Strategies

Personality to Understand Learning

Recently I took the Myers-Briggs test to determine the type of personality that I resembled. When I first took it, I thought it was trivial and did not see the real benefits although after I received a detailed description of my results, I quickly saw the importance. I also realized that it would be very helpful for my students to take this test so I can understand their personality and their style of learning. I can then better assess the best way to teach technology to reach each individual and when assessing their learning, I will know how they think and express themselves.

If you are not familiar with the test, there are four separate categories for scoring the results.
My personality results were very interesting as noted in bold:

ENERGY FLOW: extrovert, introvert
GATHERING INFORMATION: sensing, intuition
DECISION MAKING: thinking, feeling
ORGANIZATION: plan, flexible

Portfolio Survey Results

View the results and data from my group's digital portfolio survey and feel free to still take the survey as your input is important.

Student Portfolio Research

Here at the ADE conference in Singapore my group (@metzy & @1wichai) are examining digital portfolios for students and looking for the key combination of ingredients that goes into making that ideal portfolio. Please help us out and fill out the quick survey based on your experience and opinions about digital portfolios. Thanks!

Take Student Portfolio Survey

Thinking is Better than Doing

Here at the ADE conference in Singapore, they brought in photographer Joseph Linaschke to show us some things and help us develop our personal branding in education. One of the assignments was to create a photo of ourselves that captures who we are all about as an educator. With the help of other guys critiquing my work, including Joseph, I was able to develop my unpolished ideas. I am reminded that a lot of times our first ideas are usually not our best and to keep the message clear. Today, a professor from CAD told us that when Disney and other big names come to hire students, they don't look at the final product, they go straight to the rough drafts so that they can see the student's thinking process. Thinkers can succeed in anything they do. Here is my thinking process attempt:

Draft 1

Draft 2

Result (for now)

Yes...And

Just finished the first day of five here in Singapore for the Distinguished Educator's Conference. The first night's speaker didn't even talk about technology, which surprised me. Instead, she talked about social culture and how we interact with each other. She had this phrase, "Yes, and." She explained that a lot of times when people talk, evaluate, and plan with each other, they don't listen to each other and use "Yes, but" statements. "Yes, and" is much more productive and supportive while getting things done. So as we work together in the conference we can apply the statement which will help the social culture. It reminded me that when I teach or train teachers, I shouldn't just jump right into the tech stuff but lay down foundations to make (tech) things go smoother in the end.

This Internet, Growing Growing Growing

You need statistics in preparing for a technology presentation or just want to see how big this Internet has grown?

Earned $4,000 Today with Search Skills

Understanding how search engines think can help you think critically when searching other areas. For example, today I decided to finally buy my summer plane tickets when we travel to see family. It is a complex flight (Seoul > Hawaii > Portland > Seattle > Dallas > Memphis > and back to Seoul).

My first instinct was to use a travel agency. Tried one in Seoul and one in the States. Total cost, $4,000 per ticket.

My second instinct was to buy through the airline and cut out the middle man...cost of $3,000.

I still was not satisfied. Compared five different Internet ticket sites and fount www.travelocity.com to be the cheapest and best features over the competition:
> I get to see each options for each leg of the journey, with the price difference shown. This was huge for me because I saw that it was only $30 more to skip a layover which is key when you have babies.
> I was able to see the seating chart and choose my own seats.
> Travelocity will reimburse me the difference if the price of the tickets drop. Comforting to know.

And the best part of it all...the price per ticket was $1,500!I thought this had to be an error, to be cheaper than the carrier. I called Delta and asked them to match it but they said Travelocity can offer cheaper prices because they buy in bulk. Good to know!

In conclusion, if I would have been lazy, I would have paid $4,000. If I would have relied on instincts, I would have paid $3,000. Instead, I earned about $1,750 per hour for the three hours I researched since I bought my family's tickets on Travelocity. Winner winner chicken dinner.

Note: Thinking of switching to Chrome since I already wrote this once and Firefox froze on me again. Just waiting for the delicious sidebar chrome extension.

Digital Textbooks 2.0

TAGS: web 2.0 - digital textbooks - copyright

I was reading an old issue of Tech & Learning magazine from my cousin-in-law who encouraged me to create a curriculum for informing teachers and students about copyright laws. There is definitely a need as it is often not addressed and many plead ignorance on the issue. In an article about copyrights, I learned about ccLearn which is a must in your diigo or delicious bookmarks. It offers a lot of valuable resources for teaching within the bounds of the copyright laws. For example, on their site I learned about ck-12 which is a website that allows you to create open source textbooks, tailored to the standards that you want to cover.

Proving Teacher Competencies - a Must

TAGS: apple - portfolios - certifications - education

Signed up and going to the Apple Education Summer Institute here in Hawaii. There is so much knowledge out there to learn but how do you prove what you know? A teacher may have full knowledge of Final Cut Pro, great lessons, and high quality student work, but in today's world, you have to advertise and prove your ability or you may be deemed incompetent and get replaced in today's teacher cutback days. It is also important to prove to parents your skills.

Here are three ares teachers should focus on proving:

Web Your Classroom

TAGS: website - wikis - cms

In 2003, I used a simple and free website creator, GoogleSites, to create a class website. I was the first teacher in the school to have a site and the students and parents found it to be very convenient. Sometimes students failed to complete homework worksheets that were passed out in class because they claim they lost it. By posting the worksheets online, this eliminates their excuses. My exam review sheets were sometimes ten pages long; by posting them online students could download it and edit the review sheet according to what they needed to study. This process also helped to save printing costs and trees. The website idea caught on at the school and soon more teachers had class sites.