3/27/2010

I have played around with Google Earth before, but I never knew about Google Moon, Sky, and Mars! Nor did I know about Google Lit Trips. I am confident that students will think a lesson with Google Lit Trips is awesome. I can visualize myself teaching a book with Google Lit Trips on the screen in my library. When I learned about Google Lit Trips, I thought about As I lay Dying by William Faulkner. This would be a great book to plot since it is about the main characters travelling for miles on foot to bury their mother. There is something about seeing a journey plotted out on Google Earth that makes one fully appreciate the magnitude.

3/19/2010

I attended online conferences this week. They were awesome! Well, some were certainly better than others. They were all great in the sense that I did not have to leave my living room to attend them. When it comes down to content, two stood out to me. The presentation produced by Rachel Boyd in New Zealand was wonderful. Six-year-old students were teaching a professional development meeting! This class used technology throughout the entire day. Math, literature, physical education, you name it, Rachel Boyd taught it through the Smart Board. Unfortunately, every classroom containing a Smart Board is a fantasy. The other presentation that stood out was not for positive reasons. I did not want to contradict most of my classmates in the discussion thread, but I was not impressed with what Konrad Glogowski had to say. It seemed like a lot of talk about nothing. "Learn with and not from" yet we were learning from his presentation. It was very abstract; nothing was concrete about it.

3/7/2010

I got a lot of the i-SAFE assignments accomplished this week. I know how serious Internet safety is, but I still could not believe the statistics presented in the videos. For example, in the pre-assessment, "11% of students say they're willing to meet somebody they met online face to face." Meeting people face to face from the Internet always seemed like an obvious hazard to me. It is on the same level as taking drugs--you just don't do it. To think that 11 out of 100 students think it is OK, is absolutely beyond me. To make things worse, "8% of students say they did meet somebody face to face." Since so many students are on social networking sites, there is an overwhelming need to make sure they know what is safe and what is not. The simple act of creating a screen name, for example, can lead to unwanted attention from predators. As one of the videos showed, a predator can narrow down their prey from every person on the planet by starting with the screen name. Something like Sportychick14 reveals that it is a female, likes to play sports, and is probably 14 years old.