Learning Journal 12

I have learned sooooo much from this class in such a short little semester.
1)What have I learned about integrating technology into the classroom?
I learned that using technology in the classroom is the becoming extremely important in keeping up with the 21st century. We have so many new technologies available that make networking and collaboration so much easier. Teaching children with these tools will only increase their level of learning.

2)What I still want to know about using technology in the classroom.
I guess I would like to know a proper balance of when technology is good to use and when it can be better to stick with the old fashioned way. I guess you can almost always incorporate technology into a lesson plan somewhere. Even if I were to say that I just want students to make up a story, I could have them type it up, make it into a digital story, or have them act it out onto a youtube video.

I would also like to find out ways to get more technology into classrooms that can't afford it. Are there any special programs through companies to get used computers or microphones or things like that.

3)Advice for students taking this class in the future:
-Failure is okay!!
-Keep up with your learning journal
-Don't do your work for the sake of the grade, do your work for the sake of learning
-Keep an open mind to the new ideas
-Don't be afraid of technology!

Learning Networks

After learning about learning networks, we actually had to join one and get in on the action. I'm not gonna lie, I was not very excited about having to engage with someone I didn't know. For one, I felt that since I wasn't a teacher, some of the net workers wouldn't really be interested in what I had to say. Also, I had this fear of doing something new and going out of my comfort zone. When I realized I was just being stupid and lazy, I decided to join the Classroom 2.0 site. This site seemed to be strictly for education and required approval from the site owners to gain access.

When I joined the site I made sure to put up a profile picture and put a little bit of information about what I was doing on the website. I didn't know exactly where to start when it came to conversing with the other teachers so I put that part off for a day or 2. When I finally went back on the site, I started reading some of the other conversations that teachers had been posting to the forums. Some of the discussions were very interesting, but I wasn't sure if I had enough expertise to give back any good feedback. I quickly came across a posting about a teacher asking if she thought that Facebook could be a useful tool for education. I got really excited and immediately replied. I told her about our Art Show project and how Facebook, so far, has been the best mode of communication for the students. I haven't received any replies back yet, but when I do, I'll have to comment back on this post.

Overall, I think that Classroom 2.0 is an excellent way to increase your learning networks. It still amazes me what we can do with technology and how we can use it in such a positive way to enhance our learning and communication. I can speak to a teacher from half way across the world and share ideas and collaborate. When I have a problem trying to create a difficult lesson plan, or am having trouble trying to reach a difficult student, I can post my troubles online and another teacher with a great idea can post back to me and offer advice on how to deal with these problems. Yay!

Social Action and Communication Skills

Today I am reading about social action and the importance of communication skills for effective social action. My response to the video and presentation are below the activity.
Activity:
3 Social Action Related Site:
1. http://www.dosomething.org/
This site would be appropriate for high school students and higher levels of middle schools. This site encourages teens to get involved in real world causes. This would be a good site for maybe a history teacher, who is teaching about social injustice. The teacher could have students use this site to find ways to help fight the repercussions of social injustices they have learned about.
2. http://redblueamerica.com/
This website could be used in a high school history or government class. Students could relate the history of government to what is going on the government currently. This site would allow them to view both viewpoints of a debate.
3. http://www.greenbin.com/
This site could be useful for high school students. Students in a science class could do a research project where they find an idea that someone posts about how to be green and then research the validity of if this "green idea" would really work and why and how it would work.

Communication Skills related Site:
1. http://www.communication-skills-4confidence.com/improve-communication-skills.html
This site could be useful for high school and college students. It is a site to help students improve their communication skills. An English or speech class could use this sites communication exercises to learn and become more confident with their communication.
2. http://www.communication-skills.info/
This site could be used for high schoolers and college students to learn how to communicate effectively.
3. http://www.kidscom.com/
This blog could be used for elementary school students. This site allows kids to chat with other kids in a safe environment. They could practice their communication skills online while playing games with other students.
Reflections:
Here are my thoughts on a video of Tony Robins:
What Skills being demonstrated? Tony is an extremely gifted speaker that immediately drew me in to what he was saying. I was watching the video in the morning and was certain I was going to fall asleep if I was going to try and watch it, but I didn't because he was such a good speaker. He basically used all of the skills of effective speaking, especially taking command of his message and doing so with passion.
Is he acknowledging differences? Yes, he acknowledged several types of differences in his examples. He often used examples which could apply to a borad spectrum of people who think and feel differently.
Is he being assertive? He was very assertive and confident in his speaking. That is definitely what drew me in to listen. He used creativity and humor to get people's attention, which I really enjoyed.
Is he sharing his feelings? He shared his feelings about how important this message was to him and how it has personally affected him in his own life. What really stood out to me was his idea that strangers DO care about you, so you should care about them.
Is he aware of the information that is "coming in"? He was aware of incoming information. He made real world connections with 9/11 and he made use of Al Gore being in the audience to play into his ideas.
Is he being concise, clear, and providing specific details supported by concrete examples? He was very clear and concise. He didn't try to over complicate what he was saying. He just made some very simple points with very strong examples to help visualize what he was saying. He made all of his examples relatable to audience members.

I then watched a presentation by Simon Jones about using technology to communicate effectively. More specifically he addressed slide presentations. I agreed with most of what he was saying as far as not putting too much information on a slide and using repetition when necessary. I was not sure about his ideas on not using bullet points. I use bullet points in personal work when studying because I am comfortable with them. His reason for not using them was because students quickly tire of them. I think bullets can be used in moderation, especially when making a point. For me, having a bulleted form, or outlined form, better helps me to organize the incoming information in my brain.

Curiosity, Imagination, Creativity, & Play

Step 1: What do I know about curiosity, imagination, creativity, & play?
So far in my life, I fell that I know a great deal about the above topics. I think they are the fundamentals of how and why we learn at such a young age. I was a curious child, which made me experiment, which in turn made me learn. Also at a young age, I think most everyone had wild imaginations which I think goes hand in hand with creativity. And of course playing made learning seem all the more fun.

Step 2: What do I want to know about Curiosity, Imagination, Creativity, & Play?
I want to know why we sometimes lose our sense of the above as we get older. And how can we regain these important aspects back to help us make learning more fun. How can I incorporate these things into a lesson plan for highschoolers or college students, without making them run screaming because they are too embarrassed to have fun and explore.

Step 3: What did I learn?
Through the videos, I learned how important it really is to not lose sight of curiosity, imagination, creativity, & play in education. Below are some of the key points that stood out to me.
1. We get educated out of our creativity because we are taught not to be wrong. It is extremely important for us to take risks in life because that it how we learn. Many times, the way I learn best, is when I make a mistake. Yes, its no fun to fail, but learning it first hand helps you learn it better.

2. Open your mind to new experiences and use your imagination to imagine how other people live. This forces us to leave our comfort zones, which can be very hard. But there is so much in the world out there for us to learn, we just have to go out there and experience it.

3. Play is natural-this came as no surprise to me. This made complete sense. Especially when they showed how animals play, all the way through adulthood. It appears almost unnatural for us to not include play at older ages in education.

4. Why isn't everyone successful in life if everyone is capable? Is it laziness or fear? This question really spoke tome when I thought about a lot of the decisions I made in my decision to pick a major even. I told myself that I was afraid to be a premed major because I was not smart enough. But really, when I look back on my thinking, I know I was capable of being smart enough, I just was too lazy to put the work in to be that smart.

Fair Use, Copyright, and Creative Commons

Guide
Notes

Presentation


Please describe how the multimedia artifact you submitted for this assignment demonstrates your understanding of the following issues:



(a) Educational Fair Use
To me, fair use is a hard concept to describe with short terms or a presentation. The only way I really understood what is fair under fair use was to read the limitations in the PDF file. So intstead of trying to overexplain, I just provided the link to the PDF which describes the Fair Use policies.



(b) Creative Commons
I described Creative Commons in a basic manner. After showing how confusing it might be to understand fair use, I lead into Creative Commons and showed that its an easy way to share and collaborate information. I also showed that Flickr is a website that works in conjunction with Creative Commons.

(3) Please provide a self-evaluation of your artifact using the following criteria:



Creativity: This presentation was very basic with a few pictures to help explain the text. It was not very creative in its style and gave just basic information

Artifact design: The artifact was very simple. I just uploaded the picture from Flickr and made sure I provided a link to give credit to the author. Very basic.



Success in demonstrating knowledge of content: I think I gave the bare minimum when it came to describing the information. I myself don't fully understand copyright and fair use so it was hard to try and present the information.



Effort put forth: As far as creative effort, not very much was put forth. I think after being so frustrated with trying to understand what I was supposed to be doing I failed to put much effort forth in the actual artifact.



Level of learning attained: I attained an Okay amount of learning.


(4) Provide feedback on the assignment so I can continually improve the course.
This was one of my least favorite assignments so far. It might have been that I had so many tests this week. It was hard for me to try and focus and learn the material. I think the creating of a multimedia artifact part was too much for a homework assignment. I already dreaded trying to figure out copyright because it always confuses me and when I knew I had to create something to demonstrate my learning about it, I kind of just gave up before I even began.

RSS Feed

I am following 12 different sites on my Google Feeder Reader. At first I didn't know what I was really looking for when I searched for sites. Because I am a nursing major I started off searching for nursing sites. I subscribed to several of the nursing sites because some had potential job opportunities and current issues in nursing. When I started thinking more from an educators perspective I searched for lesson plans. I subscribed to an anatomy and some biology science lesson planning sites. I started thinking about how my high school biology teacher always used to have these new interesting topics that related to what we were learning about in biology. To get current topics on science I subscribed to several science journals including the New York Times and PBS.

I chose the sites I did based on the number of other subscribers listed, and also based on how often new material was published from that site. I stayed away from the sites that rarely published material or that had less than 100 subscribers. I searched for PBS because in my past learning experiences they have always provided amazing videos and documentaries.

I did not find this exercise too difficult. I was a little confused at first as to what types of sites I was going to be searching for. Once I started thinking about newspapers and journals that post weekly articles, that's when I started to find A ton of useful material. I guess sifting through the different sites to find a good one was the most time consuming part.

As a teacher a feeder reader could be extremely beneficial for both teaching and learning. For me, if I were teaching a biology class, I could easily pull up relevant current events in science to supplement my lesson planning. I could also follow the lesson planning sites to find new ways to make my lessons more interesting. I could have my students join a feeder reader and have them pull up current events on a topic we learn in class. This could be a fun class project! What made freshman year high school biology so interesting to me was that our teacher was always showing us articles about how they were using all of these new technologies in the medical fields. That has been my all time favorite class and with a feeder reader its really easy to keep up with all this cool new science stuff!

What I want to know more about feeder readers is how to better organize all of my different feeds. It was pretty easy sorting through the information with only 12 feeds but if I had a ton more it might get a bit frustrating. Also, I would like to know if we can share the sites we are getting feeds from with someone else or if someone can view or subscribe to my feeds.

Access

As shown in the readings, socioeconomic status affects access to the internet and social media. There is a technology gap based on socioeconomic status which prohibits many without the funds to have access to the internet. The first article showed a significant gap between income and access to the internet. Because the article was written in 2002, I am curious as to what those numbers would be today. It would not surprise me if those numbers had already drastically increased. As far as income affecting social media groups I do not totally agree with what the last article was saying. I think one of the main differences in Facebook and Myspace users is age, not income. Most everyone I knew in high school was on Myspace, and as soon as we found out about Facebook from older siblings or other friends, everyone began to shift to Facebook, regardless of socioeconomic status. I guess though, that manny began to switch to Facebook when they got to college, and if people couldn't afford to go to college, then maybe that is why they never really caught on to the Facebook trend. Twitter on the other hand, I associate more with upper class because of its popularity with celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and John Mayer.

Access to social media and the internet are extremely important in this increasingly developing world. As much as I like to fight this, the world just keeps moving faster and faster and if you don't have the means to technology, you can't keep up with it. To deny people who are already of lower socioeconomic statuses access to these technologies would only put them lower and lower economically. Most every high paying job requires use of the internet and other social media.

I find that it could be difficult to support students without access to the internet at home. Because knowing how to use technology and social media is becoming necessary to survive economically in this world, I would have to somehow teach my students how to use it while in the classroom. There would have to be a lot of collaboration with other teachers and fund raising to help my students have access to the internet. I would hope that my school would have a computer lab, and if so, I would fully utilize that lab whenever possible and make sure students have access to that lab. Its sad to think that a huge chunk of students don't have computers or access to the internet at home like I always have. I can not imagine surviving without my computer and feel that in the past it may have been a luxury, but now it is becoming more of a necessity.