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Week 1
Presented Content:
- Welcome to ECMP 355
- ECMP 355 is designed to introduce undergraduate students to computer
technology use in the K-12 environment. A complete course outline
is provided here
 .
Feel free to explore this website for up-to-date information providing
course information and resources.
- Much of the work in ECMP 355 will be submitted electronically.
It is important, therefore, to get into the habit of carefully using
appropriate filenames for your work and to carefully compose emails
so that they are easily identified and received by your instructor
as being legitimate email messages. For instance, for every email
submitted in this class, it's important to place the phrase 'ECMP
355' on the subject line. This will allow the message to be placed
in the appropriate folder on the instructor's email program. A good
guideline for email submission is included here.
- Students will introduce themselves in the first class. The instructor
will introduce himself with help of this PowerPoint Presentation
found here
 .
- Orientation to the Faculty of Education Computer Facilities and
Services
- The Education Computer Centre (ECC) will be your lifeline to computing
resources and services for the duration of your time at the Faculty.
You can find information about lab resources and services at this
link.
Additionally, if you need information regarding your userid and
password for WebMail or WebCT, you can contact
the ECC OR alternately, browse the University
HelpDesk website for online information and service.
- Note: the ECC and the University HelpDesk are two different, but
related departments. Either will help you, but your best bet is
to start with the ECC. The ECC (Chris Taylor and Ron Farnel) staff
is located in ED #226 and ED #227.
- Introduction to Key Online Resources
- Throughout this course, we will explore dozens of online resources.
Through one's lifetime, students will likely be exposed to thousands
of websites and/or online databases. As there are so many resources
available, and the list is growing, the task for the teacher becomes
to make sense of and to organize these resources to ensure that
one is recognizing some of the most important and worthwhile websites
related to technology in the classroom.
- Luckily, Sask Learning's Evergreen
Curriculum, Virtual
Resource Centre, Central
iSchool and related websites have helped to organize many of
the key resources for teachers. To help explore these resources
independently, explore Module
One from iTeacherEd.
- Mastery of Search Engines and Directories will also be important
if you are to search the web efficiently and find relevant results.
Search Engines such as Google,
AllTheWeb or
Altavista
boast the most complete databases of websites (over 2 billion).
Two of the most common Internet Directories are Yahoo
and Dmoz. These sites
categorize web content into special interest categories. To learn
more about the difference between Search Engines and Directories,
click here.
Two comprehensive guides to "searching the web" include
the UC
Berkeley Library and the University
of Regina Library. Also, to access the wealth of information
found on weblogs, be sure to check out specialized search engines
such as Technorati
or Feedster.
- In ECMP 355, you will be expected to keep an educational weblog.
Frequency of posts will vary, but at least 1-2 posts per week are
ideal. Of course, the quality of posts will be more important than
the quantity in the final assessment. To begin, I would choose a
service like Edublogs.org,
or you could choose commercial services like Blogger.com
or MSN Spaces.
I prefer Edublogs
as it is an educationally oriented service, and very easy to setup
and maintain. As all of the students and the instructor will have
a weblog, it will be important to keep track of the new posts from
each individual. This is where a feed aggregator is vital. A feed
aggregator (e.g., Bloglines)
enables users to track many news sources at one location. A great
tutorial on how to use Bloglines to aggregate many different sources
can be found here.
Technology Tasks
- Students will become familiar (if not already so) with their U of
R email accounts. Information on these accounts can be found at the
University
HelpDesk website. The best ways to access U of R email are (1) using
the ExecMail application (found on all campus machines) or (2) using
WebMail. The
latter is available globally on the World Wide Web at the following
address: http://webmail.uregina.ca.
- TECH TASK #1: Students will compose a word processing document
using a word processor such as MS Word or Open Office Write. The document
should be at least 1 page in length and should include the points specified
below. After you are done, please email the document as an attachment
from an email client of your choice. Additionally, if you feel that
the composition is not too personal, you may decide to post the text
as a blog entry for others in the class to read and respond to.
- a) A brief description of your own personal background (school,
family, career, etc.). Of course, only provide information which
you feel comfortable with sharing.
- b) Some information regarding your attitudes of or previous experience
with technology in your own personal, school or work experience.
- c) Insight into how you currently feel towards computing technology
in the K-12 classroom. For example, what are the potential benefits
or limitations of technology in the classroom? How do you feel that
technology should or should not be used in K-12 learning environments?
- d) A description of your expectations for this class and from
your instructor. What do you hope to learn or accomplish in this
class? Is there anything that the instructor should know about your
previous experience or lack of experience with technology?
- TECH TASK #2: Students will set up a BlueDot
account. BlueDot
allows students to keep bookmarks of their favorite sites at a remote
location which can be accessed from any location on the Internet. Other
advantages for teachers include: accessing your bookmarks from anywhere,
sharing your bookmarks with others (BlueDot
is a social bookmark manager), being able to see what others have bookmarked
and being able to subscribe to others' bookmark lists using XML (this
will be explained later in the course).
Assigned Readings:
- Become familiar with the work of previous ECMP students. Many of their
projects can be found at the iTeacherEd site (http://education.uregina.ca/iteachered).
When you get to the iTeacherED site, click on 'Multimedia' and explore
the four subtopic (electronic portfolios, webquests, imovies, curriculum
based-projects). These are also available on the CD which was sent to
you, in case you have low bandwidth. Additionally, some previous student
assignments can be found at an archived ECMP
355 student directory (although some projects are now offline).
- The Saskatchewan
Learning website is a key resource for this course. Therefore, it
is wise to become familiar with the resources provided on this site,
especially those centred around the Saskatchewan
Evergreen Curriculum.
- Websites of the week:
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