That would be traffic in India, where lights and street signs are more like guidelines that consistently get ignored. Anyway, back to technology and how it can be amazing. Yesterday, we presented in groups of three on ways to organize our lives. Our lives as teachers, as students, as people trying to figure out the masses of information we've had hurled at us. Being rather familiar with GoogleDocs, as we past Michigan undergrads have lived with it these past four years, I found Evernote to be highly useful for my life in the moment. Just today, I utilized it to save a PDF and annotate it, as well as create a checklist. So much satisfaction arises from checking those little boxes next to tasks. I can create notes for each day of the week next week, go through the bazillion places I might find my assignments, and organize my to-do lists ahead of time. It's like an anti-freak-out mechanism. Why did I not know about this at the beginning of the program?!? Plus, that elephant icon...I love elephants! Basically, it was meant to be.
And Evernote was not the only exciting new piece of technology I learned through this assignment. Blendspace, which I had likewise never heard of before, seems like a great online space for teachers to collaborate with one another. Lesson plans can be shared with teachers all across the U.S.A. online, and I can view other's online lesson plans to draw from as well. Teachers across disciplines within a school could even utilize this site to collaborate in ways that were much more difficult to coordinate beforehand. As a future German teacher, I also find this especially valuable for sharing YouTube clips and audio of native German speakers for the class. In addition, Blendspace does not only benefit teachers of all disciplines, but also the students themselves through the student-geared side of the website. Teachers could hypothetically upload technology-based portions of homework to the lesson plan section of the website--it's so ridiculously easy, even I could do it.
Kind of unrelated to this post, but food for thought, anyway:
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ReplyDeleteHello hello! Firstly, I would like to say your blog has made me feel thoroughly inadequate as I did not realize that we could/were able to add pictures in. Your blog is beautiful! I'm going to have to go back and revamp some of my posts now.The baby elephant is amazing. I said something eerily similar in my blog post about how my relationship with Evernote was meant to be because of the elephant icon. Now, related to the actual post content, I really enjoyed your connection of this program to traffic in India. Luckily we have some cool apps to attempt to organize our lives amidst all this chaos. You commented on the notes and the PDF annotation which are both features that I found useful. Did you use the web clipper at all to save websites to your notes? Another feature that Evernote had was the Atlas, personally I did not find this feature useful, did you? I also related to your love of Blendspace as a future language teacher. Video clips are very useful to show different accents, or aspects of culture. Lovely post! (Sorry for the deleted comment! I had a moment where I was like oh no! I am only supposed to comment on people's posts in my group but then I realized it was okay.)
ReplyDeleteI wasn't sold too much on Evernote or BlendSpace, until I read your post. I really empathize with having a hard time with the chaos of this program, and I have been searching for ways to organize my academic life and my personal life. After reading about how you've been able to use Evernote to make things a little simpler, I'm thinking I should make more of an effort to use it to put some order into my own chaotic life. Thank you so much for a very organized and entertaining way to talk about the benefits of Evernote.
ReplyDeleteYou really nailed it, Kelsey, with this post and especially with this line, “Teachers across disciplines within a school could even utilize this site to collaborate in ways that were much more difficult to coordinate beforehand.” The school I have in mind is the School of Ed. The one at the U of M. And I think you can maybe guess what program I'm thinking about...
ReplyDeleteTechnology can be great. It can streamline, save time, make things faster and more efficient. It can also just be piled on (I sometimes think gratuitously) just for its own sake. I'd like someone to do a study about how having to navigate so many very similar sites (the specific course sites on C-Tools), similar but not identical. Like the way that this course has the readings arranged like this, in this section whereas another instructor has it—just a little different.
“C-Tools gives instructors flexibility and learners convenience!” (I'm practicing to be a salesman for C-Tools. I'm also practicing my sarcasm...) My point is, it's easy to get confused. Which course was it that asked for the assignments like that?! All the C-Tools sites look exactly the same, so MY brain, at least, can't recall half the time where it saw something.
What would the solution be? Regulate and standardize C-Tools for instructors so there is only one way to structure the site? Instructors would hate that. It would be a disaster. Maybe the opposite: require radical customization. For 642, say, Sousa's “Liberty Bell” would play when you accessed the assignments page. For 571, paisley bats would fly across the screen when you contributed to a forum. This would help me, I'm sure.
Something needs to be done, though. More and more, technology does not necessarily make things better, especially when the ergonomics of learning and keeping things straight are not kept in mind. We humans have evolved to remember faces, to discern the tiniest, most subtle changes in someone's face and not a dozen very similar course sites...