites when photos are loading.

We also did some work with desktop publishing, but did not get into it too deeply. Nothing new to me here. Using a Word template is simple and there are plenty available online.

I turned in my Excel project. Doing this project gave me a little more exposure to a few of the features of this wonderful program. I have been a light user of Excel for years, and it has gotten progressively better (and easier to use) with each new version. The exception to this may be the Mac version. By today's standards, I find it clunky and difficult to access some of the features. Fortunately, I have a PC notebook to balance out my company-supplied Macbook.

Web 2.0

This week we focused on Web 2.0 applications. There are several that I already use: gmail, Moodle (an FTP program for education), online banking services Facebook, and others. But I did learn about a few that are helpful and fun.
I some time playing with Jing. Our IT people use it to create help videos, but I had never used it before. It is a quick and easy download. Very easy to use. I especially like the screen capture feature -- you can draw arrows and write text on you pics.
I also discovered Diigo. After playing with it for an hour, I decided that it will be the topic of my online project for the class that I taking this semester. With Diigo you can bookmark sites, highlight text for future reference, capture screen shots. Diigo creates a library of your work; great for research.

Today I learned about spreadsheets.

This weeks assignments centered around Excel spreadsheets. We are preparing for a project that is due on 9/21/10 where we will create a spreadsheet with multiple worksheets with "circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us" (thanks Arlo!).

I did some research (no, I didn't go to the library and blow the dust off of some old books; I "Googled), and discovered that there is a lot of info out there in cyberspace on how to create spreadsheets. There is also a lot of info on how to take the spreadsheets that you make and turn them into works of art. I think my spreadsheets will look much better in the future. Thanks, Mr. Google.

9/3/10 Digital Students?

It is obvious that there are different kinds of learners, as well as different kinds of teachers. The fact that there are different generations of people and, in a fast-changing culture, generations of people who think differently than previous or future generations shouldn't surprise us.

The articles that I read for my assignments this week identified the latest generation of students as "Digital Learners." This label isn't surprising. I teach electronics and technology-related stuff to teenagers. They know that I speak Digital with an accent. I text very slowly and make sure spelling, grammar, and punctuation are, at the very least, OK.

One of the videos that I watched was called "Engage Me or Enrage Me." I have mixed feeling about this video because it implies that teachers don't do anything but bore their students with meaningless lessons that are rooted in old-style thinking. Most of the teachers that I know work hard to relate to their students in meaningful ways and teach lessons that take advantage of all the technology available in their schools. Interestingly, this video didn't do that. Instead of showing students engaged with current technology, students were shown with white boards that had messages written on them. I couldn't decide of that was an insult to the students who were in the video or the teachers who were the intended audience.

Yet, important distinctions are made and developed in this lesson. Today's students know what technology can do for them. And it seems that most of today's students are anxious to capitalize on this technology. Many will use this technology, and the learning experiences that come with it, to better themselves. Some will use it solely for entertainment and social networking. A few will use the important tools in their hands lake an angry wife uses a butcher knife on her cheating husband.

Our job as teachers is to guide our students in the proper application of a huge world of technology. We must do our job well.