My Mega- Blog

So I am suppose to give a overview on what I have learn over the course of the semester. Lets see...I can say that from everything that I have experience with in the past from different ways of learning to how to get people to open their minds up to learn has been some challenging tasks. Previously, I knew there were formal and informal learning; where learning in a classroom listening to a monotonic professor to sitting at home and watching videos about different material. Not once have I sat down and thought about how much you can tie the real world into your typical day learning. I never knew the ee-learning existed in the world we called "education" today!! This very topic has led me to open my mind to new ideas for how teachers and students can apply what they would want to learn in their typical workplace and blend it in their classrooms. Its amazing that some guys can go home and play video games all evening to get that sense of relief from doing school work or having to do homework; where in reality alot of our teachers' curriculum is envolving using video games to hender children minds of acceptance to new ideas. Just think, instead of being able to drive in a driver's ed car to gain that mindset of driving where your teacher has control of the brake pedal on the other side to staying in your classroom and be able to put on a helmet that will provide a simulation that will give the emotion-test to driving as well as senarios that will increase reaction speed for drivers....Right now, I am waiting till what will happen next! Until next time.....

Peace

Ready, Set, Action

I apologize to my fans since I wasnt able to post a blog last week. Its been a pretty rough week! But I do have to tell you about this exciting new experience I encounter with last week. I made a video using CamStudio. I had the headphones with the mic on my head thinking I was a true business man!!! What can I say I look like a dweeb forreal!!! Anyway, we had to create a video that was 5 minutes long about a open source software that we were studying...I choose to pick Gmail for my video. The experience was awesome thinking I could put this video on youTube and all. Ee-learning is the way to go....

Interactive Learning

I am writing this blog in response to my previous blog discussing Smartboard features. The following link talks about some of the popular features this enhanced board has:
http://www2.smarttech.com/st/en-US/Products/SMART+Boards/Front+projection/600+Series/Features.htm

Personally, I have seen teachers use this board go educate their students. In the aspect of e-learning, teachers have the technology to create a variety of multimedia files for the students to interact with. Using this "special board" cuts down on cost for school/districts from purchasing other equipment that would have been used in addition to making multimedia files. Teachers has been able to incorporate more games and simulations versus taking notes with students; this approach have allowed students to apply what they learn from hearing the material to applying the material.

Time of Change

What can I say, this week has been incredible!!! This week in class has been focus on the noticing the various ways on how learning has transformed itself...We had to do our annotated papers this week where we picked a topic that deals with e-learning and find 5 articles that supports your topic. Majority of my class choose to write about merging gaming software with e-learning or applying real world experience to e-learning. That is only naming a few, but its amazing where would the world of technology be in the next three years. Working for the school district, I was able to get a hands-on experience seeing how children now interact in there classrooms. The district provided schools with SmartBoards, interactive white board. This board displays the desktop and other activities from the main computer via projector and has the feature of a touch screen for kids to come up and move objects around with there hands. What can I say, this is e-learning!!

Acronym cont.

Based off my annotated paper, I researched and found out what "ee-learning" is and deals with.

Correct format:

Experiential E-learning (ee-learning) is merging real world experience to an e-learning structure.

Educators today have decided to take e-learning to a new level, not only providing an alternative to sitting in a classroom to learn new material, rather switching the classroom background and inserting your bedroom or workplace around you. Or its switching a professor from the front on the classroom speaking a monotone voice and inserting a projector screen watching another class or teacher from another state giving a lecture or training to you and several other schools at once. Who would have thought??

Format: Acronym (Definition)...

When writing a paper, its good to follow certain formats when dictating certain information. One thing my professor and I discussed in class is a format for defining concepts and terminology. This format consists of stating the acronym and in parenthesis stating the complete definition of the acronym. Failure to do so give much confusion to readers not being able to follow the flow of ones' paper or article. So I was reading a article and I fell upon a acronym that brought interest into wanting to know more about this term, but there was no clear define expression to support the acronym. I actually brought this new concept of learning to my professor, Dr. Keane, and of course as a professor she gave her most educated guess. I disagreed to her guess,but could not support my perspective because there was not an article that use the correct format in their writings. So can anyone help me? I just need help completing and supporting the acronym; I will get the sentence started and hopefully someone can finish it. "ee-learning (??) is ......"

Throughout the discussion between my professor and I, it was brought to my attention that ee-learning could stand for experiential electronic learning, experimental education learning, or experiential e-learning. Thru decades of knowledge and several degrees LOL (just kidding), Keane states that ee-learning (experiential electronic learning) is merging e-learning with experience-based learning. From just my professor statepoint who is to say that this merge is relevant to what ee-learning is all about. Through research her support statement is valid that its giving hands-on experience towards learning. For example, a class that I took last semester at Carolina, TSTM 444, was structure to support what ee-learning is all about. This course was an online course and it provided hands-on opportunity to support everything we were learning offline. This new acronym gives a new aspect to what informal learning really is. I see this true meaning experiential education learning. Even though there is more facts and aspects to this one concept; its all a guess.

So can someone finish this expression: ee-learning (??)...

Categorizing

So far this week in out TSTM 544 class, we have been categorizing web 2.0 software to open source software. Our class have been utilizing a spreadsheet to rate software applications such as Moodle, WebGlimpse, Blogger, or Sakai with criteria that the class came up with. Some of these applications we rated were based off the amount of benefit it would have on students rather than business employees. We even rated some of these applications based on the "user-savvy" aspect it would have on teachers trying to download or install their particular application. During my research on giving the best possible ratings, I found that every application that may have a user-savvy interface does not benefit the user in the function of the application.