Reading Selection #6

"It's In The Game." Irish Sports Daily.Com. 2010. Irish Sports Daily. 4 March. 2010
 http://www.irishsportsdaily.com/football/2045-its-in-the-game

I decided to use this article, because it had a direct correlation with me as a football coach. This article discusses XOS PlayAction Simulator, a product of XOS Digital, Inc. This simulator is a virtual training tool for football players. It plays just like a video game, such as Madden or NCAA Football. The thing that makes this simulator unique is that it has been modified from the game to a more realistic version of football. The main reason it is a good simulator is because a team can load their offense onto the game and a player can run his own offense and help him not only learn the plays, but how they are supposed to look and what he should be looking for when he runs those plays. The simulator can also allow the coaches t create a list of the plays they would like to run and the types of defenses he wants them to run against. It really is the best thing for learning outside of actual practice. A couple of paragraphs really stuck out with how much this program can do:
“We go so far as to give coaches, when they’re scripting the session, to specify who can and cannot catch a ball,” Tsai said. “For example, on a given play against a certain defense, if my read is to the X receiver, and I throw to the Z, we can actually force an incompletion, interception or whatever, to ensure that wrong receiver doesn’t get the ball. That’s just another mechanism to provide feedback for the player.”

 “The main benefit there is, your starting quarterback, he’s going to get most of the reps on the practice field,” Tsai said. “But your second-stringers and the younger guys, that can just sit and observe and watch film, they’ve got a way now, where they can train and go through that decision-making process in a virtual environment.”

This coaching tool is a really impressive piece of technology. I knew that you could play a video game and put in your own playbook to help your players learn the offense, but the aspect of it that I did not know and that is so impressive is the fact that you can script the plays and defenses and have a certain look to a certain offensive play. It is also amazing that the technology can understand when a player made the wrong read and throw and force the negative outcome to occur as a result.

If this technology isn't efficient, effective, and engaging I don't know what is. This allows coaches to virtually get in extra practice time. This is the next closest thing to actually physically running plays. It allows players who may not get as much work on the field to stay prepared. It can also allow players who are hurt to still get in practice. It can also prepare a player for an upcoming game, because they can run their plays and put in the opponents defenses to work against. It is efficient, because it won't take as much time as a normal practice would and you do not have to get all pads on and what not. It is effective, because it simulates almost exactly what a player will see on the field. This simulator is probably more engaging then it is anything else, because the players like to play it. To them is seems just like they are playing a video game.

Overall, this simulator would be ideal to have as a couch. I would definitely love to have it for my players, the only problem is I am sure it costs a boatload of money. This is probably why only a handful of schools have it, and those schools are the major division one Universities.     

Reading Selection # 5

Panturu, Stan. "The Informative-Formative Valneces of Multimedia Technologies in the Intercultural Education Framework." Univeristy of Ploiesti Bulletin, Educational Sciences Series LXII 19-24.

The reason I chose this article was because it not only dealt with educational technology, but because I am also in a multi-cultural class and this article deals with iintercultural eduction. The article first discusses the mission of education in a multicultural world. The article's short version of the mission for a intercultural school is "to provide equal educational condition for all children, taking into account their physical, cultural, national and religious diversity. The article then goes into discussing the role of the school as a unit for modern learning as well as the pragmatics of intercultural education. The article then goes into the integration of multimedia technology in the intercultural education. The author discusses challenges such as generating an adequate environment for learning, but then discusses the methodology of integrating the multimedia. The article says that an educational program where the new technologies are used involves certain logical, physiological and pedagogical stages. The author also states that "by using the new information technology, the learning process is enriched, involving transformational learning, effective teaching (adequate to students needs), effective learning, improving and diversifying the methodological repertoire."

I think the biggest thing I learned from this article was how technology relates to the learners, and how it effects the education and how it can work in a multicultural classroom. I did not necessarily learn any new technological tools to use in my classroom or with my players. Since I did not get any new technological ideas out of this article I will not be able to take those directly and use them with my students or players. I will be able to take some of what I learned in this article, however, and use at as a base thought process when it comes to multicultural education and the integrating of technology in the classroom. This article has given me a base core of knowledge as to what should be the mission in intercultural classrooms and how technology can apply itself and make in an impact in these classrooms.  

Reading Selection # 4

Johnson, Laurence F. Alan Levine, Rachel S. Smith and Keene Haywood. Key Emerging Technologies for Postsecondary Education. Austin, TX: Horizon Report, 2010.

This article was written to discuss the up and coming technologies in the field of education for post secondary education. It brings up not only the key emerging technologies, but also the key trends in education that are requiring these updates in technology. The first trend is that "the abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making coaching, and credentialing." The second trend is that "people expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever they want to." The third trend is that "the technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized." The final trend is that "the work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross-campus collaboration between departments.

The article goes on to discuss some of the critical challenges of new technologies then goes into the new emerging technologies. The first technology is Mobile Computing. This is definitely a technology that can be taken advantage of, because almost everybody on a college campus now-a-days has a mobile device, or smart phone. The second emerging technology is Open Content. This involves placing academic content online and freely available for their students. The third emerging technology is electronic books. This makes sense, because they are becoming so popular with the public, and it would save students tons of money. The fourth emerging technology is simple augmented reality, which refers to the shift that has made augmented reality accessible to almost anybody. The last two emerging technologies are gesture-based computing and visual data analysis.

The first few emerging technologies I already knew about,  but the last couple were totally new to me. I did not really know anything about simple augmented reality, gesture-based computing, or visual data analysis. This article has opened me up a little bit more to some new technologies in the education world. Learning about these new technologies will cause me to probably look into them a little more, and keep an eye out for them, and to possibly put a few of them into use as long as the technology is available to me.