Week 5 - Information and Media Literacy

This week dealt with how to present information that is both effective and visually pleasing. We looked at PowerPoint, Hypermedia, and Multimedia. We covered what Multimedia and Hypermedia are and how they can be effective. They are both really great for stimulating different parts of the brain. These can be great for people with different learning styles. Combinations of different types of media together can be educationally pleasing to the greatest number of people. This week also shows how to use PowerPoint more effectively. It showed the importance of consistancy, contrast, proximity and repetition in presentations.

This information will be really great in the future. I know that it will be very useful for teaching. Elementary School students may not respond well to PowerPoint generally. However, with the use of multimedia, I can make learning more fun for them. When learning is fun, kids want to learn more. Also, it's much easier to disguise to the kids that they are actually learning if it's in a fun movie or cartoon. Multimedia makes this more possible. If I chose to teach kids that are a little bit older (so that they can handle more information at once), I now know how to set up an effective PowerPoint. I know that just because the presentation may have pizazz, doesn't make it easier to comprehend the content presented. It can actually hinder the learning process. When in doubt, simple is better and more effective.


This YouTube video just shows a lot of very common multimedia examples. It shows how multimedia is used everyday.

Week 4 - Copyright, Plagiarism, and Ethical Issues

This week, we learned a lot about copyright and plagiarism as well as the ethical issues behind using someone else's information and thoughts. Copyright applies to all tangible and creative works including literary, dramatic, musical, choreography, artistic, video,text, pictorial, architectural, and certain other works. There are ways to get around the copyright laws such as it's not valid in countries that didn't sign the copyright treaty, works published before Dec 31, 1922 are fair game, copyright only exists for 70 years after the death of the author, and the Fair Use Act which allows limed usage of copyrighted work without permission from the copyright owner. We also learned about Creative Commons, a new kid of copyright. Creative Commons allows the copyright owner to put conditions on their copyright agreement. This week was really informative.

In education, teaching on these topics are essential (maybe not so much at the Early Education Level). It becomes more important as the students get older. These topics are huge. Plagiarism is going to be brought up in every class as they go through their education. Also, it becomes increasingly important after they are done with school because at the later age it has more consequences than just a bad grade on a paper. They can be sued and fined and mess up their life just from something stupid like forgetting to give credit to the person who actually made the things they are presenting. It is important to educate students on the proper uses of sources and citations and well as deciphering which sources are reliable. It's also important to show these kids examples of what can happen if they improperly use something that is copyrighted or plagiarize. Students need to see that their action can have serious consequences so they understand the importance. You can do this by showing them a news story or something where someone got in serious trouble for copyright infringement. This makes the topic more pressing and real for students.



I chose this YouTube video because it is a quick overview of a lot of information that we went over this week. It talks about practical uses of Fair Use and copyright.

Copyright Blog

This is a video from YouTube. It was created with clips from Disney movies. It explains pretty much everything needed to know about Copyright. Purty nifty if you ask me!

Week 3 - Web Technology

This week, we discussed Web Technologies. This was definitely eye opening. It brought up the reality that kids know way more about the internet than I do, even at 21 years old. This is great and scary. Younger people can teach us many things through their knowledge of the web. They also have access to infinite resources through the web which can expand their world knowledge. However, this can be very frightening in the sense that parents have no idea what their kids are up to because they don't always understand the risks behind the internet.

Web Technologies can be useful in education through just knowledge of them for parents and students. In such a technological age, as educators, we need to make sure that plenty of technology is used in our instruction. This helps the kids think that we aren't dinosaurs that don't know anything about our students or the changing times. This will also be good for informing the students and the parents on the risks (physical and emotional) and benefits of using the web. The reading for this week was great. I wrote a paper in high school on cyberbullying so seeing this in the reading excited me. It is important to edcuate not only students but parents on the proper use of the web. It's also important that they know that it's not only people the don't know that they need to worry about but very often people they do know that can pose worse threats. It's important for kids to see that although myspace and facebook may be fun and they may look cool if they have the most "friends". It's dangerous. Some of their "friends" could be online predators as well as kids they go to school with that could use these technologies to bully them. Also, these sites give a false sense of security to these kids and they might share more information than they should on the web.



These YouTube videos are kinda funny but also scary. Can you imagine someone saying all those things to you? After hearing it so many times, you would start to believe it. That's even scarier. I chose these short videos to give examples of how cyberbullying can cause hurt and resentment.




This YouTube video helps to show how anything you post is public. It really is available on the WORLD wide web. So be careful.

Week 2 - Educational Technology

This week, we learned how educational technology applies to many fields. Tape recorders and videocassette players are how we used to use technology. In the 1920s-30s we saw slides, radio, and sound recordings being designed and used. Educational technology can be used in everyday use or even business as media and audio visual communications as well as social tools such as blogs, wikis, web pages, and social networks. It can be used for vocational training or instructional systems in any field. It provides us with active learning techniques and practical applications. We also saw a video about a meeting of a group called TED. In this video we got to see some really cool inventions that were designed specifically for practical purposes such as clothing shopping in Prada, cubicals that aren't awful, recycling of roof runoff water at the Millennium Dome in London, and a tool for scuba diving without getting wet.

In the education field, educational technology will be very useful. It will make it easier to cater instruction to more students. It adds more aspects to the traditional audio, visual, and kinesthetic ways of teaching. It help combine these on a regular basis and maybe could help the students learn faster because they are stimulating more parts of the brain at one time. I think it would be neat to see how many trees we can save by doing more assignments on computers. It could be really cool to inspire kids by showing them some of these videos and then have them try to invent something. It gives them practical ways of critical thinking. Also, in such a technological age, kids will be more comfortable showing what they know using technology. Plus they will think it is more fun because it's not the boring way that most of us older people are used to.


I chose this video from YouTube because it shows how teachers can effectively use technology in the classroom.