Project 16

Using the website Tumblr, we, The Grey Wardens (Emily Russell, Jay Shiver, and Rodney Patrick) have built a PLN that any teacher or student can turn to for ideas and tools they can use in the classroom, and we have done it in a way that attempts the kind of writing with multimedia project that Richard Miller talked about in This is How We Dream.


The Grey Wardens Final Project

To see the posts of individual members of the group, each post is marked with the name of the person who submitted it, and tagged with their name as well. There are links in the sidebar, as well, that will allow you to easily navigate through our individual posts.

Project #13

For Project 15 and 16 our group, The Grey Wardens, used Google Docs, Gmail, Tumblr, and Skype to discuss the way we should handle our projects. Personally, I preferred Gmail and Tumblr. This is mostly because I find Google Docs a little annoying to navigate, and also because I hate Skype. I just to not like videotaping myself. It makes me self conscious and uncomfortable. If I'm unable to meet someone in person I much prefer to use more traditional methods of contact. To be honest I find all these forms to be useful only in the absence of the ability to make contact with each other in person. I know that was the point of this exercise, so once again I preferred Email.

Blog Post 14 End of Year Reflections

Sorry about my voice the mic in my webcam seems to make all sounds go up about three octaves.

Project 15 part 2

Final PLN

I have many useful links on my PLN. I also use it to gather a lot of information that I've selected as being helpful for me. I use this more than anything else I have set up for this class.

Blog Post 13

I couldn't do it. It was extremely easy for me to avoid things like Facebook, but I have other online classes so I just couldn't avoid using my computer. I don't really watch TV, or use social media sites. I do often go to movies and I enjoy video games. If not for the online classes I am enrolled in I'm fairly certain that I could have accomplished this media fast.

There was a suggestion on the instructions for this blog post to should read a book. I found this hilarious because my favorite hobby is reading. Right now I'm reading the Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin and the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik. I'm not sure if this part was needed in this post, but I wanted to add it.

This would have been hideously difficult for many of the people in my family though. I have a nephew that the only thing he does all day is play Call of Duty. He does this for about twelve, or more, hours a day. My dad watches TV for much of the day. The reason this isn't quite as difficult for me to do, outside of school activities, is that I much prefer going places than to staying home and playing with my computer.

C4T 4

My teacher this go around was Kelly Hines. Her post was about comparing different people's reactions for technology in the class rooms to pieces of a pencil. It was a very good diagram. I actually thought that it was funny and I liked it much more than many arguments I have heard over technology in the classroom.

The second post of hers that I commented on was about Rondee. Rondee is a program used to set up group activities. I told her that this seems to be a very useful tool for getting together groups of people with busy schedules. I intend to try Rondee.

Progress Report on Final Project

Our group, The Grey Wardens, I wonder if anyone understands the reference, are just getting started on our project. We've been communicating mostly through email, Twitter, and Skype text chat, since not everyone in the group has a webcam to use. We've also used Delicious, the a bookmarking website, to share information with each other that we find on the internet about our topic.


We used Goggles, an app that you drag to your bookmarks bar. When you click it, you can draw on your current page, and anyone else who has the Goggles app will be able to click it and see the writing other people have left for them. So we've used Goggles to point out interesting stuff on the websites we share with each other.

Creativity and Curiosity: My Thoughts - Special Post #12A

1. Do schools in the United States systematically destroy (or inhibit) the development of curiosity and/or creativity in students? If yes, why does that happen? If no, how do you counter the argument of Sir Ken Robinson that schools do undermine the development of creativity in students?
No they don't. Many schools don't encourage creativity, but they don't stop curiosity. He argues that school prevents curiosity, but I've had several teachers that were able to bring out my, nearly nonexistent, creativity. It isn't the school system. Its each individual teacher.

2. Can a curriculum be developed that increases the curiosity of students? If so, what would be the key components of such a curriculum?
The easiest way to find a way to increase how much a student enjoys a class and wants to participate is to simply ask them what they find interesting and see if you can incorporate that into the lessons. Its sad how little most of the teachers I've had cared about trying to make a subject interesting. It would be so much easier to teach a student if you just try to capture his students attention.

3. Can a curriculum be developed that increases the creativity of students? If so, what would be the key components of such a curriculum?
Yes it could all a teacher would have to do was not let a class fall into a rut. That is one of the worst things about public schools, they do the same thing day in and day out. The monotony that this causes saps all the creativity in most students.

4. Can a teacher's actions increase the curiosity of students? If so, what would be those actions?
If a teacher assigns interesting work, or gives creative lectures it would be very easy to make a student curious about most any subject. The only reason that this doesn't often happen is that it would require much more work that most teachers can't be bothered with.

5. Can a teacher's actions increase the creativity of students? If so, what would be those actions?
If a teacher were to give students more leeway in many of the assignments they give it would be more likely to increase the creativity in the students doing the work. This is really the most simple and effective way to increase the creativity in students.
6. What would help you become more creative? What role would teachers and/or schools have in that process?
The easiest way that teachers could make me more creative in their classes is to stop assigning a lot of busy work. Just about every teacher I've ever had has loved assigning work that I was never able to determine its purpose. This pointless work usually takes up so much of my time that I don't have time to do anything but the bare minimum on my work.

7. What would help you become more curious? What role would teachers and/or schools have in that process?
Really I can't become more curious. I'm always wanting to learn new things. Teachers should make non curious students curious, but just as importantly they shouldn't annoy and bore curious students until they purposefully stop trying to learn about a subject.

Blog Post 12

For this assignment I want the students to watch This Video.


I then want them to write what they thought about this video in a few paragraphs following Writing A Quality Blog Post

This video could be a great video for someone who is just beginning to study Napoleon. It is missing some very important pieces of Napoleonic history such as The Hundred Days and his trip to Elba. The art in this video was very amusing and very much like a cartoon. It would be very easy for someone who wants to just learn the basics of Napoleons life to get it from this video.

The only problem I had with it was that I know an enormous amount of Napoleonic history so whenever I watched it all I could do was think of the things that was left out of it. The fact that they could miss something as important as The Hundred Days where Napoleon returned to retake his crown until his army was defeated again astounded me. Though it was missing some key elements this was a very good video.

Blog Post 11

For this blog post we had to watch two videos by Ms. Cassidy. The first one was Little Kids...Big Potential and the second was a Skype interview with Ms. Cassidy. To be perfectly truthful I'm completely amazed that there are first grade students doing the same things that we're doing in our college EDM class. She seems to be implementing these things in ways that frankly astonish me. The way she is using technology in her class is impressive to the point that I honestly like the way she is handling her class. I've never been someone who really liked the idea of a technology based classroom, but I think this will be a very impressive class, and it already is one. I'm really looking forward to trying some of the things she talked about.

Blog Post 10

The video Do You Teach or Do You Educate is interesting. I honestly didn't think that just by adding something like music to a presentation could make so many more people pay attention. For a teacher to truly be an educator he has to actually care about the students he is teaching. A teacher has to spend an enormos amont of timne trying to make a studnet retain the information he or she will be taught. So many teachers refuse to go the extra mile to get students interested in their class. We should do everything in their power to help the students they are supposed to teach.

It is not necessarily a teachers job to teach a student what their morals should be or how they should act in society. The only problem is that it seems that lately more and more parents are leaving this for the teachers to do. It seems to me taht kids are spending almost no time with their parents anymore. I find thhis odd considering that when I was little I spent all of my time with my father, I still spend quite alot of time with my dad. For many children teachers are becoming a mojor influence on their students, even more than they had been in the past.

I then had to read Mr. Johnson’s post Don’t Let Them Take the Pencils Home. It seems to be a satirical post about students taking pencils home and its effect on test scores. He makes many biting comments about parents and the perceptions of teachers in social media.
I loved how, to me, it seemed that Mr. Johnson thinks that too many teachers only teach what they think will be on the goverment sponsered test given every semester. he said he once got in trouble for useing a game to teach the material instead of just using traditional methods to prepare for the upcoming test. This is the most horrible problem with the modern education system. If you only teach for the test then the studnets don't learn anything. They find the material and lessons so horrilby monotonus that they forget the information almost immediantly after the lesson is over. We need to change this if we ever want to have an effective educational System again.

Project 13 Smartboard

Blog Post 9

What I've Learned This Year

The learning experience will never end no matter who you are, even if your a teacher. This is one of the ideas presented by Joe McClung. At the end of the 2009 school year, Joe McClung a 6th grade teacher decided to write down some of the things he learned from his the first year he was a teacher. How to read the emotions of a crowd, be flexible, get his message across, be non-judgmental, embrace technology, acknowledged your students ideas, and never ignore a chance to learn. These are valuable lessons, and I'm glad I read the lesson plan beforehand without having to learn these things alone with no one to help me understand it. I found these to be the most valuable for me.

1. Don't let the lessons be all about your ideas You can't focus on how your superiors are judging you, you need to focus on whether the students are understanding the content. I have never spent too much time on what others think of me. You should do, even if it makes you look stupid, whatever you think will most help your students. Your job is to teach not to look cool.

2. I am in no way, shape, or form shy. I have never been afraid of talking to people I don't know. According to Mr. McClung, the best way to tolerate your job and build a good relationship with your colleagues and students is talking to them. Communication is both talking and listening. Listening to your students and taking an interest in their lives can gain you their respect.


3. Don't expect more from your students than is reasonably possible, because it's cruel and will hurt them if they feel they disappoint you no matter what they do. You're the teacher, you're supposed to be helping them learn. I get pretty annoyed when people don't understand something the first time I explain. But this is something that I am working quite hard on to change.

Someone should always try to remember that they are not the center of the universe. The people around you are as important as you are. You should always do your best to understand what other people think.

What I Learned This Year 2010

Three years later Joe McClung is still able to make a blog post about his experiences as a teacher time as an 8th grade teacher. The lessons he learned this year are: know who your boss is, don't expect others to care about what you care about, don't be afraid to be an outsider, don't be controlling, and don't get complacent. So lets get started.


1. It's okay to be yourself, especially if your thinking of changing yourself to get slight approval from people who honestly don't matter to you. I have always been okay with being an outsider mostly because people disliked the fact that I don't pander to them. If I end up being an outsider among my fellow teachers for focusing on students? I really wouldn't care. But this is definitely an important thing for most people to learn.

2. This is lesson Mr. McClung learned from a teacher who he regularly went to for advice. If you're teaching something, don't forcibly show them how to do something, your job is to guide them. No matter how much they struggle, you should never do it for them. If you do it for them, they will never learn to do it themselves. It is a very powerful urge to overcome. But if you can overcome it you'll be a better teacher for it.

3. Don't let yourself get too bogged down in a daily routine. make changes daily.Challenge yourself with new tasks that you would never have thought of yourself. I understand the urge to have a routine. To be perfectly honest I love routines. They're easy. If you're in a routine you don't have to think you just do what you've always done. If you overcome this life will be more exciting.

C4K Summary

The first student I commented on was Awais. He wrote a short little story about toys, a white ball, and a spider.
I complimented his story and then said he had a good sense of grammar and a good vocabulary.

My second student was a girl named Molli from Vermont. Her post was about how much she liked where she lived. I asked her if there was any specific things she liked to do where she lived.

The second time I posted on Molli's wall I discussed about how we both had big family's and our fondness for German Shepards.

The third time that I posted on Molli's wall she had an in depth paragraph about the different reasons smoking is bad for your health. I told her that I agreed with her that smoking is something one should avoid.

My final C4K was on Vinolia's blog. She is an elementary student from New Zealand. She had a video about herself on her blog post. I discussed a few of the things she mentioned in her video. She seemed like a very friendly little girl.

C4T 3

My teacher this time was Angela Rand. She discussed how she enjoyed having online conversations with people, and how it was difficult to judge their intentions. I told her that I wasn't fond of conversations over the internet for that very reason.

The next post she discussed was about PLNs. I told her we were also useing PLN's, and that I thought they were potentially very helpful.

Blog Post 8

This is how we dream.
Dr. Richard Miller talks about how to use multimedia. I feel that technology is shaping the way we write. This is another video geared at having new teachers use technology in lieu of classic teaching methods. I think that these methods could be useful IN COMBINATION with traditional methods.
I think these methods do have an upside. It may be useful in making students pay attention in class. They will adapt to this more quickly than the teachers. Technology is very commonplace now.
Honestly Dr. Miller's video hasn't really changed my mind about technology in the classroom. I do thing that technology should be used in hte classroom. I just don't support it as whole heartily as most people in this class seem to. If I plan to teach I will need to be technologically literate.

Carly Pugh Blog Post 12
Mrs. Pugh seems to be a very prolific writer. Her writing seems to verge on satire at times. Her post seems to have been made to be seen alongside Ms. Miller's video. She was discussing the new technology that can be used in writing. Students would discuss how they wanted to teach with a variety of media.

The Chipper Series and EDM 310 for Dummies
The first one starts with Chipper having a conversation with Dr. Strange about not doing her work on time. This video is mostly used to discuss the importance of doing your work in a timely manner.
EDM 310 for Dummies is used to show the ways in which EDM 310 functions.This was an amusing video, and I also would like doing things like making videos in classes.

Learn to Change, Change to Learn
In the video Learn to Change, Change to Learn,the changing nature of education is discussed. This is the latest video in EDM310 that I have watched discussing how education is changing. Change is good, but in many instances it is hard and we should be prepared for that.
A classroom should not be just a room with four walls, as the video states, it should be the world. There are so many opportunities in the cities around the world to learn in a non traditional sense.

For the Scavenger Hunt I found a website called Edmodo. It's like Facebook. I set up an account as a student and I can make it tell me when anyone attached to my account updates. This website helps me organize everything I do. I can talk with other students for help with homework. This website helps me by giving me practice quizzes. This is a great organizational tool.


The comic creator I found was Memebase.

The tool that I had never heard of was Free Stock Photos. This site has an enourmo. You have to set up an account, but it is free. It has a lot of different types of pictures that you can use on your blog or website.

Book Trailer Project

Project 11 Short Movie

Blog Post 7

The Networked Student

Wendy and Alex Drexler use little paper figures to highlight a Personal Learning Network. It discusses an American Psychology who doesn't have a textbook and does not attend lectures. She decides to use a PLN to gather all the resources she would get with the textbook and lecture. They then discuss the various reasons a teacher might be needed.

I think a PLN is a decent idea in this context. I still think you should attend classes,but this would be a great way to gain information you might have missed because of sickness or prior engagements. I really only think this should be used as a supplemental tool for college. I don't think is should completely replace classes.

I could never imagine more than a handful of high school students actually attempting this. They'll do the bare minimum to get a passing grade, if they do that much. Some of the high achieving students would gain a lot from these networks, but the majority would get their grade and then promptly forget they ever existed.


A 7th Grader's Personal Learning Environment

This 7th grader shows us the Symbaloo PLE she had set up for her science class. She had links to her class's blog, her own blog, learning games, sites about animals which she used in her research, a note taking program, and the email addresses of scientists who she consulted with about her bloag on the Box Jellyfish which she called a "Glog." I liked Evernote, a program which allows you to save anything from any website you visit and link it back to the PLE so you can give credit to the source in a simple manner.

Project 9b

PLN Post 1

Right now my PLN only contains people in my family and some students I met at South.

PLN Post 1

Right now my PLN only contains people in my family and some students I met at South.

C4T Post 2

The teacher I hat for my second C4T post was Kelly Tenkley.
Her first post was about BBC Bitesize. It's a game that helps students learn to convert fractions to decimals. It seems to be a very entertaining game. I commented on how I thought that this was an entertaining game, and that I thought it would be helpful in classes.\

Her second post was about the Grammaropolis website. It is a website that helps people with Apple products use games to teach children how to use grammar correctly.

She likes to talk about new and useful ways to use Apple software to teach students. All of the technology she mentioned was amazing and, I think, potentially extremely useful for classrooms.

Blog Post 6

This is Randy Pausch's discussion about life and education. The lecture was given at Carnegie Mellon University. He is famous for his work in virtual reality, among other things. The reason he was allowed to give this lecture at such a young age was he was dying of cancer at the time. He only had about six months to live. He gave this lecture in hopes to change the education system for his children. His lecture was about childhood dreams, his and others, and how they can be achieved if you try hard enough. This lecture tells you how to be able to achieve things as a child and as an adult. There are many ways that this lecture made me think in ways that I never had before and these are a few of the reasons.

The most interesting thing, to me, that Randy talked about in this lecture was about building a virtual reality world. The project started with fifty random students being chosen and put into teams that would change after every project. He said one of the things he learned he was told by his mentor. After students turned in work that was way beyond his expectations his mentor said if you don't know where to place the bar that they should strive for don't place one at all. He then told Randy to go to class the next day and tell them that they did good, but he thought that they could do better. What this means to me is that teachers should do everything they can to give their students all of the help they require. Teachers should never hold their students back in any way.

"When you're screwing up and nobody's saying anything to you anymore, that means they're given up."
One of the first things that that Randy talked about was the kind of man his football coach was, and what he expected of his players. His coach expected all of his players to give everything they had when they were playing for him. His coach wouldn't just scream at them for making a mistake. His coach would tell the players the mistakes they made and how to fix them. Randy said that coach Graham was a major role model in his life. Coach Graham taught him that you can criticize someone and still care deeply about them. The educational system needs more people who are willing to take the time to help a child to learn how to properly fix a mistake they made. The easiest way to improve yourself is to have some one that is willing to help you change the things that you can't change yourself.


The last of his subjects that I want to discuss is the ability to apologize. He mentioned a few times in his life that he new he had done something that he needed to apologize for, the most prominent being when he waved the fellowship he had won in the face of the man that would decide if he would be admitted into Carnegie Mellon. He said the look on the interviewer's face immediately told randy that he had just made a mistake. He apologized and said he wasn't trying to talk about the money he had won with the fellowship, he was trying to say how he felt, as one of fifteen winners in America, he felt honored when he won it. In all I found this to be an amusing and informative video.

C4k summary for February

His first post was a very simple one so all I did was look at his past posts, introduce myself and tell him that his art was well done and that he should keep doing it if it was what he enjoys.

On Jaden's post he talked about the basketball player Jeremy Lin. All I did was ask him about how much he likes basketball. I asked him if he just liked Lin or if he enjoyed basketball in general.

On Kai's post he talked about a story he read about magic. I told him I liked the story and he should keep reading stories like that. Here is the story.

On Omar and George's blog I commented on his wide assortment of intrests, and told him that I liked that, after trying to come up with a subject for a paper all day, he chose to write his paper on not knowing what to write his paper about.

Video Podcast Post

Timelines

Blog Post 5

Don't Teach Your Kids This Stuff, Please?

Scott McLeod wrote this piece of satire about teachers who don't want their students to learn about technology. It was fairly stinging towards technologically inept teachers.

I've never thought that people needed to be taught to use the internet. I learned how to do most of the things I can do on computer at home by myself. I think it would be a great thing to teach kids to more easily access the internet and the knowledge stored on it.

It would have been very helpful to have had someone teach me how to use various tools on the internet. I have absolutely no idea what an RSS Feed is or its function. I've never needed to use one. There are many things on the internet I have no interest in that, perhaps, if I had been taught about I would consider more interesting. I think teaching kids to use the internet is a magnificent idea.





The iSchool Initiative

Travis Allen talks about all of the reasons iTouch should be used in schools. It would reduce the amount spent per student by six hundred dollars, it would ease student teacher communication, and it would be more environmentally friendly.

I think this is a fairly interesting idea, but I seriously doubt it will ever happen. It would need a lot more support than internet fame. You would need to convince the Department of Education, school boards, and teachers to use it, something I don't think will ever happen. It is an interesting idea I don't think will ever happen.


Technologically Literate Teacher

This is a cool little musical performance. I'm not quite sure what it has to do with teaching, but it is one interesting use of technology. It was very well edited, and I found it quite fun to listen to.


Teaching in the 21st Century

Kevin Roberts' video seems to be about students using the internet to solve disputed and garner interpersonal relationships. It also seems he thinks the internet should be used to teach responsibility and morals. This is something I disagree with to the point I can't properly put it into words. I think family and friends are the only proper place someone can truly learn about the world.



Reading Rockets

The Reading Rockets website is an enormous source of information for anybody.. Some of the resources I might actually use my self one day. There are resources that could be nearly mandatory to a new teacher. There are ways to find discount books for classrooms that might be underfunded. This site is amazing for a teacher of any subject.

Blog Post 4

Blog Post 4
Langwitches - 1st Graders Create Own Read Along Book

I think it's interesting getting students to record their own audio books. It has a lot of benefits for understanding the material. It also helps keep the student interested. It gives the student a script which is very helpful in comprehension. We shouldn't forget what we wanted to say and digress for too long. We should remember to control the length of the podcast.


Langwitches - Listening-Comprehension-Podcasting

I never thought podcasting could be used like it was in this video. It seems so obvious that it would be helpful in teaching someone a new language. Repetitive use of a word that is used in context is the best way to learn a new word or phrase. When we make our podcast we need to remember these methods because they seem to be very effective.

Langwitches - Podcasting With First Grade

This would have been fun to do when I was in elementary school. This aids a child in learning proper communication skills. After all, it's an interview style script, so the students have to talk with each other to make sure the script sound like it was well thought out. Additionally, when they're acting for the podcast, they have to make it sound more natural by not reading directly off of the script. That would be something we could use to improve our podcast--instead of reading directly off of our script when we record, have it memorized, maybe with some cue cards to help out when we lose our place. If it were only audio we could cut out any blips in the conversation, but being a video podcast, it's best to be completely prepared before you even consider beginning.

My Sentence Video

Blog Post 3

Technology in Special Education

Lacy Cook's video was about how technology has impacted how special education class run. The video showed some areas where simple problems affected students and how to solve them such as cards with the alphabet printed on them; a simple platform for a book to sit on; and how there was one student who needed quite reading time alone in the hallway..

Being able to use computers in class have greatly increased the amount of work that could be done by these students in class. A basic computer, something that is often taken for granted, really helps some of these students to accomplish something that would have been impossible without one. Audio books allowed the same student, who had to have his books read to him in the hall, stay in the classroom with the other students. Audio books are an effective solution for students who are easily distracted by noise. This video has shown me many different ways that technology can be used for I never would have thought of using.


iPad Apps in the Classroom



After thinking about what would help students who have trouble reading in the How the Ipad works with Academics for Autism and searching the app store, I decided "Vocabology" would be a great app to use with special needs students. It's an app that helps students build their vocabulary with words that they wouldn't learn in every day conversation.
It seems pretty simple, and it is that's the beauty of it it. It teaches students new words and allows them to look up words they might not know. This will allow them to build their vocabulary without asking out loud what it means. Some students are so shy about sounding link they aren't smart that they wouldn't ask the meaning of a word.


Gary Hayes Social Media Count

I am not as surprised by these numbers as I would have believed. In the last minute seconds over 750,000 items have been shared on Facebook, not at all surprising considering some of the people I know who spend hours a day on Facebook. I am extremely curious as to how this information is gathered. I am sort of surprised that over five hundred Facebook account has been made in the last minute. The only thing that would make that make sense to me is the fact that a page is made for every new media that is made.

I don't see how this would affect me as a teacher. Should it show me how much time people spend online instead of communicating in person. Perhaps high school will become like college, with almost all classes having at least part of their material online. It seems to me that over time elementary schools will become like what college classes are now.


Michael Wesch: A Vision of Students Today

This perfectly shows how college class are now. In class it is almost impossible for me to resist the urge to visit a social media site or just surf the internet. I want to pass all of my classes, but its hard to care about something you know you won't need to know for your future career. It depresses me how little work I do and still make great grades in my classes., yet stress over it more the classes I actually need.

Classes fill up students' lives with completely unneeded information they will be hard pressed to remember. Teachers also suffer because of this. They become teachers to help students learn, but if they are forced to teach students who obviously don't care about the information all it does is make the teacher want to stop teaching. If students only had to take classes they had some intreast in it would raise GPA's across the board. Well that's my thought anyway.

The Presentation of My Life

CFT post 1

Justin Tarte's post that I reviewed was a discussion on Seth Godin's book Linchpin. It is a book that asks teachers to self-analyze themselves and ask themselves if they are truly doing everything in their power to make their students as successful as they can become with the right help. I commented on how this book did get me to think about what kind of teacher I should be, and how I should act.
His second post was about how a show he liked in 1994 Boy Meets World discussed how maybe tests weren't really the most accurate way to judge how much a student has learned in class. I commented on how this subject can be a minefield. Whenever someone begins discussing whether or not tests are a positive or negative influence on the educational system everyone listening "knows" the right answer and will not be moved or listen to any counter argument. This is a very tricky subject with no simple answer.

Blog Post 2

I thought the fact that the top quarter of India's smartest people outnumber all of the U.S. I thought that honors students were a smaller percentage than 25. The fact that India has more honors students than we have students is a little overwhelming.
Having more people in China speaking English than the rest of the world will be scary no matter how far in the future it will be. If the "learners" learn English they will outnumber everyone that speaks English in America. That would be awesome it would seriously aid trade and make it so much easier to communicate with the rest of the world.

I found the Rip van Winkle video to be a little pompous. I can agree that school hasn't changed as much as it could or should have, but this video makes it seem like the education system is completely stagnant and ineffective.
I understand that humor and satire is used to force changes in society, but it isn't always helpful. Sometimes videos like this anger people more than is spurs them to want change.

Sir Ken Robinson's video was actually fairly amusing and enlightening. He's right about creativity being as important as literacy. If you stifle a students creativity you will destroy that child's potential. I absolutely loved the story about the girl who drew God. It seemed that the main point of his speech was about how varied and unique children are before societal norms force them to give up their creativity and individualism. Of all of the videos on this assignment I enjoyed this one the most.

The "A Vision for 21st Century Learning" video confused me. I couldn't tell if they meant that these games the were waking were to supplement traditional teaching or to replace traditional teachers. I can see how these programs would be good in theory. While many students would indeed enjoy these programs I doubt they would learn anymore from them than from a normal class. If I were to use one chances are I would have fun, but there is almost no way I would retain all of the information.

The "Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts" once more kind of annoyed me. The part where she said that students can't learn with traditional methods alone kind of upset me because this has always been the manner of teaching that has been the most useful for me. I had teachers that used technology more than traditional methods, and I have never been able to retain it nearly as well as "chalk and talk" methods. Of all of the technological usages that she discussed that I am really fond of is her use of Wikis.

Project 2 Wordle

Assignment 1 Part 1

I was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1991. The things I am most interested in are reading and playing video games. I spend almost all of my free time playing video games. I am fairly proficient at Gears of War, but mostly I play role playing games. The only genres of book that I read are Fantasy and certain Western novels.
My father is probably the single most influential aspect of my life. Because of him I love to read,and his world views are probably the thing that has shaped my personality and thinking processes.
My major is Secondary Education with the intention of becoming a high school history teacher. I have always been fond of history, studying the past has always been fascinating. Mythology has always interested me more that any other possible subject.
The Randy Pausch video about managing your time was a slightly interesting little video about how to constructively managing all of the things currently happening in your life. He basically just tell you to not become stagnant. If you want to finish everything you need to do you need to actively work on it, you have to try if you want to succeed.

Practice Post

My first post.