Preface
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Preface
This book is for:
In fact, I'll show you that all you really need to begin with are a computer and a separate web cam. You can, of course, do even more if you invest a little more, but I will start out with the cheapest alternatives to get you started. I have been a computer lab teacher and technology coordinator for over 25 years, and have noticed various trends in technology education. Lately, we've been hearing about STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) courses and how important they are to our students' futures, including a renewed interest in teaching programming to younger students, and fitting it all into a set of Common Core standards. Before that, the trend was to make our students proficient with suites of productivity applications, putting programming on the back burner. Before that, educational instruction often focused on canned approaches where you sat a child down in front of graduated programs that acted much like electronic workbooks. And back then, everyone was still interested in creating generations of productive computer programmers. The bottom line has been that not everybody agrees on what students should learn in school when it comes to technology. I've been watching this progression since the 70's, and I've come to believe that using open-ended, construction-set types of software that allow students to create something from scratch using a wide variety of specific tools and components, or that allow them to invent their own tools that perform desired actions, is the best kind of technology learning. I come from an Arts background as well, and recognize that developing an "Artistic Mind" is a necessity for modern citizens of the world. An Artist learns to see things in unconventional ways. A further issue to consider is the increasing use of various handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets. As our students become more networked via the Internet using these screen-based mobile devices, many teachers are going to some sort of "flipped classroom" approach in which they create video-based lectures and demonstrations that their students are expected to watch and/or listen to on their own outside of class, followed the next day by class time in which the teacher helps the students work through their homework problems, work on their projects, etc. Having taught a number of professional development sessions focused on presentation software, particularly in terms of making slide show presentations go far beyond the too typical pages of bulleted lists, I have no doubt that including videos of teacher- or student-created animations within slides will make almost any presentation more accessible to audiences. |