Realm of Creativity or Succubus of Dread

30 Jan. 2016


     In Chapter 1 of Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse OR The First Year of Teaching, the hilarious author, Dr. Chris Haskell discusses the rules to "setting yourself up for success" so to speak.  The first step is to create a vision; a clear idea what you expect your class to feel like, what you want to accomplish and how you will accomplish it.  It's a good idea to make sure the parents and school principal are on board with your "vision", and that your vision is written down.  In further guiding the creation of your vision, Haskall advises the consideration of the look, feel, and presence (how everyone interacts within the classroom, and to what degree) of the class. These and other considerations are discussed (teaching style, goals/objectives, etc.) - and again advised by Haskall to be written down, posted in the classroom, and even distributed. This vision can then be referred back to and modified with time.

New 3D technology

30 Jan. 2016


     So I watched an awesome video showing some of the latest and greatest computer technology.  The first part of the video highlighted an interactive touch-screen that, while cool, didn't exactly knock my socks off. I've seen that kind of tech for a few years now and while impressive, I don't exactly see it as world-changing, necessarily. I was however, enormously impressed by a ZCo "Augmented Reality Visualization tool".  Now that program was awesome!  The tech guy was able to pull up images on his screen and rotate them around like he would if it were a real, physical object.  Now, I know even this tech has been around awhile- it's a critical element of 3D gaming, which is also fairly old tech by now.  What really caught my attention though was that he could enlarge it and see the various layers of the object- in the example shown in the video the tech guy examined a multi-layer bus, like the kind driven a lot in the UK.  He was able to look at it from any angle, and enlarge it to the point that he could start seeing inside the bus!  My first thought upon seeing that was remembering the elaborate computers used by Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies, particularly the first couple when he was building/upgrading his Iron Man suit.  It makes me wonder just how many years away we really are from having those kinds of computers! 

     Functionally, I see all kinds of application for this augmented reality tool.  Especially in architecture, automotive classes, engineering, hell even in history class! Being a massive history buff, I can just imagine teachers someday talking about the Roman coliseums and bringing up not just photos of modern day ruins on a flat screen TV but actually bringing up an historical rendering of a colosseum, and even being able to spin the image around at various angles on a computer screen, zoom in and out and show the different areas of it, as it would have looked two thousand years ago.  Or imagine showing, not just telling or reading about the Battle of Gettysburg!  That would be seriously cool!

My Netiquette rules

30 Jan. 2016


In compliance with the netiquette questin my EDTECH class, here is a list of netiquette rules I generated- geared for elementary/middle school level.

KYLE’S RULES OF NETIQUETTE

1.    Never give out personal information (passwords, home address, phone number, etc.)

2.   Don’t be a “troll” and pick fights with people. Be respectful and talk to people the way you would like them to talk to you.

3.   Using all capital letters is the same as shouting online, SO KEEP THAT IN MIND WHEN YOU DO IT. The exception to that is when using shorthand, such as “LOL” or “ROFL”.

4.   Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

5.   Once something is posted on the internet, it is available for the world to see, and is very, very hard to remove.  Some things may never fully go away.  Keep that in mind before you say anything, or post images on the internet!

6.   What you say, and how you say it is a reflection of who you are as a person.   Take a moment and look twice at the things you post before you post them and ask “What does this text/image I am about to post say about me? Am I ok with possibly everyone who knows me and possibly many people who don’t know me, reading or seeing this?  If there is any doubt, it might be best not to post  it!

Schemas

26 Jan. 2016

What the heck is schema and what role does it play in how we perceive student intelligence?

     As Prof. Chris Haskell defines the term in his book Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Or The First Year of Teaching, a schema is a "...collection of experience and knowledge about how to react, iterpet, or operate in an environment."  Basically, according to Haskell, all students are capable of learning what is needed and getting good grades; we are all intelligent in our own ways.  It's the teacher's job to determine what approach will work best for each student- it's a known fact that we do not all learn the same way at the same rate, and we all grow up with different life experiences.  This is where schemas come in.  As we grow up, we learn different routines, patterns, and guidelines that tell us as individuals how we are supposed to react to various situations.  Given that, teachers need to be ready to identify students who are struggling and look deeper into the source of the problem- beyond simply accepting the "obvious" answer that that student isn't as smart or capable.  It is very possible that the schemas that student has developed in life up to this point are simply not working for him/her now, and needs help creating new schemas.

Technology Predictions

25 Jan. 2016


     Today I was tasked with watching three videos of a pair of kids video conferencing- in the 80's.  The videos, pulled from youtube and attached to a new 3D Game Lab quest, were essentially highlighting their prediction of what technology would look like within twenty years- specifically as it relates to classroom learning.  It was pretty interesting, if you ignore the God-awful acting; they actually got a lot more right than wrong, from my perspective.
     The video conferencing style used between the teacher in the classroom and a student at home with a broken leg, then between that student and another student worked a lot like Skype or other standard video-conferencing tool we have today.  Small, flat screens were used, along with voice recognition and voice commands.  Screen content was shifted left/right and into "windows".  Really about the only things I saw that aren't quite realistic yet was actually how well voice commands worked, and how the search engine used for the 80's videos (much like in Sci-Fi movies) just happened to only bring up the exact data the kid was looking for.  When, on a whim, I just did a Google search of "The Battle of Marathon" I found various websites that discussed the battle (as the kid did) but I also brought up videos, maps, pictures of monuments, even references to the movie 300 and its sequel. So aside from the questionable overly-effectiveness of the kid's search engine and voice command software, I'd honestly have to say I was pretty impressed with the accuracy of the videos, particularly given where we were at technologically in the 80's.
     Lastly, I'm supposed to make my own predictions on what technology will look like in the future.  On that note, I guess one thing I'd really like to see is tablets becoming affordable enough that they basically replace books and all things currently on paper.  That's actually one of my biggest pet peeves- paper became obsolete at least five years ago, in my opinion.  We can fit so, so many more books onto tablets a quarter of the size of your average text book.  Homework can be assigned, completed, and turned in digitally, much more efficiently than by hand.  The only real drawback in this day and age is that this technology still isn't necessarily affordable for every student in the country; maybe someday soon schools will be able to buy all tablets they need and "rent out" tablets to their students for the school year.  It would be really great if prices for ebooks could start coming down, too, as the war between digital files and traditional, printed books starts winding down; kind of like how DVD's became a bit more affordable once VCR tapes became obsolete.  There's a ton of other things I could comment on in how I think technology will change over the next ten to twenty years, but this is also supposed to be a fairly short blog, so I'll wrap this up.  Bottom line, I think, technologically speaking, we're living in a really, exciting period of history.

First blog entry- All about ME!

18 Jan. 2016

     My name is Jason Kyle. I'm a 35 yr. old student at BSU, studying for Elementary Education with an emphasis on English so I can become an English teacher while I work on my real goal of becoming a fantasy fiction writer.  I already have an Associates Degree in Social Psychology, and I've self-published two novels as Amazon ebooks.  
My Amazon author's page

     I'm a divorcee with primary custody of my three-year-old son, Justin. I've been in the Army for about 15 years now and have served in Iraq in three separate tours ranging from the Invasion to the Drawdown, among other places.  Along with being a student I'm currently a sergeant in the Army Reserves.

     Besides writing, I love reading (of course), particularly fantasy fiction writers such as Terry Brooks, George Martin, and R.A. Salvatore.  I also like the western writer Louis L'amoure, and the occasional nonfiction military story, like Lone Survivor.  I'm a massive movie junkie (especially all things produced by Marvel-Disney) and a gamer geek- my favorites at present are Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and the tabletop game Warhammer 40k.  On that note, I'm also a semi-professional artist. My facebook art page

    Well that's basically me in a nutshell. So with that I'll say "Adios for now" and leave you with this awesome universe-blending image of one of my favorite fictional characters...