Week 6: Investigating with Technologies

What are personal digital assistants? How do you use them in the classroom?

Personal digital assistants can best be described as small computers that can be held in one's hand. There are different varieties of PDA's and some have more functions than others. They can be used in the classroom for their computer-like abilities. Students can make memos for future assignments, but most importantly, PDA's allow students to transfer files in several different ways to eachother and to a computer if necessary. Other useful programs can be downloaded for free or for a small amount of money that can help the student organize his/her work and see it in graph or chart form. Personal organization of important information that can be sent to others or a computer make PDA's seem very useful in the classroom.

Why do we use online survey tools? How does it help us in our classrooms? What are two good rules for writing good surveys in your opinion?

Online surveys are used to collect data about a number of things. They can be used to find out what people's opinions are on almost anything. These surveys are often used in marketing to find out what the public likes and wants more of or what they do not like. Students can create their own surveys, which incorporates many different decision making skills in how to create a good survey and also how to analyze the data they recieve from their survey. I think the two most important rules in writing a survey are avoiding bias and leading questions because the survey taker may not realize it, but the way the question is worded could ultimately affect their answer.

Conclusion:

This may sound silly, but I had heard the term PDA so many times and never understood what they really are. I had no idea until reading a recent article that they could be used in classrooms. PDA's in the classroom seem like a good idea to me because of the amount of organization that is at one's fingertips, and how easily data can be transfered from one person to another. Online surveys are another thing that I had never considered being used in a classroom. It took reading this chapter to realize the amount of higher-level thinking creating a survey requires. Both PDA's and online surveys seem beneifical for students in my opinion.

Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Marra, R., & Crismond, D. (2008). Meaningful Learning with
        Technology (3rd ed.). Columbus, OH: Pearson.

Week 3 Assignment

I had no idea that a program like Inspiration even existed! All of the information from the Inspiration and Webspiration Classroom videos is new to me. It could be very useful when you need to diagram all of your loose ideas and to organize thoughts. The Webspiration Classroom seems like an equally exciting and fun way to learn with technology.

I am going to be teaching much younger children than what these programs were designed for, but they could help especially with research papers in older grades and for taking and organizing notes. Having students do peer review and offer suggestions to each other could save time, and the teacher could also offer suggestions and praise existing peer review. The first time I taught a new subject I tried to be as familiar with it as possible, but teaching the subject helps you to have a better understanding.


I believe that this technology could be very useful to students. The thing I liked the most about the programs was how the outline of the paper could be changed to diagram view. People learn in different ways, so the different views could really help some kids.









Inspiration Software (2011, February 2). Inspiration videos and webcasts for
    using visual learning in your classroom [Video file]. Retrieved from
    http://www.inspiration.com/videos/Inspiration



Inspiration Software (2011, February 2). Webspiration classroom service:
   Improve writing and thinking skills [Video file]. Retrieved from 
   http://www.inspiration.com/webspirationclassroom



Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Marra, R., & Crismond, D.(2008). Meaningful
    Learning with Technology (3rd ed.). Columbus, OH:
    Pearson.