Social Justice

The technology gap also affects our classrooms and we as teachers have a responsibility to work towards closing the gap between the poor and rich in the area of technology. As it mentions in the article if we do not use technology in the classroom we are doing a disservice to our students. But as we discussed in class, what about those students who don't have access to technology in their homes?

I would argue we can still teach them as much as possible about technology in our classrooms. There's a lot that can be done in the class with technology. I would argue we would be doing our students the greater disservice if we did not use technology as much as we can.

Cell Phones in Class?

I lean towards not allowing cell phones in the classroom because I think they are just too distracting. However, I can see using them in specific situations as long as the guidelines were very specific and clear.

I personally think the first fellow didn't make a very strong argument against cellphones because he was going off on his own personal soap boxes. I think the girl for cell phones was much more reasonable and therefore I wanted to side with her because her arguments were more reasonable.

Power Point

I've really enjoyed going through the readings and info on power point. I have found the emphasis on story-telling and simplicity to be enlightening and something that I want to implement more thoroughly.

I have actually found it a freeing concept because focusing on good images and one idea a slide is so much easier than trying to cram in the right amount of info.

I also thought there were some helpful design ideas such as making a box around the text and contrasting white and black.

Is Chat Speak Destroying English?

As usual, I think that both sides have valid points to make. Howard argues that chatspeak is destroying English because young people are beginning to write like that so often that it is becoming more natural to them than standard English. As Howard wrote in her piece, "I am concerned whether students are learning
the skills to fully express themselves through writing
as they move toward adulthood."

However, Monfils argues that kids can chatspeak and easily switch between standard English and chatspeak. I can understand Howard's concern especially in the case of those students that struggle academically. Students that don't have a lot of academic support or skills may have a hard time discerning what is standard and what is not.

Shortening Attention Spans?

I actually agree with both sides to some degree. I do believe it is true that technology can shorten our youth's attention span. However, I also think that we can help balance this tendency by training our kids to take the beneficial aspects of technology and try to minimize the negative aspects of it. I think being in denial of technology's negative by-products is not helpful.

I think Marcovitz shows a balanced, sober perspective when he writes, "Does that mean that educational technology is all bad? Of course not. There are great things that can be learned with technology. But Postman teaches us that every technology is a Faustian Bargain; for every positive benefit, there is an often unseen and very serious downside." Being aware of the downside of technology is an important key to avoiding its pit-falls and making the best of its strengths.

Cyberbullying

Define cyberbullying. Do you have personal experience with it as either a victim or perpetrator, even if you didn’t know it at the time?

Cyberbullying is picking on and abusing someone through the internet often anonymously. I have never been the victim of cyberbullying to my knowledge at least. I think the reason for this is that it wasn't the bullying style of my generation. My time was the time of bullying by writing on bathroom doors and so forth. And I did see that happen to kids I knew in Jr. high.

Describe the problems schools face in dealing with cyberbullying. What are the legal issues? How would you know students are being cyberbullied? Should schools step in and regulate what is happening off-site?

The problem with cyber-bullying is that it is hard for schools to control and monitor. It is also difficult to prosecute legally as in the example with the mother that impersonated a boy online. It was hard to find legal grounds to punish her. I hope that the federal government is working on cyber-bullying laws that will better enable them to prosecute serious cases.

I think I wouldn't know that students are being cyber-bullied unless they told me. So I think it would be prudent of me to address the issue in the beginning of my class and let students know how they can address the issue if they are a victim of cyber-bullying. I believe schools should have concrete rules concerning cyber-bullying and methods of addressing the issue if it comes up.

Copy Right Laws

What are some new things you learned about copyright that you hadn’t known before?
Before this class, I had very little knowledge of copy right issues. I now realize that I have often broken copyright laws in class, unfortunately. I have shown clips of movies as illustrations of particular subjects in a class many times. And I'm sure that those clips were longer than the allowed length. It was also helpful to learn that many educational sources allow their work to be open source.

Do you believe that copyright laws are fair as they are currently written? What specifically do you believe to be fair/unfair?
On one hand, I can understand wanting to protect one's work and wanting to control where it is used. However, I also think these laws are burdensome, impractical and difficult to enforce as a teacher. If I was trying to make a profit by using other people's work or showing someone else's work to thousands of people then I could understand the concern. But I am simply a teacher trying to use multimedia in my class to make it more interesting, so I think the laws should make it easier for copy-righted materials to be used in an educational setting.

Tell me what you must do to make sure whatever you are using in your classroom will fall under Fair Use protection.
I think the first step to making sure my work falls under Fair Use protection, is making sure I know where to go to check if I'm not sure. So I will be sure to keep the links that were provided to us for future reference. I will also have a list of common Fair Use issues and how to make sure I'm abiding by Fair Use printed out and in a place where I can easily access it in class.

How will you enforce copyright within your own classroom with your students?
I plan on having a brief explanation of Fair Use issues as well as examples of how they can use video, music and so on within Fair Use. We also go through these guidelines in the beginning of class.

Wikipedia

1. How often do you use Wikipedia for research? Where do you usually start for researching a topic?

I use Wikipedia for research quite often. Actually, almost every time I'm curious about a subject I look it up on Wikipedia. Interestingly, even if Wikipedia wasn't the first place I looked when I was curious about something, it is usually one of the first links that comes up through a google search. As the article mentioned, it's hard to avoid Wikipedia even if one wants to because it is so up-to-date on the current issues.

I let myself use Wikipedia freely when I just want to get an overview of a subject because it often has the most current information and thus works as a great starting point. However, as I become more serious about a subject I move onto more verifiable and traditional sources.

2. As a teacher, would you accept Wikipedia as a resource that your students can quote in their research? How does the article support/negates your idea of what to do with students?

At this point my position is that I will let a student use Wikipedia as long as they test that particular page with a credibility rubric and don't use it as their primary source. They should have at least four other traditional sources to balance the Wikipedia source.

3. What would your policy be surrounding internet research?
I think starting out with instructions on how to verify sources is really important particularly in regard to the internet. I would spend a substantial amount of time going through worksheets like the credibility worksheet in this class. It would be a priority to teach kids the skills to discern between credible sources and questionable sources.

Blogs in the Classroom

The Sargent Park Math Zone blog is a great example of how we as teachers can make learning more interesting to the "Digital Native". Some distinguishing features of the blog that I particularly liked were the ability for students to interact with the question proposed and additionally, the ability of the students to answer each other's questions.

The blog also includes a flikr account where students can post their own math and number themed pictures. I thought this feature was ingenious because it allows students to be creative and interactive around a math topic.

My initial feeling about the "Don't Feed the Trolls" article was that it over elaborated something that is quite self-evident-the need to be polite in public discourse. However, perhaps this shows that I am "out-of-touch" with how unkind teenagers can be in the cyberworld. I suppose it is a good reminder to set up "appropriate behavior parameters" for students when initiating a classroom blog or online exercise.

Teachers and Social Networking

What did you find about yourself after you went through the Google and Pipl searches? Give me the actual links you found (unless you are really embarrassed by them).
http://www.facebook.com/people/Joyce-Thompson/662095181

I was genuinely surprised by how many links I found associated with my name and my handle. My name is fairly generic so I thought I wouldn't find anything on myself especially because in the past I wasn't able to find anything. I wasn't easily able to find my information through Pipl for which I'm thankful.

Is there anything you want to change now or went ahead and already changed that may have been unbecoming of you as a teacher?
At this point, I don't think there is anything particularly unbecoming of me on the internet. I do, however, think it is important to keep in mind that my students are going to become facebook friends with me eventually so I will need to think about how much of my life I want to keep private.

Do you think teachers should be held to community standards in terms of their personal lives?
As an aunt, hopefully a mother someday and as a future teacher, I do think that teachers should be held to community standards. If teachers choose to put pictures of themselves in a public place or air their ideas online, I think they need to be ready to be held accountable.

Public school teachers have the rare responsibility and privilege to have a direct impact on students. Like it or not, what teachers model for students influences them. If a person doesn't want that kind of accountability, then maybe this isn't the right profession for them.

Digital Native?

1. Do you consider yourself a digital native, immigrant, or even alien? Why?

I consider myself a digital immigrant with a pretty good digital accent. I was young enough when the digital revolution began that I was able to adapt to the technological advances of the time and they in turn influenced me. Not only did I adjust well to the technological advances of my time but I have also made an effort to learn about technology as it has developed.

While many of my friends hesitated to get involved with blogger, facebook or photoshop, I worked at teaching myself how to navigate these different forms of technology. However, I shouldn't take all the credit when it comes to my natural "digital accent" because of a lot my willingness to engage in these different forms of technology comes from the influence of my Korean ESL students and the friends that I made while teaching ESL in Korea.

2. What experiences have you had with technology in the classroom either as a teacher or learner? Compare high school technology to college technology. Did it improve your learning experience?
I have experienced technology as both a teacher and a student. In my undergraduate program is where I first began to use email and then in my graduate work I received almost of my reading through the gradschool's website.

However, I learned the most about technology in the classroom from my students in Korea. I taught English as a Second Language at a Korean university for almost three years. In my opinion, the average Korean's technological literacy is much higher than the typical American's technological literacy. My students' overall knowledge and comfortability with computers inspired me to learn more as well as use technology more in class.

My students would always use hotmail chat to complete their assignments and in their presentations always used various forms of technology. I also used technologies like powerpoint, mp3 players and video in my classes in the past but after reading these articles I have an even greater understanding of how important it is to use technology in classes in particularly when working with such a highly digital group of people like Koreans.

3. Have these articles changed your mind about the use of technology in your future classroom? How might you incorporate it?
Even though I feel I am somewhat comfortable working in a "Digital Native" setting, I do feel that I don't always have the level of appreciation for "these new skills that the Natives have acquired and perfected through years of interaction and practice." I truly gained a greater understanding of the skill-sets that my students are coming from through this article. And even if I don't design everything in a computer game format, I think I have a greater understanding of how I need to design class content.

I found Prensky's story about the professors that wanted to write the program like a graduate class particularly fascinating. It was the perfect analogy for the difference between the digital immigrant and the digital native. "The professors insisted that the learners do all the tasks in order; we asked them to allow random access. They wanted a slow academic pace, we wanted speed and urgency (we hired a Hollywood script writer to provide this.) They wanted written instructions; we wanted computer movies. They wanted the traditional pedagogical language of “learning objectives,” “mastery”, etc. (e.g. “in this exercise you will learn…”); our goal was to completely eliminate any language that even smacked of education."

Interestingly, I can understand both parties. I can understand the desire for deliberate instruction and pedagogical language but I also know almost intuitively that the computer game model will be more effective. Perhaps this shows that I straddle both the Digital Native world and the Digital Immigrant world.

First Post!

My name is Joyce. I hope to teach Middle School Social Studies. I will be endorsed in Social Studies and Language Arts. My favorite animal is a monkey.