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Recently, we hosted a teacher cadets program at UNCW. This program brings high school students interested in becoming teachers to campus to learn about the field. I was asked to do a short workshop on games in education and was interviewed by the local news channel. Here is the link to the article and video clip: http://news14.com/Default.aspx?ArID=605339. The product that was demonstrated was DimensionM which they did not mention in the video.

I just received my teaching evaluations for my first academic semester at UNCW. I am delighted to say that the students felt I did a good job teaching my first semester. This makes me extremely happy as I was very concerned that teaching in a new environment would be devastating for my teaching evaluations. Not to mention I became deathly ill for part of last semester. Anyway, according to my students, I did pretty well for my first term. A big thank you to my students for making the teaching effective. After all, it takes two to tango!

I recently came into contact with a software program called Wordle. This software basically does content analysis of key terms that emerge in a written prose. The more frequently words occur, the larger they appear on the word diagrams generated by Wordle. The software randomly generates colors and alignments of the terms on the diagram as well. For example, I took one of my journal articles titled the “effects of time-compressed audio and verbal redundancy on learner performance and satisfaction” and plugged it into Wordle. A thumbnail of the resulting word illustration is shown below. You can click on it to see a larger picture.

As you can see, the softare summarizes the key terms in a visual and spatial format that allows an observer to make meaning from the diagram. This is fun and interesting software that certainly has a place in summarizing the vast quantities of text published on a daily basis. Enjoy!

ISTE and many other professional associations have applauded both houses of US congress for slating $1 billion for educational technology funding this upcoming year. Here is the news link. While I feel this is a great way to spend federal stimulus dollars, I have to question whether $1 billion is enough money to have a national impact on school technology integration when Florida alone slated $1.25 billion last year for the technology infrastructure of classrooms. We have schools that have inadequate Internet connections, computers with barely 256 MB of RAM, and teachers lacking the professional development to effectively integrate technology into their instructional practice. If we are to invest in a stimulus package to have an effect on our future, I think more money is necessary to equip our schools for the 21st century!