Jim's USF Tech Cert Blog

Hello class, I found this week's read,  Exploring America’s Tech Skills Gap and the Parallel Deficits of Applied Tech Skills and Hard Tech Skills , interesting on many fronts.  They say that this generation is so tech savvy, but unfortunately I found nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, if I had to sum up their skill set in 2 words I would call this generation "tech lazy".  That is why I didn't find this article surprising, but yet confirmation of what I have observed in my own high school classrooms.  Sure, students are good at texting, snap chatting, or buying Lala Palooza tickets, but ask them to do some research or find and analyze data online and it is a whole different story.  I think we need to consider teaching these students "21st century" tech skills as a part of our curriculum or we are doing these students a disservice.  Especially when this week's reading assignment states that 77% of a company's competitive advantage lie...

Implications of CIPA: Hello Class, For this weeks discussion we were to read and critique the article  To Surf and Protect: The Children's Internet Protection Act Policies Materially Harmful to Minors and a Whole Lot More.  Although I am very familiar with internet filters an educator and a parent of two young children, I was unaware of the legal documents in place.  After reading the article, which really came down to a history lesson on protecting minors in the courts, I feel like CIPA benefits minors the majority of the time.  My knowledge of the legal system, ammendments and laws in general is admittingly poor.  In fact, I often find myself disagreeing with use of the ammendments in arguments or policy as a blanket statement.  It was interesting to see how the first ammendment is interpreted and how it's vague nature can lead to some interesting discussions in our legal system.  With the introduction of the internet, it added a lot of new cha...

Hello Class, For this week's module we were to examine the conduct and ethical guidelines of four professional organizations.  I have to be honest, I typically spend very little time reading these types of documents and struggled with this activity.  This is one of the many reasons I know I belong in the classroom and never plan to step out in any kind of administrative role.  I feel like administrators spend more time with documents like these and less time with the students themselves, the latter being my favorite part of the profession.  In saying that, here is my review of the 4 organizations and how they address the social, ethical, equitable and legal standards for educational technology implementation. The first organization I reviewed was the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT).  Their code of professional ethics was easy to read and follow and I thought addressed the four aspects we were looking at for this assignment....

Hello Class, For my second artifact I chose the tech tool that I use the most in my classroom thanks to the St. Francis Masters program which is Screencastify, a google extension.  As part of the assignment I made a video reviewing my experience with screencastify, so for those of you that would rather watch a video here is the link:   Screen Casting Discussion   . I really love Screencastify as a tech tool because it is so easy and convenient to utilize in the classroom.  Whether it's used as a tool to deliver a lesson, or used a tool for kids to use to show me what they learned, there really are lots of positive attributes about the tool.  I even learned from others in the class that it is a great tool for communicating with parents.  I can send out a mass email to the parents with a link to my video and they can get a "first hand" explanation from me what is going on in the class or what to look out for in the future.  Furthermore, with just...

Hello class, My name is Jim Nielsen and I teach Biology and Anatomy at Waubonsie Valley High School. Teaching was a 3rd career change for me as I worked previously as a zookeeper at Brookfield Zoo, and did medical research at University of Chicago for 5 years as well.  I am currently in my 12th year of teaching and truly get excited to come to work everyday and spend time talking about the study of Life with young adults.  The two courses I teach are extremely diverse in learning levels as I teach freshman co-taught biology and Senior Anatomy.  It really creates a fun challenge to create material that works for all learning levels.  Because of this challenge, and our districts move to 1:1 instruction next year, I decided to enroll in the Educational Technology courses at St. Francis.  This is my 3rd course at St. Francis, and my favorite aspect so far is that I am actually able to utilize many of the lessons in class. When students leave my classroom...

Hello class, For my first artifact I decided to talk about our Video Trailer assignment that we had to do for Module 4.  I was really excited about this assignment because I use "movie trailers" to get kids pumped up about topics in Biology all the time.  Usually I search YouTube for these videos, but this gave me an opportunity to make one myself!  I decided to use the program WeVideo because it is closely associated with Google and my students have Chromebooks.  Since we don't read full books in Biology class, I decided to make a movie trailer for one of our concepts which is Punnett Squares. The best part about this assignment, and class in general, is that I have actually been able to utilize these assignments in class already.  I actually sent out this exact assignment via Remind.com to my students to view at home before our first day of Punnett Squares.  I attached the movie trailer to get them excited, and then another Screencast to teach them ho...