Post 7

I feel that the biggest advantages of using presentation software in a k-12 classroom  would be that you can present your lesson over and over again with a guide that you can modify and save and store the lesson on a disk for future use, each time you plan to teach that material. It's really great that you don't have to prepare a whole new lesson for each group of students that you teach. What's also great about using presentation software, such as Powerpoint is that you can insert speaker notes for the teacher, that can be really helpful in keeping one organized. The flexibility of presentation software is amazing: modify, reuse, link to websites, movies, sounds!!! All really helpful in keeping material on target, up to date, and students interested. 

   Some disadvantages would be that they can limit active learning, meaning that the students sit and watch, rather than hands on activity to enhance there learning. While they do keep the presenter on target, their rigid format can often inhibit including ideas that are not on the teacher's or presenter's outline often to to much of an extent. Another risk with using presentation software is that it is prone to technical difficulties, such as faulty links, or incompatibility problems. Furthermore, more complex slides may take a lot of time to download, which can be annoying to the teacher and students. Also, flashy additives to the presentations can be overused and often be distracting to students and push them away from absorbing the material. 

Lets say I wanted to teach my students a particular lesson on Hamlet. Well, if I wanted to target each dimension of knowledge, I might include text as well as a link to a video of the play being presented, such as a particular scene, target their visual and audio learning, as well as informational. 

One issue related to educational technology that interests me is the effectiveness of using the internet  responsibly for research as a student, and the teachers responsibility to make sure students aren't abusing resources by plagiarism or by using sources you cant trust. It is important to understand that the range of variability of the quality of information on the Internet.    That is why it is often useful to use a web resource evaluation for your students to assess how trustworthy the information is. Also it is important to understand that all plagiarism isn't directly intentional, yet you need to teach your students, if expecting responsible use of the internet, how to watch out for plagiarism.