How do corporations provide training resources for teachers?

In the instructional technology area, I found a very strange phenomenon: almost all the technologies used in education area are not designed for the education originally. At the beginning, our area was built on the need of the Second World War and then, the industry. However, no matter what is the purpose for to people think or design technology in education area, technology are playing an important role in education nowadays.
Because of the emerging of the technology into education area, teachers have to learn how to use technology now. Also, because of the technology evolving, teaching and learning are becoming different to the tradition. So as the author said in this chapter: (teachers) just learn how to use technology is not enough. They have to apply the technology they know to enrich their teaching and enhance the students’ learning. That is technology literacy, or educational technology literacy.
For the teachers who are so-called technology immigration, training is a most important way to improve their technology skills. In industry area, people spend a lot of many on training employees every year. They have systematic rules and resources, and even a department taking care of the training issuers. However, this is not available in many schools or this is not as advanced as it is in industry area. But the exercises form industry area are useful for the training in education area. The best way of using the resources and exercises from industry area is incorporated it into the real situation of educational training. Transfer the advantages of using technologies into teaching and learning process according to the need in education area.
For example, the purpose of training in industry, business or some other areas in corporations is to improve the employees’ working efficiency. But in the educational area, the purpose of training is to enrich the teaching methods and enhance the learning effectiveness. So, when transferring the resources from corporate area into education area, adjustments need to be made for making it fit the need in education.
Corporations also provide technology products to the education area nowadays and this kind of production is right designed for the education area or for public use, such as Microsoft office series, macromedia software series, and other products. All these kinds of technology are very useful for the educational training.

What advantages can broad bandwidth and wireless networking offer schools? Describe the current technologies available for connectivity.

As the author said in the book, many schools have spent a lot of money every year on network cabling or creating new facilities to be network ready. However, this is becoming the past. Then what are these schools doing now? The answer is wireless networking.
Wireless Networking is not strange to us anymore, today. Just like cell phone, wireless networking can help people connect computers to servers and computer-to- computer. This is powerful, if you think about that we do not need to bring the internet code and go to classrooms or libraries to get online, instead, we can bring a laptop and sit anywhere on campuses to communicate with classmates and/or processors. in fact, this is the truth now and many schools are offering this kind of technologies right now. Furthermore, there are several new technologies which are support this wireless revolution. Take WiFi technology as an example, this is a wireless net working technology based on the common 802.11 standard. WiFi, using radio frequency set aside for consumer use, can offer connectivity across a school campus in hardware barely larger than a textbook. This kind of technology can make internet access everywhere on campus available. Public WiFi can do more than this. It is a cheap way to get internet access nowadays. WiFi has its advantages, such as convenience and open ways of getting on line. However, things always have two sides, also because of WiFi’s open access, some security issues arise. Protecting students’ and faculty members’ privacy is the responsibilities of all the schools. They need to resolve the wide implementation. Also, WiFi has its potential to change the way we access the internet and the places where the resources are located.
Another example is Bluetooth technology. It can help users to share the device in a classroom and communicate to each other. Even when the school network does work, under the supporting of the Bluetooth technology, students can still take pictures and transfer data. Bluetooth is becoming more and more widely used these days and also, more and more devices are now Bluetooth enabled.
Technologies are playing a more and more important role nowadays and it is a part of education. Almost all the schools in the US are offering students wireless connecting to internet now. There is a significant change and reform happening in the education area now. The potential for the limitless connections in every classroom and the capability of arranging the instructional environment without regard for power or network nodes will be possible.
Technology will make teaching and learning easier and more efficient in the future.

What is distance education? What types of support are critical to the success of distance education? Why?

This is an interesting topic. I mean I felt interesting when I find that, in the middle of 1800s, correspondence courses in Europe used mail systems to offer instruction. It is out of my imagination that courses can be delivered through mail. However, it is easier for me to understand that communication through technologies, such as telephone, email, or discussion board, nowadays. In fact, communications through technology did not appear until 1980s. It is pretty new. Then it is introduced into education area for offering classes to the students who do not have time to go to school regularly or are far from school. The technologies that used to support this kind of learning is called distance education. People had to go to schools everyday and stay in classrooms before the distance education was used. If people did not have time to go to school or they had not a regular schedule, they had to give up the ideas of learning before the distance education was served. So the distance learning solved these kinds of problems. Any people, wherever they live or whenever they want to study, they will always get the chance to do it through the distance education systems.
Of course, the distance education needs technology-support. “Technology is the key to providing a format for academic communication and exchange” (Teaching and learning with technology, Judy Lever-Duffy, Jean B. McDonald, 2007). For example, students can choose different ways to communicate with teachers and their classmates, such as emails, discussion boards, facebooks, or skypes. So they have many choices for communications. Furthermore, students can choose any time to communicate with teachers or classmates. People form different countries may be in a same class and the time difference may stop them to communicate during daytime or night. The distance education can offer students choices to communicate at anytime. That is, technologies can offer students synchronized communication an unsynchronized communication. So a student can send an email for help either during the daytime or during midnight if he or she likes to study in the night.
Teachers benefit from distance education too. All the processes of teaching are delivered by a system and teachers have enough time to develop the whole course before they put it into the delivering system. And they can also make revisions after they already put them in the system but the students do not get the part yet. Students can send teachers questions to ask questions and teachers can reply them during the morning. This helps both the teacher and student to improve the efficiency of teaching and learning. Of course, teachers do not have to stay in their offices everyday, like students do not need to go to schools everyday. What they need just the access to the delivering systems, normally just need to remember the password and account number. If they like they can also make appointment with students to see each other through videos when they are discussing.
More and more technologies are emerged into this area, such as phone bridges: a sophisticated telephone conferencing system, allowed a large group of students to dial in together and connect with each other and their teachers. Students can, of course, also interact with teachers and classmates via the phone. There are also other technologies that are used very common in this area, such as personal computer and internet. Technologies are the most important to any of the distance education.
At last I also want to say, technologies help education to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of teaching and learning. There would not be the distance education with the support of technologies. However, the education also helped to improve the technologies themselves. I mean the companies may try to recreate a certain technologies according to the feedback from education area. This is the process to improve technologies. So what I want to say here that distance education need technologies and technologies benefit from the emerging into education, too.

What is visual literacy? Where and when is it learned? Why is it important?

As the author said, visual literacy is like we are in the process of developing technological literacy through this course. The author did not give us a definition of visual literacy directly in this chapter, however, according to the author’s statement, I think visual literacy means the visual environment through which we gain knowledge or information.
A visual environment includes text, colors, animations, and shapes. The visual literacy helps people to interpret information and encode knowledge for storage into memories. It is also a kind of stimuli to human brains. Both adults and children have the experiences of learning through visual literacy. We all have the experience that we can remember and understand things better when we see them. It is hard for us to really understand the idea if we only hear it from others. This is also the reason that why we encourage teachers to use technology to create an analog environment for learners to “see” during the learning and teaching processes.
Every visual consists of a number of elements presented in a deliberate arrangement. The three primary categories of design elements are visual, text, and affective elements. Visual elements include graphics, symbols, real objects, and organizational visuals. Graphics are primary visual elements and it is said that a picture talks better than text. Another important style of graphics is video which is also used a lot in teaching and learning processes. Text elements include font, color, size, and all other aspects of textual presentation used. Making sure that all the aspects of the text elements can match each other is the designer’s responsibility. Affective elements are those components of a visual that can elicit a response from viewers, such as pleasure, surprise, or humor. These elements are used a lot in some tutorials. The requirements of using visual design are listed at page 328:
Relevance – all elements should be all about the main topic;
Coherence – all elements should be used to enhance and support the topic;
Consistency – all elements should work together to send a single message;
Proportion – all elements should have their sizes corresponding to their importance;
Contrast – key message should be emphasized more than others elements;
Unity and direction – all elements working together to gain the users’ attention and guide them through is the most important thing needs to be targeted.
In my opinion, the visual literacy should be used with other components for maximizing the effectiveness of learning and teaching. In fact some designers did combine some elements together with visual literacy elements, such as narration of a video, and animation with music background.