Dear Kaia

This story hit a lot of important topics. I found it ironic that it all started because Kaia's dad was reading The Last Child in the Woods and he felt guilty because he was not exposing his child to nature the way he should and in the end he was exposing his child to more than that. I believe children are spending less time outside exploring nature and all the great wonders of the world hands on. I think a key factor in that is the way society is changing because of technology. Children no longer feel the need to go outside and discover something new when they can simplyGoogle it without having to leave the comfort of a chair. Also it has become more convenient for parents to tell their children to play video games, watch TV, or surf the net instead of having to worry about them playing outside. The world has become such a fast pace place that parents do not have the time to watch their children play outside and since violence is getting worse as well they do not allow them outside alone. This subject really hits home with me. I believe it is a vicious cycle. I am gladJabiz Raisdana shares my belief that today's children need to spend more time outside exploring nature.

Even though I may believe technology is the source of a lot of society's problems I still believe these advancements have opened a lot of doors. I think it is amazing how quickly people around the world reacted to this topic and project. Jabiz simple posted the pictures for family to see but in the matter of hours it had touch the hearts of people across the world. Without technology this would not have been possible. Students in rural Missouri would have never been able to learn hands on about a culture half way around the world. I would have never seen the pictures, the blogs or heard about a book that would inspire me. If we did not have the technology advances we have today then people such as Mr. C ( the 8th grade teacher at Noel Elementary School) and me to explore nature more often.







The world is full of danger so we cannot let it predict how we should live our lives. There is danger in nature as well as with the internet and technology. The key is education; if you are educated on what is dangerous and how to avoid it then life suddenly doesn't seem that scary anymore. In all reality technology is not fading away, so as a teacher we need to teach our students how to safely and properly locate sources of information. The pace of the world is not slowing down but instead is just now beginning to pick up speed. We need to teach our students how to be Networked Students I feel these skills will be a necessity in the future. Although I feel we should prepare children for the future I also believe we have to teach them about the past. There needs to be a harmonious balance between nature and technology and I know that seems impossible now but hopefully we are moving toward it.

The New Media Literacies

The New Media Literacies Movie shed light on a new subject for me. The movie talks about eleven media skills they believe people need to be productive members of society. Our culture has changed a lot over the past twenty years. People are no longer considered just the consumer of media but the producer of media as well. That makes these skills more prevalent for the common person; these skills are no longer only needed for work and school but for everyday tasks.

The media skills needed are judgment, negotiation, appropriation, play, transmedia navigation, simulation, collective intelligence, performance, distributed cognition, visualization and multitasking. I believe I possess six of these skills; appropriation, play, collective intelligence, performance, visualization and multitasking. Multitasking is one of my best overall traits and I believe it is because it is my way of life. I have to multitask every minute of my day because i am a full time student with a full time job and it can become exhausting. This is the future though and whether it is a bad or good thing I am not sure.

I do believe these are the skills that will be need to be effective artist, citizens and workers in the, not so far away, future. In that case I know I need to acquire the rest of these skills soon. To improve my judgment skills I will visit Dr. Christie's web-site page about evaluating web-sites. I can also find resources on her web-site to improve my negotiation and transmedia navigation. I believe the other skills can only be learnt through practice which is what I am doing in my EDM 310 class.

The Networked Student by Wendy Drexler

The Networked Student by Wendy Drexler movie gave me a lot of interesting topics to ponder. The video is about a high school student that uses connectivism as a way of learning. The student does not have a text book and his teacher rarely gives lectures he learns via Internet. The student sets up his personal learning network before he begins his research. As the student searches scholarly web-sites and finds information he posts it on social bookmarking sites.The student then searches blogs to review other people opinions about his topic. The student also subscribes to iTunes U and downloads lectures from the best professors in the world to further his knowledge on his topic.

At the end of the movie it posed the question "Why does the networked student even need a teacher?" The teacher is no longer in the class room to teach facts but to teach skills. The teacher " offers guidance when he gets stuck, shows him how to communicate properly and ask help from expert, how to differentiate good information and propaganda, how to vet a resource, how to turn research into a scavenger hunt and to get excited to find that pearl on content."Ms. Drexler is going to begin conducting her class this in this manner.

I have got to admit although this all sounds amazing it kind of scares me. Teachers are becoming obsolete in higher forms of education. Imagine if students in the fifth grade were taught to learn new ways to use the internet for educational projects. By the time those students reached eighth grade he or she would no longer need a full time teacher. Teachers will be cut because all they would need was an advisor for questions every now and then. High school would become more like college. I believe this is a good program but it seems it could be a little too much. If students didn't have to come to class then they will never gain those much needed social skills. I feel the obesity levels will rise as well because people will be spending all their time in front of a computer screen instead of being active. This makes me think of the Disney movie WALL-E. I also believe this method of teaching is not for everyone. There are many distractions on the internet that could lure the students away from their academic purposes. The internet is also over whelming for lots of people even though they may be focused they are easily confused. Also not all students have access to a home computer, internet, or and ipod. If that is the way the board of education suggest we teach our students then they should supply the student with the technology they need. I believe this method can be very benificial for certain students under the guidance of a good teacher such as Ms. Drexler.

Richard Miller: This is How We Dream Parts 1 and 2

In Richard Miller: This Is How We Dream Part 1 he talked about the incremental changes in writing such as: workspace, research the world, freely available documents and collaborate. Technology is now allowing people to create documents from their laptops instead of using just pen and paper. The process of researching is different now as well. A person can search the web for information for a research paper without ever leaving the comfort of their home. Technology is also helping preserve information because a web based document lives on forever unlike most paper documents that eventually end up in the trash. Web based documents will always be there unlike a book at a library. The new technology also opens the door for collaboration. People from around the world can work together to create a web based document from information online without ever physically meeting each other.


In Richard Miller: This Is How We Dream Part 2 he discusses how he believes writing is fundamentally changing and what we need to reach that point. He believes we should begin to write using only the web. He believes we need to create beautiful, compelling compositions. He talked about how he did that with this video and the impact it had. If he would have done it differently it would not have made such a large impact on the world and it would have taken a lot longer for it to circulate. Miller also talks about the need to create a program to teach people to compose this way. He also believes we need inspiring teachers of new media composing and spaces that foster collaborative learning.



I believe Miller has a great point and wonderful ideas but there are still a few kinks to work out. I do not feel I am prepared to write with multimedia at this point in time but I believe with proper instruction I could be. I believe it will take a few years before this method hits mainstream and becomes prevalent in the public classroom. I am not sure if my students will be able to do this in my first couple of years teaching just because we do not have the resources for it yet but I believe eventually I will be teaching this concept and using it in the classroom.

iPods in Instruction

About 22 million Americans own an ipod or mp3 player so why not put them to a good use. Ipods are becoming more and more prevalent in the classroom as technology rapidly increases. After viewing Duke ipod first year experience report I began to realize it was for the best. The ipods gave initiative thinkers a new way to learn. Duke gave away about 1,600 ipods to incoming freshmen in 2004 to technologically enhance their school. The ipods succeeded in more subjects then they expected. They were used in 38 classes that first year for academic purposes such as: course content dissemination tool, classroom recording tool, field recording tool, study support tool, file storage and file transfer.

After reading about this i wanted to learn ways I could use ipods in my own class so i searched the internet. While searching I found a very interesting article on abcnews.go.com called Schools Dump Textbooks for iPods, Laptops. Several schools across the nation are becoming textbook-free zones. Teachers believe ipods and laptops are more efficient learning tools then books because they are cost efficient, the internet is never out dated, they are more portable, and it makes learning cool and fun for the students. I believe it is a great idea; it will give students an equal opportunity no matter where they are from or their social status.

As a teacher I will to incorporate the educational use of ipods in my class. I will do so by using podcasts for weekly assignments, due dates, major project information, and tips on study skills as a way to communicate with her students and their parents. The world is morphing because of technology shouldn't education too?

iTunes University

Introduction to iTunes U

I have never used itunes until just a few weeks ago. I thought itunes was just a place to buy music for an ipod but I could not have been more wrong. I am amazed by all the wonderful features itunes has it blows my mind. When I viewed David Hopkins introduction to iTunes U I keep thinking how useful that would be if my university worked with iTunes U and how I could use it as a teacher and the ideas were endless.

I wish the University of South Alabama worked in coercion with itunes it would make a huge difference in my college experience. I am an aural/visual learner so it would tremendously help improve my test scores. I could download vodcast of lessons and reviews then play them on an iphone at any time convent for me to watch. This advancement would also help me if I am sick or an emergency was to come up and I cannot make it to class, I can simply go to my class subscription and view the class session for the day. ITunes U can also be used to do research for a paper because it is a scholarly program.

As a teacher I will encourage my students to use iTunes U because I believe it is a very useful tool for education. I will create an ongoing podcast for subject I will be teaching. I will also share them other interesting educational vodcasts and podcasts. I believe this will better prepare my students for life outside of school because I will not only be teaching them english, math, science and social studies but also how to locate scholarly resources online, how to use new software programs, and how to learn.

Dr. Christie

Dr. Christie's site

Today I explored Dr. Alice Christie's web site in which she lends her forty years of experience to help other teachers. I found several things on her web site that would be useful to me as a teacher. I really enjoyedDr. Christie's Online Researching Resources which contains information about search engines, evaluating web site, resources, webcams, virtual field trips and more. I remember staying up till midnight searching for a source for a paper and constantly questioning if the source was good enough but this web site helps eliminate all that trouble.

Dr. Christie's page about search engines gives you several different search engines and tells you which ones to use when looking for certain information. I can use this information to reduce the headache when looking for educational material for my class. I now know of a search engine called EducationPlanet.com I can use to give me a narrower search results. I can also this page to pull search engines for kids to give my students to help them research their school work.

Another thing I really liked about the online researching resources is that it had a page about evaluating web sites. I know as a student I was always questioning is this web site a legitimate source but Dr. Christie's web site evaluation page will take the guess work out of it for you. She has eight links listed that teach you how to evaluate a site. Several teachers ask their students to do reports using the internet and expect them to find exactly what they want without giving them any guide lines to search by. The World Wide Web is massive source information and often times it is overwhelming for students, I know it was for me. So I would use research Dr. Christie’s information about evaluating web sites and teach my students how to properly assess if a site is a legitimate source.

I feel Dr. Alice Christie's web site has tons of useful information for not only teachers but also for students and their parents. I believe Dr. Christie has lots of initiative ideas to improve the classroom and I most definitely will use them in my classroom.

Wikipedia

NPR Article on Wikipedia


My teachers have always told to never use Wikipedia but they never told me why. After reading this article, I now know not to use Wikipedia as a source for anything I could possibly search for in college. The article explains that Wikipedia is an open source of information that anyone can post on any subject they want to. This allows certain information that might have already been posted to be edited by a small degree or possibly be erased completely to have new information posted in its place. With the problems created by loose restrictions on editing, there has been a solution created. Although California Institute of Technology grad student by the name of Virgil Griffith created a program called the Wikipedia Scanner that follows IP addresses that users used to log into Wikipedia to be followed back to the location of where the user posted the information. This is a step in the right direction but i feel Wikipedia still has to many imperfections. I mean yes every edit can now be traced back to the computer the edit was made but the editor could have used a computer at the library, school, work, or even wi-fi at any public location. I now understand why my teachers tell me that Wikipedia is not a good source for information because as you can tell, it is not a school trusted source.

I believe Wikipedia started off as a good idea. I use Wikipedia all the time to get a quick definition of a term I am unfamiliar with. I also use Wikipedia for brainstorming; it helps me find subtopics to expand my research on. As a teacher I would not tell my student to completely avoid Wikipedia I would just tell them to be cautious of what they are looking for. Some topics are okay to search on Wikipedia such as noncontraversal facts and nonpolitical. I would also tell my students to back up any information they found on Wikipedia with more reliable resources.

I think Wikipedia is a resource center of the future that just has a few more kinks to work out. If the rules for editing Wikipedia were tweaked a little it would be the most successful resource center. If people could simply send a suggestion about a topic to Wikipedia research teams where they could further research the suggestion and make changes instead of random people being able to edit it. This will allow collaboration of bright minds across the world with little inconvenience to them.