Metacognative Blog

Wikipedia defines metacognative as "cognition about cognition" or "knowing about knowing." This semester has been a fast paced experience for me. This is my first summer class ever but I believe it was successful. Very valuable information was gained in this class. One of the greatest things I learned in this class was the use of open source software, which is free. In this class we worked with Camstudio, which is a good tool. I just think it was somewhat pressured to learn and use it in that short period of time.
Also Over the past few weeks my blogs have been pertaining to e-learning, its environment, and its relation today. As we learned e-learning is becoming more and more popular. Its not just in jobs or colleges but its being implemented into grade schools (k-12) also. My following blog related to that in a way. This way was the need of teachers. Teachers are needed in certain instances. I just depends on the subject or material that is to be learned and the needs of the students. More than likely teachers are very much still needed with grade school e-learning. If not, students may get off of track or may need help and may not know where to find help. These two previous blogs mentioned then relates to another e-learning blog dealing with e-learning today. E-learning today is great and I believe it will become better and better. Also with the economy the way it is, I believe e-learning will actually help in a way. One way is that it can help save on gas.
This has been a wonderful, experiential TSTM 544 class.

Final Workshop Preparartions

As we come to the end of this Summer 1 2009 session of TSTM 544 class, we are making final adjustments and preparing for the workshops to be presented in the final week. We gathered all of the information and the final thing to do was to make sure we had everything in order. For our group we had all of our software and information. We just needed to add our information to the wiki. We also needed the input information for our participants to use when doing the activities we prepared for them. As far as the information we provided for them, we gave them basic info for the business letter and also test students with necessary inputs for the grade sheet activity. One thing I am concerned about is my video. It was actually harder than I thought it would be. If I wasn't messing the words up, it was some other audio discrepancy. But in the end it all came together. I believe these workshops will be a success. Now we just have to wait for the time to come.

E-Learning Discussion

This past week we had discussions on blackboard dealing with topics from our annotated bibliographies on e-learning. At first I was sort of nervous or concerned about how they would go. After the discussions got going, I realized that this was going to be good. There was a great deal of information discussed in these three different discussion groups. All types of information was presented, opinions and facts. In most of the discussions, most people agreed on everything and if someone didn't they presented valuable information as to why they didn't. So, overall I believe these E-learning discussions went very well.

Teachers in an E-learning Environment

Are teachers really needed in an E-learning environment? Well, as technology continues to get better and better, more information can be found on the Internet or something to that extent. As with that, e-learning gets better and better. But I do think teachers are still needed in an E-learning environment to a certain extent. Everybody knows if they have a problem, need to find a answer to a question, or how to do something, they just "google it." That's fine but sometimes google may not be the best option. A student may need help in which google wouldn't be the best option for them. But there are also times when the student may be having a hard time understanding a particular concept or idea and may just need it explained in a different way. Google may not have this way or it may take a great deal of searching but the teacher may understand the best way to explain it right away because they are there with them.

Workshop Preparation

This week we have been preparing for the workshop or seminars to be presented to the business education professors in our last week of class. Previously we had already gathered a great deal of web 2.0 and open source software and chose the best out of those. After being split into groups and receiving specific software for each group we begin preparing for specific seminars. My group had open source software. At first we thought we were just supposed to gather information about the software and outline a few things that could be pointed out in the seminar. We were somewhat right. Our software is basically a replica of Microsoft word, excel, and access. So, we kinda figured that most people know how to use these. But we didn't realize we had to make a specific outline, step by step. But all of this wasn't too hard because we had actually went through and had everything planned including the activities. So, we just had to go back and make it more detailed. But overall I think this project is going well.

Summer Class

This TSTM 544 is my first summer class ever. Coming into this class I didn't know what to expect. I figured the pace would be faster but I was concerned if getting the information would be successful. So, far everything has being going good. Even though we are just going into the third week of this class, I feel like everything is flowing smoothly. One of the main things I have learned that I have put to use already is the use of the FREE open source software that is readily available over the internet. Though my college career is coming to its end, I wish I had taken some summer classes earlier.

Conducting Research

For one of our assignments in this TSTM 544 class we are assigned to create an annotated bibliography about E-Learning. For this assignment we need at least 5 supporting articles to cite in the bibliography. Before class the other day, when looking for articles or anything, I would just "Google it." This is a common action for many people.

After class the other day, I now can say I will not google everything. Besides the library resources, which I somewhat previously learned about, there are other resources that can be used to perform successful searches. There are many journals but there are other sites that perform searches also such as Google Scholar, Spezify, Searchme, Search-cube, KoolTorch, and KartOO. Not only are they good sites to search but there are very appealing to the eye and somewhat different from your regular ordinary search engine.