Final Blog Assignment

My final research question is "Should cellular phones be allowed in classrooms as educational tools?" After taking a final look at all my research, I've come to the conclusion that yes, cell phones should be allowed in the classroom for educational purposes.

Microsoft Powerpoint

Although Prezi is really neat, it was really confusing to me. I like how it’s “3-D”, I think that’s a really good way to get the audience’s attention. It was really confusing, though. It was talking about a “path” and a “journey” and I had no idea what it meant. I would like to learn more about this platform in the future because I think it has potential. I really liked the Wix platform where you can make free websites. I’m thinking about using that for my presentation, but it seems like a lot of work and I’m not really technologically inclined, so I’m not sure yet. I may just stick with Microsoft Powerpoint because I’ve used it in the past and it’s not as confusing or fancy as the platforms I looked at today.



Above is just a practice page for my presentation, which I created on Microsoft Powerpoint.

I would like to use Sliderocket to make my powerpoint, so I could access it online instead of having to worry about a jumpdrive, but Sliderocket isn't available to people anymore unless they're with a company.

 

Plagiarism!

                The digital age and widespread use of the internet is making plagiarism easier than ever before. It’s physically easier because we can go on a website or blog or whatever it may be, copy the text, and paste it right into a Word document like it’s our own work. It’s also getting harder to determine what’s considered plagiarism and what isn’t because there’s so much information on the web that it’s difficult to decide what you should cite and what you don’t have to. A lot of stuff seems like common knowledge when really you should still give credit to the author.

            It feels like I plagiarize sometimes, not purposely but because sometimes it’s hard to paraphrase without using the same words as the author. If it’s really the only word that makes sense then it’s hard to not “steal” the author’s words or phrases. I’ve also heard of many people, like one of the examples in the article, accidently plagiarizing from Wikipedia because they aren’t aware it’s plagiarizing, since it’s hard to discern what’s common knowledge.

2 Helpful Sources

Research Question: How has technology changed the classroom?

Hendricks, Drew. “A Look at Recent Findings on Technology in the Classroom.” Huffington Post. Huff

          Post Tech, 14 Mar. 2013. Web. 1 Apr. 2013.

Periathiruvadi, Sita and Anne N. Rinn. "Technology in Gifted Education: A Review of Best Practices

          and Empirical Research." Journal of Research on Technology in Education 45.2 (2012): 153-169.

          Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 Apr. 2013.