Technology Tools Week 4

I viewed an InTime video called "Opera on the Net: Collaboration and Performance." This project allowed students to work together with a school in Sweden to create an original opera via e-mail and video conferencing. This assignment was created in 2001 and seems like it was ahead of its time.

Our school received a grant about 5 years ago to install distance learning equipment. We now have the ability to talk to people all over the world. Our students now collaborate with others around the state and they have participated in activities around the world. This project is a long-term assignment and allows a greater connection between students than what our students currently experience. The assignment seems to be very involved and requires a lot of preparation from the teacher, like taking a summer course from the Metropolitan Opera Guild. It seems to be as much a collaboration between teachers as it is between students.

Students took on roles to develop an opera, from music, to costumes, to staging. In the end, the students from Sweden flew to the US to rehearse and present the opera to the community. What a great opportunity for all involved.

Technology Tools Week 3

Week 3 brings some good resources for me. This week's spreadsheet assignments forced me to use and try things in Google Docs that I had not yet tried. After trying it, I can now comfortably go to my teachers and tell them what I like and what I do not. I feel better about my knowledge of the product and my ability to help them.

NetTrekker was also very helpful to me. I have been researching web sites with lesson plans for my teachers for a number of years. NetTrekker was a great resource. In the past, I have recommended sites like Teacher's Domain, Curriki, and MIT's Open Courseware (specifically for the high school). This is a much better resource than any of my pages. This is something I would like to look in to as a future resource. We have plenty of resources in our library and labs for students like databases, computers, and books. We do not have nearly as many resources for our teachers.

Once again, I found the readings to be the most difficult thing for me. I am not one who learns by reading and answering questions. I am a much more hands on person.

Technology Tools Week 2

Again, this week's class offered up some interesting new technologies. The biggest thing for me, and I would bet for others, is using a different search engine. Most of us probably use one search engine for everything, usually Google. I was not aware that there were so many different search engines out there. While I have used many search engines like Lycos, Google, WebCrawler, Yahoo, and Bing, I didn't know about the others. A quick look in Wikipedia under the term search engine listed all known search engines by their creation date. Very interesting list.

After researching that list for a while, I chose to try out the engine called Cuil (pronounced cool). I chose it mainly because its name interested me. While it is a good search engine and its results format is different than Google, it is not as thorough as Google. I may try some meta-search engines like Dogpile later this week. If it can really search many different search engines and get better results, that is great.

As for the online word processing services, I was already pretty familiar with those services. There were really not any surprises in this area. I am now excited that I have an entire suite of online services. Between Google Docs and some of the others we learned about I now have presentation, word, graphic, and spreadsheet services available to me. While they are not as advanced as something like Microsoft Office, they work for me. I am a basic user, not an advanced one. For the most part, these services will work fine for me and I am looking forward to sharing this information with my teachers.