Directions without a goal lead nowhere

While at Football camp this past week, I heard a quote form our defensive coordinator that really stuck with me throughout the evening.  As I thought about this quote even more the next few days, I noticed that I was no longer thinking about the football aspect but rather as an educational aspect.  The quote which is,"Directions without a goal lead nowhere" comes from a football coach named Bill Yoast.  Coach Yoast is mostly know because he was the original coach of the football team in the the movie Remember the Titans.  Since coaching, Coach Yoast has provided many ideologies and philosophies about the psychological side of football.

Just like with sports teams, in education it is important to always provide a goal when asking for something to be accomplished.  As a teacher, I feel that my students would not really gain the knowledge of what I was expecting of them if I just asked them to do something without giving them a goal to reach.  This made me think about all of the projects that I created this semester with my grad classes.  For each project, the first thing that I did was figure out what the goal(s) would be for the assignment.  I think that this is very important when asking a young individual to accomplish something for you.  Provide them the reasoning for asking them to do what it is that you want accomplished.

Whether it is on the football field or it is in the classroom, my expectations for my students/athletes will always be goal oriented.  I have always like the students in class that ask why when I provide them with a task to accomplish.  This tells me that they really want to know and understand why they are about to do something.  Others usually just jump right into the task and when they are done they don't really understand what they just did.  How can I expect them to now remember this information a week or two later when it appears on the next assessment.  Always provide a goal and make it as clear as possible before allowing the individuals to attempt the task.

Wimi - a collaborative management system for Classroom use

After searching through a variety of management systems that could be used within the classroom I found a few that I felt could be very useful.  The two that kept coming up in discussions and I even found them to be ranked higher in the rankings and reviews by other technology places were WordPress and Haiku Learning.  I really liked what I saw in Haiku Learning and thought that this would be a good collaborative system to use in the classroom.  After seeing that others in the class had already reviewed Haiku Learning, I thought that even though I found it to be very useful, I would keep looking and try to find another that hasn’t been reviewed yet.  The one that I found and liked was Wimi by Cloud solutions.

Wimi is a collaborative cloud based site that creates an environment of ease and excitement for the users.  Wimi is built to be an easy to use platform that allows for faster production on projects and even increased effort within the team.

Documents:  Wimi allows for easy file sharing and editing.  It also integrates very easily with Google apps making for smoother transition to the system.  It also provides easy online editing and the ability to monitor the documents because of the rights management where you maintain the control of the document.  Because it is cloud based, the files automatically synchronize in real time across all computers connected.  It also provides the ability to send large files by creating a link that then can be used to download the file.  The file sync ability allows for work to be done on documents from almost anywhere.

Tasks and Projects: Wimi allows you to manage your group’s projects and activities easily and efficiently.  You are able to create new projects quickly and can even manage the responsibilities within the project of the team members.  Wimi allows for timelines to be incorporated so that the team members will know the important dates along the way.  It also has the ability to notify when these dates have become past due.  You are also able to create a project journal for the team and you even have the ability to track the history of the project.

Calendars:  Wimi has a built in calendar where you are able to share key points to the activities and projects.  You are able to create a main calendar for the class as well as each project itself is given the ability to have a shared calendar just for that project.  These calendars are synced to all users which provides the key dates as well as tracks the users to make sure they are working on project and keeping up with the material.  You can even set reminders in these shared calendars.

Communication:  Wimi AirTime provides the ability to initiate screen sharing and audio/ video calls without needing to download any other software.  Because of these features, it makes it very easy to communicate using Wimi.

Collaboration:  Online collaboration is easy to use and you can even add other members to the project at any time allowing for up to the minute access to the project’s work.  The set-up is easy to follow and the team members will always be able to know who they are working and communicating with during the project.  As the teacher, you are able to easily control the access rights to whoever is in the project. 

After looking at this system and reviewing the web page I think this would be a great tool to use in the classroom as a collaborative management system.  It is cloud based which makes it safe to use anywhere, and it is easy to track and monitor providing very detailed feedback.  Wimi integrates very easily with Google apps so schools that already use Google would not see any fallback.  There many ways to communicate and collaborate when using Wimi.  I think it would be a great way to incorporate parents and keep them up to date on what is going on with in the classroom.  Wimi does provide a small free platform, and one that would work within the classroom would not be very expensive.  For fewer than six dollars a month it seems that it would be money well spent for what you are able to do.

1st ever podcast

Well, I just published my first ever podcast and by no means am I ready to be known as a professional pod caster.  I will be shocked if I am able to gain very many followers with my one and only podcast so far.  I ended up going with Audacity to create my mp3 file because of the ease of using Audacity.  I have messed around with Audacity before creating sound files and putting together music collections in the past so I felt semi comfortable with using it to create my file.  As for my host site for the podcast file, I choose to go with Podbean.com.  Just like Audacity, I found it to be very user friendly and easy to upload my mp3 file.

While creating my podcast, I took the advice from my readings and I tried to prepare some notes to follow along with as I was recording.  As a rookie, I'm not sure if I made more work for myself or if I helped cut down on some of the work with the next step.  I found myself working in smaller sections less than a minute or two and then I would stop and edit that section before I started with the next section of material.  I thought about just pressing the record button and going until I felt like I covered what I wanted to cover and then going back through the whole file to edit, but I was afraid that would've taken me forever so I went with the smaller increments. At the end of the process I think I had around 22 clips for the whole process which ended up being just over 9 minutes long.  I can only image how many clips I would have if the podcast would be in the range of a half an hour to an hour in length.  I may have to train one of my daughters to be my chief editor and let them do all the slicing and dicing of the clips before publishing them.

the end, I am glad that I am experimenting with Podcasting and this is something that I plan on using next school year with my classes.  For anyone who would like to have a listen, you can find my podcast here:  http://mwitting.podbean.com/

My ideas on my Podcasting abilities

After reading a few articles and the chapter from the textbook for our class on the topic of Podcasting I feel that I am going to really work on the following areas.  In all of the resources it states that an early mistake in podcasting is not targeting the right audience.  For my podcast, I am planning on targeting people interested in the sciences and more importantly people who are interested in current sciences.  My idea for my podcast will be to highlight a few topics in science from the past week.  I am thinking of calling in "Sunday Morning Sciences" and my plan would be to talk about current events in the science fields for the past week.
Another factor that was mentioned a lot was the length of the podcast.  It discussed how to short of a podcast could be an issue in getting a good following, but to long and the interest in the people cod be lost.  I would like to try to keep my podcasts to around 30 minutes so that it is long enough to gain some valuable information, but not to long where some may not want to listen to it.  I think in the 30 minutes I will be able to have an introduction and then discuss either three or four new topics dealing with current events in science.
Along with length of time, it also was brought to my attention on the fact that people like to really feel like they learned something from the podcast. I think that with three or four topics, I will be as to go into enough depth so that the listeners will feel that they gained some valuable knowledge from listening to the podcast.  A good podcast goes into depth on the selected topics and gives the listeners a chance to gain knowledge from listening and this is what my plan is to do.
I also agree with the readings in the aspect that not using the proper equipment can cause for an unpleasant experience trying to listen to the podcast.  As a beginner, I am goi g to use the audacity program along with an USB connected microphone.  If the quality still doesn't sound good, then I will look into finding a better set-up because I feel the sound is the most important step to gaining a following and producing good podcasts.
After the production and editing has taken place, I think finding the proper place to host the podcast will be very important as well.  I really like the idea of making the podcast easily accessible and then it will come down to advertising it through the various social medias like the ones we are currently using right now.  I plan to get my podcast out there through my Twitter account as well as the blog site.
The following article is on of the articles that I used as a reference when creating my podcast.  "Are you making these 10 mistakes with your podcast?"
http://www.inboundpro.net/making-mistakes-podcasting/

Using technology in a science classroom

After reading this blog on www.nms.org about using technology with students in a math and science classroom, I really liked the arguments they used to justify the means. They started with the fact that students tend to be focused for longer periods of time when using technology.  I also liked the idea that technology helps build engaging lessons but also allows students to go at his/her own pace.
At the bottom of the article I read a quote that really stuck with me.  It was,"Education is no longer memorizing facts on paper; it's engaging with students through technology." As a science teacher, I remember most of my classes when I was in school I would just try to memorize the information to just get through the test. After the test, I could barely remember anything from the unit. Now as the teacher, I am trying to use my own errors and find ways to get my students to actually understand the unit and not just rely on memorization.  I think finding ways to incorporate technology can be the way to accomplish these goals.
The article was - Technology in the Classroom: The Benefits of Blended Learning

http://www.nms.org/Blog/TabId/58/PostId/188/technology-in-the-classroom-the-benefits-of-b

WebQuest complete! .... I think

Just finished my WebQuest on cells and organelles for a middle school science classroom.  Take a look and let me know what you think.

https://sites.google.com/a/kent.edu/mr-witting-s-science-webquest/

Mobile Application ideas

As I am sitting here trying to think of the next best thing to compete with apps like words with friends and Clash of Clans, but more for the educational setting, I am not gaining much ground.  I would like to create a concept that could be practical and possibly even used myself as a teacher/coach.  Or even maybe something that the students could use themselves in my classroom or somebody else's classroom.  Looking to see if anything out there already could be of some help I found a pretty interesting article on some of the best apps to use in the classroom.

52 Of The Best Apps For Your Classroom In 2015

I found some of the apps in the article interesting and I plan on looking more into them and the possibility of using them next school year.  I was also pretty surprised by some of the apps and the use of them in the classroom.  Overall this article was very informative and I think can be really useful to ones that decide to use these apps, if not just a few of them.  I know I am planning on looking into some of them for my classroom.

Now back to my own mobile proposal, still not quite sure what my idea is going to be but I did stumble across a resource that I think may become valuable in the near future.