The Famous Dr. Ed-Tech

I am signing out! All assignments are completed not a moment too soon. This blog is postified, widgetified, and clarified. I have run the race, surfed the web, and performed on the web 2.0. It is finished.

(photo: Natalie Behring)

Final Technical Considerations

The last word on technical issues is that I went ahead and created two student accounts for this edublog. I named the users as exco1 and exco2. When I created the users as students, I used the gmail+ hack to have all information forwarded to me. The users were immediately assigned passwords and a blog site. For exco1, the site is http://exco1.edublogs.org/. The student can login and work on their own blog site once I assign the password information. Managing the content on the sites might prove to be a challenge, but it could be monitored by subscribing to the RSS feeds for each student site.

In order to have exco1 contribute and collaborate on this blog,  http://thefamousdredtech.edublogs.org , permissions were modified to allow exco1 to become a contributer.  This allows the student to add posts and modify their profile, but not change any other properties on the blog.  The only real concern is that exco1 can now go back and modify his email address which will take away some control from the teacher.

Here is another episode of “The Famous Dr. Ed-Tech Show”. This time Matt Sherwood is sitting in for the Doctor to review the “IBC News” Googlesite.

To preview a larger size of the Vodcast, click here.

Well, my 1 minute podcast ended up being 3 minutes, but I had fun making it. The podcast is an interview from The Famous Dr. Ed-Tech with Matt Sherwood (Me) regarding my assignment for EdTech700.

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Hi.  My name is Matt Sherwood and I am a technology teacher in Corona, CA.  I am currently earning a master’s degree in Educational Technology at SDSU, hence the title.

I have been teaching for 13 years now in fifth, third, seventh, and eighth grades.  Only the last 3 years have I been strictly teaching technology at the middle school level.  I am loving it. During that time I have been moving from just teaching MS office, to incorporating multimedia into my curriculum.  This has been largely on account of the wonderful free programs available such as Audacity, Paint.net, Photo Story 3, and Windows Movie Maker (not so wonderful, but free and easy).  I branched out into my first podcasting unit this year and created Podcasting101 for my gate class.  I felt it had mixed success and I want to refine it a lot.

You may be wondering about my blog title.  I am actually not a doctor of anything, or famous for that matter, but I earlier made a blog by a similar name for one of my other EdTech classes.  Visit http://thefamousmredtech.blogspot.com to see what I’m talking about.  I started My first blog back in August 2006 for a family website and I still keep my family blog there because I am reluctant to transfer it for fear of loosing all of my four readers in the process.  This is called “From the Mouths of Babes” and can be found at http://sherweb.blogspot.com. Since then, I’ve pumped out various blogs for classes and lessons.  Often they go unused, but I always plan to go back and use them at a later date.  Most recently I created http://writenowsurvey.wordpress.org as a launching point for a district wide student survey.  It worked out quite well.

Anyways, I much prefer the Wordpress “engine” over blogger.  I had already transferred most of my other  blogs to Wordpress.  So needless to say, I am very happy to see an educational rendition of Wordpress and will very likely get some mileage out of it this year in some teacher  inservices I am planning on offering.

Regarding wikis; they kind of are intimidating to me.  I have tinkered with them, but have yet to successfully implement them in any educational manner.  I like Google Sites and Wikispaces seems easy, but I’m not sure how to make them work in a school without rolling out 100’s of passwords.

For a final project, I would like to work out a plan for implementing blogs, podcasts, and wikis in a classroom setting so I can create a teacher-inservice based on my plan.