514

Assignments may vary. Check with your professor.

(1) Focus of your portfolio: The goal of SED 514 is to equip teachers with technical and pedagogical skills to enhance teaching and learning. You will prepare an electronic portfolio (samples) of your work on your U-drive, illustrating how computer technologies can be used to improve the teaching and learning of a particular unit within your discipline. By the time you are done with this class, you will have collected and developed resources that will benefit you and your students. Please note that many of the activities in this portfolio may be also used as artifacts for your professional teaching portfolio (PDP) .

Complete the title page of the portfolio that includes you’re a photograph of you, your name, school, subject taught, and topic for portfolio.
Identify the subject and topic for which your 514-portfolio will be developed. Briefly describe the significance of this topic with respect to your curriculum.

(2) Documenting your work with screen capture: Screen capture programs allow the user to take pictures of anything on their screen and save them as graphics files. Download a screen capture program for your home computer and use it to take pictures of items required in this portfolio.

Demonstrate competency with a screen-capture utility by inserting a .jpg file of keyboard shortcuts, contextual help menu, of the operating system you are using. Note that virtually all programs and operating systems have help menus and keyboard shortcuts. Consult these electronic help menus when you need to know how to perform a particular operation.

(3) Backing-up and transporting your files: Always backup your files!!! You can: (a) save them on USB drive or portable hard drive, (b) upload (ftp) them to your CSUN U-Drive , (c) move them to an Internet hard drive, or (d) send them as attached files accompanying email messages. Do one of the following:

Save your work to your U-Drive (Note: to use a U-Drive from home, it will be necessary to install VPN.) Include a screen capture. Note, it may be necessary to reset your account password. You may also need to set the privileges if you get "forbidden" or "access denied" when trying to access your public_html files from a web browser.
Develop an Internet hard drive using the Yahoo briefcase or similar resource. You can send your files to your Internet hard drive and then retrieve them at home or school. Include a screen capture.

(4) Learning about your students. Most secondary school teachers must learn the names of 150-200 students at the beginning of each academic year. This formidable task is made much easier using a photographic seating chart. *TPE-tip Teachers may use photographic seating charts, combined with student information surveys to learn about their students early in the semester (TPE 8). Make certain to check with your school regarding policies for photographing students.

Use a digital camera to make a seating chart for one of the classes you teach or for this class at CSUN.

(5) Searching / Identifying Plagiarism. The ease of information access can accelerate the learning process, but it can also be counter-productive by facilitating plagiarism. Discuss the importance of intellectual honesty with your students and illustrate how you can easily identify work plagiarized from sites on the Internet.

Using an advanced search engine with Boolean search features (such as Altavista), find text from one of your students or from a website related to your field that appears to be plagiarized. Copy and paste the text and the URLs of both pieces in question. Alternatively, you may wish to use an online plagiarism detection service such as tunitin.com (Herr SED514 - 1803832, pwd sed514). If you can not find any plagiarized student work, use an article related to your field from Wikipedia or this simple article.

(6) History of computers / graphic search engines. Answer the following questions using information from technology education websites or other online resources. Make certain that all information is in your own words. No credit can be given for information that is identical to that of another student or a web page.

Contributors to the development of the computer: Select five individuals who have made significant contributions to the development of the computer. List the contribution(s) of each individual and briefly describe its importance. See technology education websites. Use a graphic search engine to find pictures of each.

Computer Generations: Computer historians have classified computers into "generations" in an effort to identify the major technological advances upon which the computers are built. Briefly identify the major features of each of the first five generations of computers. See technology education websites. Use a graphic search engine to find pictures of each.

(7) Making computers accessible to students : Given the importance of computers in business and society, it is important that we provide students who have special needs access via specialized software and hardware. Describe three data input or output devices, or three OS or software options that may be used to make computers more accessible to students with specific physical handicaps. *TPE-tip If you have students with special needs in your class, you may wish to develop lesson plans illustrating how you have made your curriculum accessible to them using adaptive hardware and/or software. (TPE4)

Experiment with the universal access features associated with your computer's operating system and research third-party hardware and software solutions for those with special needs. Describe three hardware or software solutions and explain how they may help students with specific special needs

(8) Computer knowledge. Teachers should be conversant with computer terminology and concepts that pertain to the use of technology in their classrooms.

Review the list of computer terms and concepts for educators and then take this online quiz. Retake the quiz until you understand the terms and concepts and score 90% or better. Include a screen shot of your first and final test results. *TPE-tip If you have access to an online test-generation system such as WebCT, Blackboard, or Quizmaker, you may wish to develop online self-quizes for your students. (TPE2, TPE3)