Final Reflection on ICT course

In this entry I will reflect about the extensive use of ICT resources done in this course. Many tools have been provided to us in order to enhance our teaching methodology and therefore to improve the learning process of our students. We have learnt how to use a Blog, share information on Google Drive and Google +, how to create quite easily different quizzes using Hot Potatoes and summarize the importance of information using Wordmaps.

From my personal point of view, the most useful ones to me have been the use of a blog and wordmaps. I have always wanted to open a blog both for personal and professional uses. However, blogs seemed to me a costly investment that I always thought I did not have time to make. After this course, I will definitely dare to use this tool since I have seen that it is a very powerful, attractive and simple way to show information to students and follow their progression. Being able to create wordmaps so easily was also very surprising to me. I think it is a very visual tool in order to start a lesson and summarise the concepts and vocabulary to be used. As a by-product of this course, I have also incorporated new applications and lesson plans to my “virtual” library.

Regarding the use of ICT today in education, I think it is essential to teach our students how to use the massive information and resources they have on hand. We must be aware that nowadays we are not the only source of information that students use and hence how to analyse and filter all the external information becomes a quite important task.

The use of ICT for learning allows one to make this process a much more enjoying and fun experience since a wide variety of applications: videos, media, online quizzes, etc can be used. We should use these tools in a way that communication between students (by working in groups, using forums, etc) is improved since the opportunities to interact go beyond the classroom. However, we must ensure that personal interaction does not disappear. Surprisingly, they can promote also the interaction between teachers and students if they are used in the right way.

UNIT 6: TASK 4: NEWSLETTER

I have share 3 web pages which use Newsletters related to the field of teaching Economics. From my point of view the most interesting one is econedlink.org, since it provides a very good source of classroom-tested, Internet-based economic and personal finance lesson materials for K-12 teachers and their students. This is approximately the level of students I am considering throughout this ICT course. Interestingly, they have a lesson plan finder and each of the lessons includes a teacher's version as well as a student's version. Each lesson is designed to be delivered in a variety of formats and classroom settings. This site allows educators to access and customise content that is relevant to individual classroom needs. When I subscribed myself to its newsletter, I found out that I could save and annotate lessons in my personal profile, get access to the student version of Virtual Economics and to a Quiz Builder Tool which I could customise. I also get alerts when new resources are available and get related lessons based on profile preferences.

The new lesson finder allows you to target economic and personal finance lesson by topic, grade level, state standards, common core standards, and more. The whole site is an initiative of the Council for Economic Education in the United States.

For example, there is a lesson where students will explore economic concepts in an unexpected place such as stories for kids: five Dr. Seuss’ books. Using books such as “Green Eggs and Ham”, “The Lorax” and “The Cat in the Hat” students reinforce their understanding of microeconomic concepts.

This is the link for this lesson: www.econedlink.org/e966

UNIT 6: TASK 2: COMMENTS ON APPLICATIONS, TOOLS AND APPS

In the previous post, I listed 5 apps for tablets, 5 applications for PCs, 5 lesson plans for printing and whiteboard and 5 e-books. They were all focused on the fields of Economics. In what follows, I will choose one of each of these and explain how they can help in the organization of the classroom.

I particularly liked World Figures by the Economist. It allows one to have quantitative knowledge with statistics for more than 190 countries. Mainly socioeconomic data is provided and there is a wide range of variables whose main characteristics are described in many different countries. This allows students to compare figures of two or more countries in a touch, obtain intuitive figures (both current and past data) and get a quantitative idea of the main economic issues around the world. As a teacher, this helps in comparing different policies that can be observed in different countries and check that the starting point could have been also different in both cases.

In relation to software, Excel is an essential tool that Economics students must learn. It is useful to deal with short data sets, to produce balance sheets, to calculate rates, to draw graphs from given data, to report main statistics of different variables. Nowadays, a large number of data is available in Excel and this helps students to use real data to solve their own exercises. As a teacher is important to provide students this type of tools so that they can be self-sufficient by working with their data of interest or solving particular quantitative problems. Gretl is an alternative program to excel in terms of statistic analysis. It is recommended for students in higher grades. The advantage is that it is completely free and it is available in many languages.

The lesson plan on the labour market (here) is the most attractive to me. It is very well organised and includes a very clear schedule to present the contents divided into two lessons. It includes also activities, presentation and a mind map. It seems to me a very complete resource to be used in order to teach the particularities of the labour market as opposed to other markets.

The set of slides on price elasticity of demand (here) are quite accurate and also very intuitive. They contain nice and real-life exercises Slides on Price Elasticity of Demand, a very intuitive and some very good examples and exercises embedded in the presentation that help fixing the concept of elasticity. I first-hand experienced the difficulties in understanding this concept and I think that going through these slides in detail would help to acquire a clear and deeper knowledge. However, this web site does not allow one to edit the slides which can be quite convenient to personalise different details and examples in order to adapt the presentation to a particular context.

Regarding my choice for ebooks, I found Freakconomics an excellent book for beginners in Economics. This is one of the first books to push economics and data science into popular consciousness. The authors emphasize that economics exists as a tool to study society. They discuss an apparently random assortment of topics, such as the drop in crime in American cities, the corruption in professional sumo wrestling and the real impact of parenting on a child’s life outcomes, among others. The reason why I think it is important for students to read this book is because they should not consider economics as a subject matter, but as a set of tools whose concepts could be use in real life. 

UNIT 6: Information about applications, lesson plans and ebooks on LINO

Here you have my LINO canvas with information about:

• 5 apps for tablets
• 5 apps or tools for computers
• 5 lesson plans for printing
• 5 lesson plans for whiteboard
• 5 ebooks or online publications

in the context of teaching ECONOMICS.

UNIT 5: TASK 2: CMS EXAMPLES

I prefer the web pages of the IES Benjamín Jarnés from the examples provided in this unit. The most appealing feature in my opinion is that the home page is self contained, since there are many last news which can be directly read there (including many pictures of the event). This web pages also includes a long list of links to AMPA, Moodle, library, links to the own pages of the different departments. There is also information about the twiter of the school.

I find also useful to be able to find the information chronologically and the idea of including a calendar. I do not like the idea of turning different pages when you do not know where to find the information.

The only disadvantage is that there is no search option, which I find extremely useful. I should point out that the web page of Salesianos Alicante is also quite well design regarding the features defined above.

UNIT 5: TASK 1: JOOMLA

Joomla is a very popular Content Management System where corporate web pages are very easy to be created. Apparently, it has a massive community and support network. Joomla was wide-spread before wordpress, which is mainly used for blogging. Another advantage of Joomla is that allows one to create nice educational sites and community sites.

It seems easy to install the basic tools, choose among different templates and use extensions in order to get closer to your needs and be adapted to each particular situation. Apparently, no programming knowledge is needed.Additionally, Joomla is multilingual and well supported, it is quite easy to update and help is automatically integrated in the system. Websites designed by Joomla provide a quick and good search option. Managing the content is quite easy since it allows for nested categorization and tagging. Editing content is also quite easy and fast and menus can be created for each particular need.

The fact that it requires a maintenance team, regular updates, restrictions of the templates and some knowledge to go beyond the characteristics of some templates are discouraging and they would make me choose some of the many possibilities to give information and teaching that one can find nowadays. Some of this alternatives are Google sites (which are quite flexible, do not require programming skills and easy use in order to build webpages) , blogs or combine them with some tools provided by Moodle for handing in students’ activities.

This is the extension I want to share with you:

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/extension/calendars-a-events/events/jevents

This extension is used in order to schedule events and introduce a calendar in your website. In terms of teaching, I find this extension interesting because you can add the date of the exam, deadlines for problem sets, organise didactic units by weeks, etc. This helps students to have a clear idea about the temporal organization of the course. Additionally, it has very good reviews and it is available in many languages. 

UNIT 4. TASK 2: ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF THE CLOUD

Definition

The term cloud is referred as “cloud computing” most of the times in Internet. The definition given by investopedia is “ a model for delivering information thechnology services in which resources are retrieved from the internet through web-based tools and applications, rather than a direct connection to a server. Data and software packages stored in servers”.

On the other hand, the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) defines the Cloud more precisely as “a model of enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with a minimal management effort or service provider interactions”.

Advantages

Regarding the positive aspects of the Cloud, accessibility of all the personal information from any internet-connected place stands as the main advantage of this service. The Cloud also allows one to have back ups of any type of files and the same version in all the devices you might want to connect to the cloud. One of the most extended utilities of these services is the possibility of sharing your private information with other people. This can foster the collaboration between different people working on the same project, since all the participants can have the last version of the files and they can also share files that are quite difficult to send via email. In most of the cases, this service is free of charge for a minimum space. In fact, for the companies providing this service the marginal cost for each additional individual is very close to zero because since there are millions of customers, they can obtain economies of scale.

However, flexibility is an important characteristic of the cloud because they can adapt their offer to the customers’ needs of a higher capacity.

Disadvantages

However, there is also a list of disadvantages that must be taken into account. In my opinion, privacy is the most important one. Although these companies encrypts data so that it cannot be decoded, one must make sure that the server provider is reliable so that your information can be totally secure. This could be a great problem if there is sensitive information of firm customers or individuals.

There are also technical problems that could be associated to serious dysfunctions of the cloud. Even if they are not very frequent, this type of technical issues of outages can cause important trouble. Despite high standards of security and maintenance, the best cloud service providers also sun into this kind of trouble. Lastly, these services are not available if one does not have offline, so that they are not reliable if you have network or connectivity problems. For business purposes, those firms replacing their IT by a cloud provider lose some of their control on their information and processes. There might be compatibility problems with the web based services sometimes.

Personallly….

I use dropbox in order to have access to the files I am currently using. This allows me to use these files from different computers without the need to taking my USB with me and also to have access to the most recent version of the files. Given that I teach in many different classrooms, I find that this is a great advantage. I also use dropbox to share files with the different coauthors of my research papers that are located around the word. In terms of connecting devices, I use iCloud in order to connect the photos of my smartphone with my iPad. The utility that I see in this characteristic of the cloud is that I feel that I have these photos in a safe place in case both devices are lost or stolen. However, I am aware that there are some privacy issues due to the fact that more people can have access to them or the loss of the property rights.

LINKS

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cloud-computing.asp

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf

http://www.cloudcomputinginsights.com/management/cloud-computing-advantages-and-disadvantages/?mode=featured