EDLD 5362 Informational Systems Management Week 1 Ramblings

I'm voicing my aggravation about the week 1 assignment. The assignment called for a 500-700 word paper with 4 sources that are either articles, chapters or books plus an interview with a person who's taught for 20 years (making 5 sources in all). The 700 words isn't enough after getting some crap in my paper from 4 sources. I barely had any room to report on my BRILLIANT interview! LOL... I finally cut it off in the 950 word range without most of what I'd learned about real school change. I didn’t have a cohesive conclusion because after I wrote something with enough substance to actually CITE using 4 outside sources, they was little room left to address the interview... It's not easy to just throw in some citations and make them make sense if you have to use 4 plus your interview... You cannot just randomly toss in a quote to cite without building it up enough to have it be cohesive and coherent and doing that uses lots of words. With the requirements they gave,it should have been about a 1500-2000 word assignment to produce quality... sigh, I wish I could go home. One, maybe two outside sources and the interview would have been about right for a 500-700word assignment

Here are the unused notes for my Week 1 assignment. Notes for 5362Week1 Assignment 1 The Expectation of More Efficient Education: From District and Classroom Management to Extraordinary Student Multimedia Projects

The advent of the internet, not only helped with student interest and research, but also helped with classroom and district management.

What is the most significant change you see related to students? Classroom management?

Media presentations, insert info about low socio benefitting and collaborating more.. Student who didn’t participate before are doing so now Harla, yearbook Frances business before/after internet Library scanner checkin/checkout, faster inventorying, see at a glance who’s stuff is due, no more card catalogue, books can be ordered online without searching thru’ catalogues.

Do students benefit more by using technology? Do they get a more quality education?

Encyclopedias, reference, correspondence courses for seniors getting college credit before graduation, textbook companies have vast multimedia add-ins for teaching, Study Island, AR, Promethean boards, Discovery Streaming videos, Web 2.0 tools.

What are the drawbacks of technology in school for students?

For teachers? cheating, outside threats (email, chat w/ unknown people) cellphone distractions, texting.. if tech is down, many times class can’t do assignments or enter grades… if tech goes down and isn’t backed up, all is lost, email
How does tech benefit schools at the campus and district levels?

Class scheduling Test disaggregation Gradebooks/report cards Cheating, online Cliffnotes, book summaries, closed off in a vacuum, only info being spooned from teachers, email large groups at once Online ordering of materials

Online testing Special ed records, IEP’s online Precoded answer docs/labels
Also, I've been disappointed in the quality of readings for this course. I teach in my own classroom that technology articles about internet and computer trends must be fairly recent to be good sources of information. 2 or 3 years is about the oldest you want some article to be and here we are in this course reading 5 and 6 year old articles about student technology and internet use in school.