Special Assignment #2

PART A
Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a non-profit website that students can use as a great learning tool. This website has information in lectures and videos on many different subjects. Also to go along with the lectures and videos, they have problems that you can wok out and will give you step by step instructions if you need them. This website will keep track of your progress on any activities that you do and will let you know what you need to work on. To go along with the students, teachers can use this website as well. They can use the site to see what their students have been doing and see how they are faring on the assignments.

iTunesU

iTunesU is another website that teachers can use to post their lectures and assignments for their students. The students can view the assignments and lectures and download them to their home computer, iPod,iPad, or iPhone. The teachers can set these assignments and lectures to private for their class to see only or the can set the option to public so any and everybody can see if they want to look.

TED

TED was an annual Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference that was later developed into a website. The conferences are recorded and the videos of the speakers are posted on this site. The videos or subtitles in many different languages that way people from all over the world can view them and understand what is being said. This website was created to help individuals learn and change their lives and ideas.


PART B
Khan Academy
Khan Academy is a great learning tool for students and also a great tool for teachers. Their are tons of ways that students can learn using this website. There are lectures to watch and assignments that they can do to practice. This is a good tool for teachers because they can watch the progress of their students as the complete assignments. Also they can keep up with statistical scores of each student for each subject they work in.

iTunesU
iTunesU is also a fantastic tool for teachers. They can upload lectures to it and then can decide who can see them. They can limit them to their students only or for everyone to see. This can save teachers a lot of time and headache because they can post the lecture and then if the students have any questions about what was said they can just replay the video over and over as many times as they'd like. One advantage for students is that the videos can automatically download to their computer without them having to worry about it.

TED
TED could be useful depending on how the teacher decides to use it. They could send videos of other students that are not exactly to thrilled about school and could help their current students relate to issues they are having personally. One advantage to this process is that teachers can send each individual a different video that relates only to them. Also another advantage could be the fact that it would make talking to their students a little bit easier. If they find it difficult to speak to their student in person they could let the video do the talking for them.

PART C
 Khan Academy
I watched the Liar Truthteller Brainteaser  video from the Khan Academy website. In this video, we must chose the correct door to open to find all of our happiness. Choosing the incorrect door leads to agony and despair. But in order to choose the right door we must ask the doorkeeper one question and one question only. From this question we must decipher which doorkeeper is the liar and which is the truthteller. As I sat and thought about the question I was sure what to ask so I watched the rest of the video. The question that needed to be asked was "Which door would the other guy say to open?" Whatever the answer we were given it would always be incorrect so we should choose the opposite door. I thought this was a pretty cool video because it really made you think. Activities like these really help to get you thinking and help your logic.

iTunesU
My Class 2.0 by Marc Coleman is found in the K-12 section in iTunesU. During this video Marc discusses how to use the website Evernote. In this website you can create notes and then search for keywords in your notes to find your notes. This site also has another cool feature in that you can use pictures in your notes and they can key in on any words used in the picture for the keyword search. This would be extremely helpful in class because you can share these notes with whoever you need to and you can also sync these notes with your facebook or twitter accounts.

TED
  The hidden power of smiling by Ron Gutman was a great video. Growing up we always heard that smiling will make your happier and improve you life. Ron spoke in his video about how he did research on the power of smiling and how it improved our health and life. In his research he looked at old yearbook photos, baseball cards, and pictures of Hollywood actors. I thought this was awesome and we can use this in everyday life because I want to produce happy students and citizens. And if I can make my students happy and smile then it will make me smile and we can all live long happy lives.

PART D

Khan Academy
 I believe that this website can and will be extremely helpful to my future students. The use of the many lectures, activities, and videos will be a positive if used by my students. The activities can help students practice what we have been working on in class and I can keep track of how well they did and what they may need some help with. It can also help students that need an extra bit of guidance that I may not be able to give them at home. So they can just pull up the site and go to work.

iTunesU
 iTunesU can be very helpful also because almost everybody has an iPod or iPhone now a days. This will be helpful because I can post our class lectures and work on the website and they can access it from home. So whether the student is sick or just needs to refresh their memory of what we covered they can pull it up at home or on their mobile device. Another good thing about this that I can set it to private just so my students are the only ones that can access this material.

TED
 TED will probably be the least useful of the three. It has videos of speakers talking about many different topics. Some of these videos are pretty interesting but I'm not sure if I could incorporate it everyday like I could with Khan Academy and iTunesU.

PART E

 This assignment surprised the heck out of me. I had no idea about these sites and they were all pretty cool. Khan Academy was by far the best one we got to play with and check out. The amount of information and activities on this site is outstanding. It covers a broad array of topics and it has practice activities that students can work with. I actually showed my brother-in-law this website the other day to help him out with his high school algebra. Overall I was very impressed with all of the information.