Excel and/or Google Docs?

Microsoft Excel can be used in a variety of different ways, especially when incorporating it into a curriculum at school. Excel can be used to keep track of student grades and attendance.Not only can the teacher use them, but the students can use them for various projects. The class could set up a school-wide fundraiser and keep track of their costs, profits and total money raised for their fundraiser. It can be used to record the daily high and low temperatures each day from the newspaper and the students can graph the highs and lows at the end of the week and compare and contrast them throughout the year. They can also be used in science class. Students can plant a flower and record their observations of how the plant is growing. The spreadsheet could be used to keep sport statistics for a given team over the season. It can be used as a getting to know all of the students in the beginning of the year by a survey and then graphing the results. You can then look at the similarities and differences as a class.
If my school district was thinking about switching to Google docs for their word processing and spreadsheet needs, I would be against it. Google docs can not do as much  neat things as Microsoft Excel. For example, when making a pictograph in Google docs,  you cannot insert pictures. Unless I was unable to figure it out after many, many attempts. Google docs spreadsheet is not as easy to work on to create graphs and/or spreadsheets with information. Google docs can be very confusing. Microsoft Excel has so much more to offer in not only spreadsheets but in word processing as well. Google docs is fine for typing a long paper of things but it takes away the ability to see how many pages you have created. If a teacher wanted to create a flyer, sign or a one page worksheet, it would be difficult in Google docs because they would not see when they have exceeded one page. I would not be able to work in Google docs for an entire school year if Microsoft was not available.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a new way to store your favorite websites. Instead of it being on just one computer, they are stored on a website so they can be accessed anywhere and everywhere. This makes doing work and research more easy in ways. Instead of having to write down each website you want to visit, you can just tag it and access it from anywhere, whether that's at work, school, library or a friend's house. Social bookmarking becomes social in the means that social bookmarking is public. Everyone can see your bookmarking website and all of your tags and you can see everyone else's as well. This allows you to search for common keywords or tags for more websites on a given topic. Comments can also be made on tagged websites. This can come in handy if another individual finds something on the website, you never got to. Then they can tell you through a comment on the social bookmarking website.
Social bookmarking can help me in several ways as a student. Every college student has to write several research papers throughout their college career and in most cases you have to have at least 15 to 20 references. Social bookmarking can make gathering those references or websites easier. Instead of the old fashion, copy and pasting the url into a word document, I can simply tag the website and keep everything for my research papers in one place. It makes it easier too because sometimes I do my work at home, others I do it in the library and sometimes the computer lab; I am constantly jumping from place to place and with social bookmarking, I don't need to carry around a hardcopy of all my references because I am access them anywhere with a social bookmarking website. During my methods class I was always searching for lesson plan ideas, social bookmarking would have allowed me to tag those websites with good lesson plans so I could come back to them for a different subject instead of starting my search all over again.
As a teacher, social bookmarking can help with lesson plans. You can see what other people have tagged under lesson plans and find some neat websites you may not have necessarily  knew existed. Social bookmarking is a great way to connect with other teachers outside of your district for ideas and new activities to do with your students.

New Means of Communication

I guess I'm pretty much in tune with the ways students communicate these days. When I read this quote in the online text, I can't even remember these days because I grew up in the days when research for papers was done online and communicating with friends was done through instant messaging after school. "He represented, for me, a world I could scarcely remember—a world before driving directions on MapQuest, book buying on Amazon.com, and making plans on Instant Messenger—a world when tasks were managed one by one instead of all at once on multiple Web browser windows (Chapter 5, page 5). Even now, MapQuest is getting old because most people have GPS.
The reading states that staying connected is a central part of students' lives. I think that today, that can be applied to almost anyone. I feel completely lost when I leave for the day and I realize I left my cell phone lying on my bed. I honestly feel disconnected from the world. I don't know what's going on or who's trying to get a hold of me or the plans for the evening. I think that so many people are used to having technology in the palms of their hands (literally) that when it isn't, they don't know what to do. Almost all communication between friends is done through text messaging these days. I work for the YMCA and all of our directors text because we are in and out of meetings where we can't answer our phones and if someone needs to get a hold of us, they can do it instantly through a text message. To students this is a part of their everyday life; being connected to everyone, everything, everyday. Older generations never had these means of communication, so they don't feel that staying in constant connection with others is an essential part of their lives. In a way, the Net generation has some advantages. My mom has lost contact with many of her friends from the earlier years of her life. That could be partly due to the fact, they were still hand writing letters at the time and it took time. She got busy and didn't have that extra time to sit down and write a letter to friends or vice versa. My generation gets to stay in constant contact with friends through various means of technology- facebook, text messaging, skype, etc. The communication and language is changing. Language is becoming so very much integrated with technology that parents who want to keep in touch with their college age children, are sooner or later going to have to learn to facebook, skype or text to communicate and stay in touch with their children.
I really liked using google docs. At first I didn't like it. I got 2 or 3 of my lessons done and I couldn't figure out how to save it and I was scared I was going to use my work but I eventually realized that it saves automatically., which is very nice for people like me who sometimes forget to save their work. I thought that it was easy to share it; it was much easier than adding an attachment. All in all I will definitely use google docs in the future.

Digitial Natives Response

I thought that this article was very interesting to read. It got me thinking; I believe my generation is somewhere between the Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. There are some of us who grew up with computers and rushed home from school to get on instant messager but there are also some of us that were not exposed to computers and technology until later on in life. Now, we are all slowly moving to the Digital Natives but we are behind in some areas than the students younger than us. For example, I work in an elementary school and when I first got my ipod touch, I was unsure of how to do everything on it. Some of my students didn't even have an ipod touch and was showing me how to do different things on it and search for songs I wanted to find. It blew my mind. I think that Digital Natives do learn entirely different. Technology has encouraged them to learn hands on and learn through exploration. Whereas, the Digital Immigrants were more learn through the process of being taught or straight lecture or readings. The concept of the teachers having to catch up to the students is very true, just as our parents have to catch up to us with all the technology. Teachers have to think outside of the box to reach their students because students today are learning differently than students of the past. With ADD and ADHD becoming more and more prominent today, teachers cannot teach through straight lectures, readings and demonstrations. They have to think of new ideas to teach where the students are able to use technology and learn through their own experiences as well as handson. For example, when doing research about a specific topic, it is okay for teachers to stay they have to use at least one book for research but to think that the students are going to retrieve all of their information on a given topic through books is crazy. That may have been to do it in the past but this generation is so adapt to researching on the internet that they would become so frustrated doing all of their research in the library with books.

Practice Post

:)