Module 4-2 Digital Literacy

Here is a link to the blog that I read and am summarizing:

http://www.edutopia.org/skype-internet-tool-students

I first read this article because of its name, "Use Skype with Students". It caught my attention because I currently use Skype and know what a powerful tool it is.
I work from home as a contractor, so my other team members and I use Skype to keep in touch while we're working. Skype offers the ability to 'call' anyone else using Skype for free and any cell phones or landlines for a very low cost. It also offers a chat feature which allows users to type to each other. I think this is very useful while working because if I have a question, I can type it, send it, and keep working while I wait for a response. This cuts down on wasted time I might spend trying to get ahold of the other team members.
I started using Skype when I traveled to Poland 2 years ago to teach during the summer. My cell phone wouldn't even turn on in Poland unless I paid a ridiculous price to buy a new "international" phone along with the international fees for calls. Skype allowed me to call my family back in the U.S. for just a few cents a call. I could also type messages for them to recieve later which was convenient because there was such a great time difference.
This article addresses both of these uses for Skype in the context of the classroom. When students are ill and aren't able to make it to class, they can log onto Skype and communicate with the teacher to stay caught up on work. Also, if the teacher is out of the area on a trip he or she can also communicate with their class through Skype. This could be very useful, especially with all of the recent problems with the flu. There also seems to be an outbreak of Mono at the school my brother attends. Luckily he got Mono over the summer and didn't have to miss any school. But the students who are missing weeks at a time could stay in touch with teachers through Skype and keep up with daily homework in that way.

Module 4 part 1 - Learning with Games

http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-katie-salen-video

This video is all about taking the idea of games, studying how people learn from playing games, and integrating this into a school curriculum.
In this video, Katie Salen explains how children learn from playing. Children of all cultures need to play, no matter what the game. She then explains how she has been studying this idea and designing games to teach specific lessons. One of the main ways that this works so well as opposed to traditional classroom teaching is the way the students feel about themselves. Many times, students feel like the classroom is a place that is meant to be hard and is setting them up for failure. But a game is meant to be won. Therefore, students have more confidence in their abilities from the start.
I am particularly interested in this video because I am more on the design side of education rather than the hands-on teaching side. One career path that I would love to achieve is taking part in creating educational games for elementary children. This could be a goal for myself. I've created a few simple games for graduate classes but they didn't have a purpose. I could expand on these skills, collaborate with teachers, and create games that their students could use in the classroom.
As I watched the other videos from this module, I thought it was great how these concepts carry through to my other classes. The first video is about someone changing from scrolls to books. This was actually the theme of our lecture in a class last week. How do people adapt to new technology? Why is the 'book' an improvement from the 'scroll'? The video is focusing more on the humor in the problems people have with learning simple concepts revolving around an updated technology, but I think it could apply to anything. Whenever something is new, it is going to be frightening and challenging to most people. It may seem very simple to the people who work with it everyday, but the rest of us need time to adjust. So whenever we first use a new technology, I think we should try and be more like risk-takers. If the book doesn't open from one side, don't be afraid to turn it over and try the other side.

Emerging Technology 1: Wordle

I explored Wordle for my first emerging technology. The website is www.Wordle.net. I had never even heard of this application before, and I must admit I had a really fun time with it. I took the first paragraph from a blog entry I made recently for another class, copied it into the form, clicked create, and then changed the font and colors until I came up with this result. The blog post was about my "Mission" as a graphic design graduate student. I think the Wordle picture really captures the main ideas of my paragraph. The word Mission is very bold and that is what the paragraph was all about. Other important words stand out, like design, graphic, and thought.
I can see this being a very useful tool in a writing class. Students can copy and paste an essay they wrote into Wordle, and if the words that it emphasises are the main concepts of their assignment, it's probably a good indicator that they did a good job sticking to their subject. It could then be a fun and creative addition to the assignment. It could be printed out as a cover to the essay.
I think this application should mostly be used for a fun supplement to a writing assignment and shouldn't be taken too seriously. Students shouldn't use this as an alternative to thoroughly proofreading their work.
An issue I had using this technology was trying to figure out what to do with it after it was created. There was not a simple "save" button. I printed it to my computer as a pdf. I then took the pdf into photoshop and turned it into a jpeg that I could upload onto this blog. I think there should be a way to save the image from the application to a jpeg or other image format.