Blogging From Afar

I found a school in the UK.



My second comment on the same blog.

Nafiza

Nafiza

All I can say is that it would be amazing if this technology was available for all students, rather than just the certain ones or charter schools. Nafiza is a pretty cool young lady who works to make sure she is helping others and she is staying up on the newest technology. I would really hope that she will be one of the future leaders who will lead this nation into complete technology leadership. It is our young people who will lead the way, perhaps she will figure out a way to make the ipod battery stay charged longer.

BLOGGING BUDDIES

Blogging Buddies Video

This video explains how a pre-service teachers class learned and assisted 1st graders. The video discusses the effects of blogging on the spelling and punctuation abilities of the 1st graders and how those abilities grew over the course of the semester. It is interesting to note that the college students felt that they got just as much from the 1st graders and the 1st graders did from the college students. I liked that the students were allowed to meet face to face. I think that will embed a thought that if you can't meet that person, then you probably shouldn't be talking to them.

Project Learning

ProjectLearning


This video really exemplifies the reasoning behind keeping students up and active. Not one classroom was about being still, being quiet and reading books.The students are learning a new vocabulary that includes science and math concepts rather than what kind of gun or drugs they want. Forget the lecture and bring on the global warming, curing cancer, feeding the starving people of the world. This is what education should be, this is what education has to become.

21st Century Sex Education

Link to Comment

Luiz- Changing A Life

Luiz seems determined to change not only his future but the future of his family and his community. He has taken the opportunities he has been given and that he has created for himself to become well engaged in technology and shown how technology can help others.

Wizard of Apps?

Wizard of Apps.

My first impression was; boy, was this a long video. I appreciate the desire to make this information entertaining but quite frankly, the material Dr. Valenza was wanting people to see was so blurry, I couldn't see it. I can understand the need to understand the tools available but I think it would have been more effective had I been able to see what she was actually trying to show. I am sure that it was more visible on a big screen, but I just couldn't see what she was doing. I also do own an iphone or a mac computer, so some of it I found a bit bewildering.
Overall this is a worthwhile effort that might be best viewed in short segments rather than as a continual piece.
This piece discusses using different websites to track a digital footprint, one of the sites is 12people, another site discussed is pipl, also discussed was using mind map on Wikipedia. All of these tools can be helpful considering that children are often in many different places on the web without realizing they are leaving footprints. This particular video would, I believe, be more effective if it were broken up into segments that can be viewed separately to allow students the opportunity to master each tool before moving on. Introducing this many tools at once can be quite off putting for students. Allowing students to master then move on rather than overwhelming is a recognized best practice in curriculum. While there are incidences that students are prepared for the introduction of many new tools, there are also students who would prefer to take it slower. Each student has their preference and it is up to the educator to develop a plan for each student to use their preferred learning style. As educators it is up to us to teach how the student learns, not for the student to learn how the instructor teaches.