Implication for Education

       What is the implication for education? In other words, what the current education requires for? Since the purpose of setting up an effective education system is to benefit our students, what should be down that in favor of students? No matter what the curriculums, standards, and evaluation are, teachers should at the very least to motivate students in order to catch up with those requirements. Thus, looking for motivation becomes significantly important.

 Taken digital media as the first important step, many people more or less know something about digital media, including students. They usually obsess in video game that requires some background knowledge, such as media literacy, and special vocabulary. As the article indicates, “Digital media hold out the potential to hone the skill necessary for success in our globalized world. They can enhance the learning of traditional point literacy and ‘situation understanding’ in the content areas (Welcome to Our Virtual World, p 49). Thus, teachers may engage students as the way video games motivate them. It doesn’t mean teaching video games as lesson plans, but to apply more interesting teaching strategies look like video games. For example, my middle school English teacher usually taught us English vocabulary by English movies (English is my second language). Watching movies in a class is as fun as play video games. In this case, we remember many words the movie includes. Otherwise, we have to learn by rote. As a result, it is important to think about ways to teach students specially. Just like the way video games motivate students, having fun with technology should be emphasized on teaching.

Another implication of education is application of technology to teach. According to Social Media and Young Adults, there is increasing number of teens and young adults are using technique ways to communicate with others. Therefore, as teachers, application of technology to teaching is essential since teens and young adults are parts of students that teachers should teach. For example, Blogs, Facebook, and Myspace become popular among students; teachers may try to teach students how to use those media to study. On one hand, students can get all useful information from Internet. On the other hand, student can improve from comments that friends or teachers give. Those media ways that current education system needs, because our students need. In a word, both digital media and social media are ways that are all required in current education system.

A lesson from SMART Exchange

    It really took me quite a while to have SMART Notebook installed in my computer. Surprisingly, thousands of lesson plans could be found in SMART Exchange (http://exchange.smarttech.com/), and all lessons I have seen are very well written. I wish I could have more and more time so as to explore those incredible lessons.

    One 2nd grade lesson which impressed me the most is named "Germ" developed by Kim Casali. The lesson is created to give students general introduction about germs, and students should be able to invent solutions that will keep our communities germ free. This lesson interacts with students a lot, which makes learning interesting. In addition, the learning methods are very well diversified. For example, students can learn from images, matching games, animations, and other tools.

    Smart Notebook is really a great learning software, which I will definitely spend more and more time to explore. Just like Alan November said, "Until you see it really work well, you don't know how great it can be!"

Open Teacher - A Great Application from OpenSource

     From sourceforge.net, I downloaded Open Teacher. It is an opensource application that helps you learning a foreign language vocabulary. Just enter some words in your native and foreign language, and OpenTeacher tests you!
     When I opened this little application, I saw a nice interface which requiring me to set up the tests. Then I entered the "Title" of the test, "Question Language", and "Answer Language". The next step is to write what you want to learn about. Of course, a foreign language! Input whatever vocabularies you want to learn. Using a "=" to connect the two languages so that to set up a test later on. The left side is the Question Language and the right side is the Answer Language. For example, if I want to learn Apple in Chinese, I would input " Apple=苹果". Then, after setting up a number of vocabularies, I would be able to study them, or we can say test them. Click on the icon "Teach Me", Open Teacher would give you some study choices like question order, which allows you to translate from Question Language to Answer Language, or reverse order. You can also set up some study hints, which makes learning easier. The most important thing is that you can save the test when ever you want, and continue it the next time you open this application.
     It's been a few days since I used this software, and I think it is a very useful tool for students who want to study a foreign language in a special way. Further, I hope the soft ware could have its build-in tests so that students who don't want to set up tests by themselves can use it.