Smart Boards

The school I'm student teaching at has a smart board, so I figured I'd learn more about them.
My cooperating teacher uses it to teach her students about cells (plant and animal) and many of the kinds you buy come with lesson plans. She applied for a grant to get one in her classroom, but if you were to buy one personally they're in the realm of $2000-$3500 (some specials are offered for education purposes) depending on how many features and what brand.

For more information go to http://www.electronicwhiteboardswarehouse.com/polyvision/polyvision_ts800_education.htm

Basic Information to Help with Welding Lessons

When I took ASM 240 I ran across this website when doing that presentation thing.
http://www.lincolnelectric.com/knowledge/training/weldcurriculum.asp

This is the Lincoln Electric Website. It has a lot of basic knowledge for most types of welding but is more specialized is SMAW and GMAW. It has powerpoints, safety information, and welding projects to try in the classroom! I think this website would be a great reference for planning a welding lesson in the first few years of teaching. If you get a free minute check it out! You may be able to use it when planning for your welding lession in ASM 533!

Krysteena Brown

Farm Industry News .com

http://farmindustrynews.com/
This is one of my favorite websites to go and read about farming news. They have everything- Equipment, biofuels, seeds, crop protection, trucks, atv's, etc. It is a very informative site to go and read about the upcoming events and technology for the topics mentioned. The topics are broken up into smaller sub catagories for easy navigation. The site also has the commodity pricing that updates itself. This would be a good site for students to get articles and look up information.
-Drew Bender-

Dot Mac

When this assignment was described in class I immediately thought of a tool I love to use. It is called .(dot)Mac. It is a program created by Apple to electronically sync your computer files and e-mail to a server online. For $99 a year you get a username@mac.com which gives you 10GB of space to upload files, e-mails, PowerPoints, or virtually anything you save to your computer and access it on ANY computer (PC or Mac) that is connected to the internet. I use this feature a lot for files used for school that I want to access somewhere on campus. It would help a lot for Ag teachers to save all of the lesson plans, files, record books, etc. that are used and ensure that they will never be lost or moved by students (in a public folder). It is a great feature I highly recommend.

For more information visit http://www.mac.com

- Nathan Arnold

Teaching Resources..

Friday I stopped in to see my old high school ag. teacher and he gave me a great website for teaching resources... it is call "Georgia Agriculture Education" and it has all kinds of lesson plans... powerpoints... photos... CDEs... practice exams... and other internet links... So I thought I would pass it on to all of you!!

http://aged.ces.uga.edu/

Go check it out!!!

Jess Peecher

Free Technology Tutorials at OSU!

I was reading the weekly headlines from Buckeye Net News this morning and saw an advertisement for technology tutorials at the Digital Union. The Digital Union is a pretty cool Mac based computer lab in the Science and Engineering Library. Here is the link for the list of free tutorials offered this quarter by the Digital Union:

http://digitalunion.osu.edu/newsandevents/workshops/

Side note: I believe the Digital Union still offers free color printing if you bring your own printing paper!

Jamie Zimmer

PSP's Taking Place of Textbooks

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=445196&in_page_id=1770#StartComments

This link will take you right to the article. British Schools are now using the handheld playstations to provide notes, audio and video clips, along with textbooks on this small piece of technology.
Although there are mixed feelings on it, I thought it would be interesting just to use as a tool in the classroom, Possibly just have enough available to only keep at school, to minimize theft, and gaming instead of classroom work.
Some of the teachers also thought that these would be good for slower students who may need more than just a book in front of them. The PSPs could provide them with more information on a topic.
Lindsey Regula

interactive livestock judging

I heard about this idea, while at a judging clinic and was amazed. So I found this site from the Univerity of Kentucky http://www.ca.uky.edu/agripedia/agmania/livestock/ This site doesn't allow judging but is a great tool to use with your livestock judging team. You can sit them infront of the comuputer and allow them to learn about judging and animals.
-Sarah Criswell

iTunes in the Classroom

When I began thinking about this assignment, I was immediately reminded of a conversation that occured with Dr. Steve Gratz who is the executive secretary for the Ohio FFA.

Dr. Gratz makes no effort to hide his love of advancing technology and how those advancements might be integrated into agricultural education classrooms. One of his techology plugs, however, really struck me as interesting.

His theory was, that if you were instructing a unit on forestry, yet you are far from being a forestry wiz, why not sit your kids down in front of a computer and have them listen to an instructional unit by another ag teach who is a forestry genuis if you will. You, as the acutally instructor, would then serve as the facilitator of the information. Dr. Gratz felt that this would allow instruction to be strenghtened by allowing teachers to "bring" experts into the classroom, without actually physically bringing the expert into the class.

The ease of podcast would also allow for many programs to easily access the information in the classroom, but students could also subscribe to the cast and listen at home.

I think this is an extremely interesting take on a media that so many people are involved with. I'm not sure if it will ever catch on, but it is definitely something to think about in the future as we begin our own programs!

For more, check out the following website: http://oregonstate.edu/uesp/podcast.htm

**It was created by students and faculty at the University of Oregon and one of the podcast is actually titled "agricultural sciences" and also there is one titled "forestry"

--Hilary Bailey

grants within your classroom

After a long hard day of a wonderful day of BLOCK I came home only to think about financial issues. Then I started thinking about where in the world am I going to come up with money or grants to help make my program a success?! So I turned to the world wide web to find out. I knew that ohio department of natural resources would be a great place to start. One there website they had a designated tabe for grants. Great I thought, one in particular grant caught my eye. "Watershed Awareness to Watershed Action (WAWA) mini-grants for projects such as educator workshops, student field days, water festivals, storm drain stenciling, landowner and developer seminars, and other watershed awareness initiatives." http://www.ohiodnr.com/default/grants/default/tabid/8835/Default.aspx This would work out great in my classroom as an educational tool to touch on areas I may have forgotten about. Hope this helps all of you as well!

Jenna Meeks

New Table Saw Safety Mechanism

I found some interesting videos on a new technology in table saws. The table saws, made by SawStop, have a safety feature controlled by the presence of electric current when contacted with flesh to trigger a shut-off mechanism. The videos do a great job of illustrating in a better way how it works. Here is the link to SawStop's website: http://www.sawstop.com/ and there are four neat videos on the left-hand side.

You might recall Mr. Keck made mention of this table saw on Monday and predicted that most shops would eventually be equipped with them.

I also did some research on the cost of this machine. Right now, it runs around $3,000. That is quite expensive compared to around $1,500 for a good Delta 10" table saw, but I think school administrators will agree that the added safety offered is well worth it.

-Kurt Leber

helpful intro to welding website

I was meandering around the NAAE communities of practice website I found a post that included this website:

http://weldingteacher.com/

I checked it out and it was pretty informative, it contains some basic info about welding and even has a couple of easy lesson plans and quizzes that you could mold your own lesson plan off of if you were so inclined.

-Adam Ziadeh

A Great Example of a Blog- AFBF Young Farmers and Ranchers Committee

Since many of us are new to blogs, I thought it might be good to share an agricultural blog I read on a regular basis. It is a great reference for how to set up blogs and what sort of format to use. The link is http://fb.org/blog/

It is written by members of the American Farm Bureau Young Farmers and Ranchers Committee. They often share their thoughts and opinions on current issues facing the agricultural industry and ways to educate the public on the importance of the food and fiber industry. The blog is a great way to find out what is going on in the world of agriculture and what types of literacy efforts are being utilized across the country.

~Rose Dudgeon

First Post

Hello World!