Day One of Presentations

This week we started our class presentations, the first three presentations were on cyberbullying, filtering, and the history of the internet respectively. One thing I would really like to comment on is cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is definitely on the rise these days, and I think that in the school we need to be doing a little more preventative measures. I think the reason that cyberbullying is one the rise is firstly just because the technology that is used in cyberbullying is more redily availavle for students, and it is also just at their fingertips. Also I feel that the distance associated with cyberbullying also promotes an increase in cyberbullying. There are a lot of things that people would not say face to face with someone, however through texting or the internet people wouldn't think twice about saying to someone. This seems to give people a false confidence that what they are saying or doing to the other person does not bother them. I think that schools need to start doing more preventative measures at an early age to make students aware of the damaging effects of cyberbullying. One of the best ways I feel this could be done is through using real life examples such as stories or videos of people who have been cyberbullied. I feel that these types of methods really hit home for students and would hopefully give them an understanding of the damage cyberbullying may cause. Sometimes I don't think students really understand the effect their action may have on others and just feel that what they are doing is a joke. These students need to be made aware of potention effects of cyberbullying.

Another topic from this week is filtering and the use of filters in schools. Personally, I do not feel that filters for websites such as facebook, hotmail, twitter, etc. are necessary in a school. These websites can be great resources within the classroom and blocking them really does not do any good because if a students wants to get onto the site they will find a way around the filter. What are your thoughts on filters??

Odds and Ends

This week we were fortunate to have an appearance by the notorious Mike Nantais! We discussed some odds and ends from different presentations and also had another appearance by Dr. Gatin to review second life again. Part of Mike's instruction was on an Alan November video, which included many of the topics we have covered thus far in the class. A couple of things I got out of the video include; the idea of splitting the class up into different groups in order for every student to have a role in the classroom. He referred to them as "teams" and some ideas of different teams to use within the classroom included: research team, scribe team, assignment team, etc. I like this idea and it all relates back to the idea of the shifting role of the teacher to a facilitator within the classroom. This gives all class members a responsibility within the classroom. He also talked about using these teams to help create the assignments within a class. This idea of giving students responsibility within the classroom, collaborating, etc. helps to develop skills that will be useful in the workforce. This will also help students to take initiative and become life-long learners. This video really summed up a lot of the things we have done in class so far.
As mentioned, we had another visit from Dr. Gatin on second life and the applications of this program in the classoom. Today I was able to get a better idea of how to use this program and how it related to school because we could actually see the avitar moving around from place to place. One idea I had to incorporate this into the classroom was using the library on the program. This would be an engaging way to have students read articles. The avitar can take it out of the library and this will download the pdf to your computer. This may be a more exciting way to get students reading in the classroom!
Thats all...

Busy week of presentations!

We had two interesting presentations this week! On Monday we had Howard and Donald presenting about web-based instruction. There are a lot of courses and different ways of teaching them, and I was glad to see that independent study is starting to get pushed off the radar. This is not a very effective way for learning! They showed us how we could get onto courses using the demo username. In one of my placements last year I used this username to get more information on topics and examples to use in physics classes. I have also taught a grade 11 applied class with IITV, it took some getting used to for being on the camera the whole class but overall I didn't mind it. The biggest challenge was definitely classroom management, as it is hard to manage a class over a TV! I think that Elluminate might be more efficient because it could be more interactive if students can type in questions at any point.

On Wednesday we had Shawn from Boissevain school. He was really interesting and again showed us some cool new google apps. One of the apps that I liked was google calender. Shawn talked about getting different sites, iPods, phones etc. all synced to the same calender. He mentioned the possibility of using this app to have important dates on the calender automatically texted to all students in the class! I think that would be an awesome way to use the calender and get students involved! He also used google docs a lot in his classes, and one application of google docs he talked about was to use it for editing student work and sending it back to them for corrections. In his class he used epal for students to connect with students across the world! This sounded really cool, and a great way to broaden student's viewpoint and mindset! Another really neat tool Shawn showed us was Prezi, I had never heard of Prezi but it is a different way of making presentations. Powerpoint seems pretty overdone now but using Prezi you can create very different presentations and still add videos, pictures etc. into your presentation. It also helps to limit some of the words on the page and just uses key points. When you create one, you can also choose to share your presentation, then when you type in your topic, other people presentations on the same topic will pop up to give you an example and give you ideas! One last program we talked about was Picasa for sharing, ordering, organizing photos in full resolution. After field trips or events, you could send the photos to all of the parents so they could see what you had done etc. Whew!...this seems really long...that's all!