Course number: EDDV 286
Credits: 1 credit

Instructor: Gary A. Feurer
Room WHL 301B
Phone: 831-2751
email: feurer@udel.edu
Office Hours:
   Mon - Thurs. 12:00-1:00

Description:

Texts:

• An Introduction to Computing Using ClarisWorks® Version 4 for Apple Macintosh, Bruce Presley, Beth Brown & Elaine Malfas, Lawrenceville Press (1995) CW

•  Internet for Educators, Randall James Ryder and Tom Hughes, Merrill an imprint of Prentice Hall (1997) IE

Prerequisites:

Requirements:

The course grade will be based on the following:

1. Graded laboratory activities. Most weeks throughout the semester graded computer-based lab activities will be assigned  based on the class lecture. Work for these activities is due the class meeting of the week following the class in which the activity is assigned. The Web page authoring activity is larger in scope and will be due 1 week after the last part has been assigned. All printed assignments MUST have your name, course and section, and the assignment id printed at the upper left corner of each page.
2. Mid-term exam.
3. Summary of short reading drawn from list of readings for Week 13.
4. Final exam.

Readings:  Tues

Topics and Assignments

Class 1 (Jan 6): Introduction to Windows 95, Netscape Communicator, and FTP tools.

• Readings: IE Chapter 1

• Lab Activity - FTP
 
Using Netscape Communicator, copy an interesting image from the World Wide Web. Save it temporarily on a floppy diskette or the hard drive of your computer. Using an FTP tool like WS_FTP on an IBM-compatible running Windows 95, or Fetch on a Macintosh, transfer the image file to your Copland account. Then, send the image to your instructor as an attachment to an e-mail message with the subject My Image. In the e-mail message, be sure to specify the URL of the image on the WWW. Your image should be small and in the JPG or GIF format. Almost all images on the WWW are of one of these two formats.

Class 2 (Jan 8):  Netiquette and Newsgroups

• Readings:  Usenet Etiquette on-line

• Lab Activity - Newsgroups (NEWS)
 
Try reading newsgroups using Netscape Communicator.  Look for newsgroups with discussions that might be interesting or useful to a teacher in the grade level or subject area you expect to concentrate in. Appendix B of the IE book contains names of some newsgroups.  These may or may not be available through the UD news server.
 
Hint:  In the Netscape Subscribe dialog, try using the words "education" or "k12."
 
Report on the results of your search by writing a message in the class newsgroup.
 

Class 3 (Jan 13):  Search Tools. Review of concepts of the World Wide Web. Searching on the Internet.

• Readings: IE Chapter 2 Finding Stuff on the Web

Murray, Janet, et al. (1995). Searchin’ the Net
http://arlo.wilsonhs.pps.k12.or.us/search.html (on-line)
http://www.udel.edu/feurer/christina/started.htm
http://www.udel.edu/sine/training/
 

• Lab Activity - Resources (RES)

Choose a topic to related to teaching to search for on the Web. Use one subject index and at least two search engines to conduct your search.  NOTE: You may want to try this for an assignment you really have for a class. The results will be more meaningful if you have a real task at hand.

Use bookmarks to save a record of the WWW sites that you have located.  If you don't have your own computer, save the bookmarks to a floppy disk. You will want to use them later. Report on your search, describing what you were searching for, comparing the approaches used with each of the tools, and the results with each tool. Use ClarisWorks (or any word processing program you prefer) to write your report and submit it in printed form.

 

 Classess 4- 5: Authoring for the World Wide Web

Class 4 (Jan 15): Creating a Web page, Part I. Text and images.
Using the Web page authoring tools in Netscape Communicator to create a page that uses a variety of text styles and includes in-line images.

• Reading:

IE Chapter 4
University of Delaware. (1996) Responsible Computing: A Student Manual. http://www.udel.edu/eileen/Ecce/toc.html (on-line)

Handout on creating a Web page. This is available in the bookstore.

Lecture Notes

• Lab Activity - Web Page I  (WEB1)
 
Using the standard UD policies for creating and publishing student Web pages, create a Web page and send the URL to your instructor. The page must contain the following elements: title, heading 1, text, an image, a list (ordered or unordered), links to useful materials, and a link to enable other users to send e-mail to you.

Class 5 (Jan 20): Creating a Web page, Part II. Anchors and links. Publishing to Copland.  Using audio and video in multimedia presentations and on the Web. Demonstration of capture of audio and images.

• Lab Activity - Web Page II  (WEB2)
 
Your Web page should contain a series of 8 -10 links that will be useful to your study of education. The links should be based on the resources you located while exploring the World Wide Web and the newsgroups. With each link there should be a brief description of the resource. At least one of the links must be to a newsgroup.
 
• Lab Activity - Web Page III  (WEB3)

Using a Windows 95 PC in the WHL 309 classroom, capture a short audio narration. Add a link to it in your Web page.  Copy your audio file to your public_html directory on Copland and be sure your links still work.  Your Web page, with all the required features, should be completed by the class meeting of the Class 8.

Class 6 (Jan 22) Mid Term Exam
Tools for creating classroom materials. The important but sometimes difficult task of transferring data between applications. Mail merge.

To prepare for this exam, be sure to review your class lecture notes and the material in chapters 1, 2, and 4 of the IE book. Know all the terms in the glossary. Pay special attention to the discussion of netiquette. You will not be asked specific questions about software mentioned in the readings that we did not use in the class, but you should be very familiar with the various kinds on Internet software: Telnet, e-mail, FTP, and Web browsers.
 

Click here for some vocabulary you should know.

• Readings: CW Review the chapter on databases that was covered in Ed Tech I and read Chapter 11, Sections 11.1 through 11.13.
• Lab Activity - Labels (LAB)
 
Step-by-step directions.
Copy the class list file clist.txt from the Ed Tech II: Data folder. Following the instructions given in class, import it into a ClarisWorks database. Delete 5 students from the list and add 3 new ones.  Then, create a set of labels for student folders. Each label should show the student's name with the first name first and should contain a small graphic chosen from the ClarisWorks clip art library appropriate to the elementary school classroom. Print your labels on a standard sheet of paper.  Do NOT use real Avery labels.

Class 7 (Jan 27): Electronic grade books. Using special purpose and general tools for keeping student records and grades.

• Readings: CW, Chapters 8 and 9. Review the chapter on spreadsheets that was covered in Ed Tech I and Chapter 9, Sections 9.1 through 9.15
• Lab Activity - Grade book (GB)

Use ClarisWorks to create a gradebook based on a spreadsheet. Copy the students' names from your student database into a spreadsheet. Use one column for the first name and another for the last name, two columns for two hour exam scores, and one column for a final exam score. Add another column for a weighted course average based on the hour exam scores and the final exam score. Each column should have a label at the top. Include another row beneath the column labels that contains the weights to be used for calculating the course average. Your formula for the course average should use absolute references to the weights. Changing the value of one of the weights should automatically change the computations of the course averages for each student.

Print your completed spreadsheet. Also, choose Options|Display to display formulas and print the spreadsheet with the formulas displayed. Hand in both on paper to your instructor. Save your work on a floppy for use in later assignments.

 Class 8 (Jan 29): Statistical tools. Using a spreadsheet or a statistical analysis package to compute basic statistics on student performance.
Displaying data graphically. Using a spreadsheet to create useful and meaningful charts and graphs.

• Readings: CW, Chapter 10, Section 10.5.

Teaching Mathematics with Technology: Statistics and Graphing. Parker, Janet. (1992) Arithmetic Teacher, 39(8), (on reserve).
 

• Graphing in the Information Age:  Using Data from the World Wide Web. Dixon, J. & Falba, C. (1997) Mathematics teaching in the Middle School 2(5).

• Lab Activity - Adding Statistics (STAT)
 
Working with the grade book spreadsheet you created last week, add cells that display the average (mean) and the standard deviation for each of the hour exams, the final exam, and the course average. Print your completed spreadsheet. Also, choose Options|Display to display formulas and print the spreadsheet with the formulas displayed. Hand in both on paper to your instructor. Save your work on a floppy.
• Lab Activity - Advanced Grade Book (CHART)

Use the built-in function VLOOKUP to assign letter grades, A, B, C, D, and F, based on the course average. You may use any criteria you like for setting the breakpoints between letter grades. The using the built-in function COUNT2, add to your grade book spreadsheet a tally of the number of A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s and F’s. Finally,create a pie chart to display the distribution of letter grades and a line chart to display the change of the class average for the two hours exams and the final. Print your completed spreadsheet. Also, choose Options|Display to display formulas and print the spreadsheet with the formulas displayed. Hand in both on paper to your instructor. Save your work on a floppy.

Class 9 (Feb 4): Classroom presentation hardware and software. Demonstration and comparison between types of projection systems.

• Readings: CW, Chapter 12.

• Lab Activity - Slide Show (SLIDE)

Using the slide show feature of ClarisWorks, create a presentation for Parents’ Night at your school. Your pages should be colorful, attractive, and contain lots of graphics. There should be at least four pages in your presentation. One page should show the pie chart of the letter grade distribution that you completed earlier.

 
To hand in your work, change the name of the file on your floppy diskette to "YOUR NAME - Presentation." Then copy it to the folder Ed Tech II: Homework: Your Section: Your Name.

Class 10 (Feb 6): Integrated Learning Systems. View video "Making a Difference in the Classroom" from CCC. Technology tools for traditional and alternative assessment. View video on the Sunburst Learner Profile system.

Vocabulary for Final Exam

• Readings:

Integrated Learning Systems: What Does the Research Say. (1995) Warburg, Karin. The Computing Teacher, 22(5), (on reserve)

Can Integrated Instructional Technology Transform the Classroom? (1995) VanDusen, Lani. M. & Worthed, Blaine R. Educational Leadership, 53(2), (on reserve)

Portfolio Assessment and High Technology User Handbook. (1992) UCLA Center for the Study of Evaluation. http://www.cse.ucla.edu/Products/ACOT.html  (on-line)

Touching the Mind: Technology and Assessment. (1994) Jenkins,Yolanda L. The Computing Teacher, 21(6), (on reserve)

Technology-Supported Assessment Portfolios. (1994) Barrett, Helen C. The Computing Teacher, 21(6) (on reserve)

Portfolio Assessment in Mathematics: Lessons from the Field. (1994) Johnson, Judi M. The Computing Teacher, `21(6) (on reserve)
 

• Lab Activity

Select one of the article listed above and write a short summary of the article.  You should describe the main ideas in the article and your reactions to it.