Week 1 of CeDO 535

This week I started my new class called Facilitating Collaboration using Web Tools.  I found the assignment on investigating blogging services to be quit useful.  I really liked the this site called Coveritlive.  Coveritlive is a service that allows users to cover events live.  If there are speeches, sporting events or other live events going on, this service lets you post your thoughts in real time, so others can see what you are thinking about the topic at hand.  It is very similar to instant messaging.    As a person posts  in real time, readers are able to post comments, which pop up like instant messages.  I can see this to be an exciting way to get students involved with discussions.  This services also allows the readers to answer questions to polling questions that the blogger shares.   This services is free and can work in your school if you get certain school restrictions lifted.  
I also like the book that we are starting to read, "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms" by Will Richardson.  This book looks into the many new tools that are out there to use in school.  I really like the idea of blogging more with students and having more of a connection that way with my students.  I recently made Facebook pages for 2 of my classes, and so far that has been a fun way of interacting with my students in a way I have not done in the past.  

Week 5 of CeDO 540

This week we took a look at Google Trends.  I found this to be really interesting.  I really liked how easy this site makes it for a person to look at the popularity of two or more subjects based on the searches for the certain topic.  As a group, were were too look into this site and research a topic.  We decided to look into popularity of professional sports.  It was really neat to see the big difference in popularity between NHL and NFL here in America.  Football is a lot more popular!  However, you are also able to look at popularity in different areas of the world.  To no surprise, Canada's love for the NHL for surpasses that of its love for the NFL.   We also compared the NFL to the NBA and they actually were quite similar, but some cities had higher interest for NBA or NFL than others did.   After looking into our group assignment, I wanted to play around with Google Trends a bit on my own.  I took different U.S. cities and matched them up to on another.  New York had the most hits, followed by Chicago.  I was a bit surprised, because I thought 2nd place would be Los Angeles since it is the second largest city in the country, but Chicago had quite more hits than LA.   One thing I found very interesting was when I put Minneapolis in Google Trends.  Overall, there isn't much activity for searches on Minneapolis, but there was a large spike around August 2007....or when the I-35 bridge collapsed.  That event cause many, many people to look up Minneapolis.   Anyway, I am happy that I learned this new tool and I hope I will be able to use it for something practical in my personal or professional life in the future. 

Week 4 of CEDO 540

This past week in class were were to learn about Bill Tancer.  Bill Tancer is general manager of global research at Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence services company.  He studies Internet trends based on the searches that people do on the Internet.  One of the really interesting things that I learned was the pattern of when people start searching for prom dresses.  It turns out that January is actually the biggest months for prom dress searches.  Who knew?  The reason that information like that is important is because companies, either online or brick and mortar, can use that information to start marketing and selling the their prom dresses.  This technique can be use for countless other products.  This method of data research can be useful most of the time, but sometimes it does have errors.  Bill Tancer spoke about the excitement he got when he thought he could predict the winner of "Dancing with the Stars."  It turns out that the number of searches spiked for one of the contestants not because of her popularity on the show, but because of her attractiveness to men.  This caused  a false prediction that she would win the show, but she came in 3rd.  After learning more about Bill Tancer's data studying methods, I think it is very useful for companies that want to market something they are selling, but I wouldn't use it for trying to win bets on reality show contests!

Week 3 of CeDO 540

This week we had to make a survey that we could collect data on, analyze that data and eventually make a report.  When my group got together, we made a list of possible topics that we could make a survey on.  After discussing for a while, we came up with the idea of making a survey on pet ownership.  We felt that this would be a survey that could generate a lot of data because everyone can share their experience or lack of experience of owning a pet.  We are planning on sending this survey to many people on Facebook as well as on email.  We are hoping for a lot of good data that we can make a good report with.   I am very curious to see what numbers come out of this project!  

Week 2 of CeDO 540

For the past couple weeks we were investigating how to use mean, median and mode as well as learning about different surveys that are available for use.  Though I'm not thrilled about averages, I did learn a few new things the past few weeks.  I think it was useful to think about what numbers to look at depending on what topic your are talking about.  For example, for a group assignment we had to explain what group of numbers we would look at if we were assessing the value of our home.  It would be a good idea to take the mean for the most part because that tends to give an accurate number of where our home would be priced.  However, if there are a few homes that are on the higher or lower end of the spectrum, that can skew it a little.    When looking at surveys, our group felt you really need to have a pay per month plan if you were going to truly benefit from the survey site.  The free plans usually do not offer you as many questions to send out or have a limited number of surveys that you can send.   I felt it was really hard to say exactly which survey sites to use since there are so many of them, but Survey Monkey does seem like a popular and reliable service. 

Week one of Cedo 540

On to another class!  This new class is a statistics class.  I don't recall ever taking a statistics class in the past, but a lot of what we were covering in the first class made sense to me.  Being a special education teacher, I look at numbers fairly often and look for patterns in students' performance to see where they may need a little more help or where they are excelling.  Something I learned this week was the concept of parameters vs. statistics.  Before this class, I thought statistics was the measure of a sample and a population.   I did not realize that you actually call a measure of a whole population a parameter.  Another thing that was new to me this week was skewed distributions.   I always thought that a positively skewed distribution was top heavy to the right, not the other way around.   Now I know that I was incorrect and I will understand what it means for data to be positively and negatively skewed in the future.  Though a lot of the material in this statistics class isn't a ton of fun, I do find much of it interesting and look forward to the rest of the class. 

Week 5 of Digital Story Telling

This week we were assigned to make a rubric  for a multimedia project we have used with our students.  This assignment worked out great because during the final week of school I had my Linguistics class make an Animoto project based on their favorite book they read during the school year.  When giving the students this project, I did not have a rubric for them to follow.   This assignment gave me an opportunity to make something that I can use multiple times next school year.  As I was thinking about what to include in this rubric, I thought about the main things I wanted my students to express in their Animoto.  I wanted them to show me they knew how to make an Animoto account.  I wanted to see pictures in their presentation that accurately represented the book they read.  They also need music that is appropriate for the mood of the book they wrote.  I also added a section on the presentation of the Animoto.  Overall, I think this assignment was very beneficial and I will be able to use this many times in the future.

Another thing we had to do this week was finish our Pecha Kucha presentation.  I did mine on baseball stadiums that I have visited.  It was a fun project, but was hard as I expected.  However, I did set up a routine to make the task not as daunting.   To make sure that each slide was 20 seconds, I used the stop watch on my phone to get an accurate count on each slide.  Before I knew it, I was producing quality voice overs.  I am very happy with my end product and hope others enjoy it. 

Finally this week, as a group we had to evaluate hardware multimedia.  Our task was too evaluate the Ipod Touch and Flip Video Cameras.  Both are unique gadgets that can be very useful in every day life.  It was interesting to really look at these products and see how they could benefit you.