Dear Kaia

Kaia



I really enjoyed watching Kaia's first phtot essay . I also enjoyed reading the other blogs from the sites and comments about her phtos. It is amazing that here dad has her using technology at such a young age. However, I do think more parents should do this with their children. As a parent, I would be hesitant because of the dangers but I would just have to hope and pray that the good over does the bad. I think it is great that he understands the risk of it but that he is not keeping her hidden.

I also agree that children should spend more time outside. Technology is a factor of why they do not spend time outside, but I do not think that it is the problem to be blamed. I think the problem is that parents do not know how to manage their childrens activities well. They should allow the children so much time to play outside and so much time to work or play on the computer or video games. Being able to go outside is a nessecity for children to be children and so is technology. Children and adults can learn so much from technology and from being outside.

As adults we can learn so much from children, even if we do not realize we are learning from them. I like reading the comments on the blog and the comments actually prove that we can learn from children. I really thought it was neat how Mr. C's class got so involved. This was a great experince for me!

The New Media Literiacies by the NML Staff

This video was very short but very helpful. The video explains the new set of skills that everyone needs to deal with our culture today, to be able to function with current media literacy's, the Internet, cell phones, and to interact with information regarding our culture. They say that everyone needs them to become creative artists, workers, and citizens. In the past media literacy's were made to try to get consumers of media to think critically about what they were watching.

They believe that a child is not only a consumer, but also a producer of media. Instead of asking questions about creator, we actually need to be asking questions about ourselves. There are eleven skills that are said to be needed to function with our culture today. These skills are judgment, negotiation, appropriation, play, trans media navigation, simulation, collective intelligence, performance, distributed cognition, visualization, and multitasking.

Judgment is being able to judge if information on the web is reliable. Negotiation is knowing how to get in different groups and spaces and understand how different norms are. Appropriation is knowing how to remix and sample content in a meaningful way. Play is said to be one of the best skills because it is having the capacity to experiment with your surroundings. The other skills are pretty self explanatory. I believe that the skills that I hold are negotiation, play, appropriation, visualization, and multitasking. I do believe that I need to conquer the other remaining skills, but that it will take a little bit more time. To acquire the others I will just research and practice conquering each skills one by one.

The News Media Literacy project is a research initiative based within MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. It explores how we might best equip young people with the social skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants in emergent media landscape and raise public understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural world according to there website. You can look at this website by going to: NML .

The Networked Student By Wendy Drexler

This video had a very effective way of keeping my attention. In the video, a story was told about a student who was studying American Psychology. The student attends school three days a week and does two days on the Internet. He has no textbook. His teacher hardly ever lectures. His teacher is a student of connectivism. Connectivism is a theory that learning occurs as a part of social network of many diverse connections and ties. This was made possible by various tools of technology. The tools are said to be not as important as the connections made possible.

Anyways, the teacher empowers her students to take control of their learning and make new connections with others who will strengthen the learning process. The student must spend his time building his own personal learning network. He practices finding valid websites and to access the website to find its credibility. He use Google Scholar to find scholarly articles about his topic and he shares the site he finds. He looks at blogs from people around the world to see their point of view on his topic and he even has his own blog that he posts his point of view on. He uses reader to subscribe to his blog.

The student loves his MP3 and he uses it to subscribe to video and audio podcast. He can find lectures on his MP3 player and can also find documentaries. While he was looking at his virtual textbook that he had created in social book marking account in RSS Reader, he shares his knowledge to the world. Information management is said to be a big challenge in the 21st century.

So the question is does the networked student need a teacher. Well the answer is yes. The teacher is there to show him and teach him to build the network and guide him when he gets stuck. She is to show him how to communicate properly with experts so that he can respectively ask questions for help. She teaches him how to differentiate from good information and propaganda and helps him organize his information. She hopes that he will maintain his learning network to navigate his future.
I believe I am ready to teach a networked student. I will definitely use the advice that this video gave to make sure I do all I can to advance my student in technology and to make sure he or she is guided in the right direction for their future. To listen to this video go to: Wendy Drexler

Dr. Richard Miller: This is How We Dream Part 1 and 2

In the video, Dr. Miller starts off by saying he believes, " we are living in the moment of the greatest change in human communication in human history." He says we now have the capability to communicate instantly globally. Dr. Miller says now is the time to be engaged in work of literacy. When he began in the profession, he spent his time understanding writing as a solitary activity. He loved books and has always loved books since he was a child. He talks about some incremental changes we as a culture have gone through. One of the incremental changes is how we work with laptops and not pens, pencils, and paper. Our workplace is now at a desktop. We can research the riches of the world because it is stored on the web. We can do an entire project without having to step foot in a library. It is now possible to collaborate using networking technology, not compose with text but with film. We need to try and teach our students to produce multimedia not just listen and consume it.

He says as we work we find ourselves confronting a new kind of material. On the web the material changes right before our eyes, it is updated instantly, and it is aggregated. It shows visual representation and we can compose items using iTunes U. People seemed to be please, Dr. Miller says, by the success and liability of the academic lecture. He says there are people who understand that ideas do not belong to us individually but they belong to us as a culture. He says as educators we must be in the business of sharing ideas freely.We can not just look at the material and use it, we can actually go behind it and see how it was put together. We can distribute information globally and freely.

Dr.Miller says he sees a time where students will not compose material using Word Processors, but with the kind of digital composing material that him and his colleague are learning how to use themselves. He commends Jonathan Harris' material in the video. He commends it because it's fascinating attempt to try and use the web to present the affect of the globe.

As an upcoming teacher, I believe that I am working at being able to write with multimedia, but that I am not all the way there. But I believe that with practice, hard work, and actually putting the time into it my students as well as myself will be able to use it. If you would like to listen to these videos go to Dr.Richard Miller's Videos

Using iPods in the Classroom (Duke University)

I have studied information on how iPods can be useful in the classroom. I went to this website: Duke University and Ipods .

Duke University uses iPods to enhance learning at their school. At Duke University, about 1,200 students will use iPods. Duke gave away iPods to 1,600 upcoming freshmen. Duke only gave iPods away to students who's professor requires them for course work. The classes are those that are coordinated through Duke's center for Instructional Technology. Part of Duke's Digital initiative is designed to encourage digital multimedia use in classroom instruction. The iPods they will give away have a recording plug-in device. The plug-in device makes it possible to make digital audio recordings of lectures and interviews.

At Duke University, the following classes are some of the classes that will be using the iPods in the classroom for course work: Foreign Language, Engineering, Music, and Documentary Studies. Duke University is also fixing to include: Mathematics, Biomedical Engineering, and dance in the list of classesw using iPods. The new iPods that are coming out store and display pictures and videos on a small screen. An example of how one of the classes will incorporate the iPod in the classroom is a history course call Digital Durham and the New South. The class will use iPods as students record data from court records and other public archives. Another way to use them in the classroom is to create podcasts or online presentations that require the use of copying recordings.

iTune University

iTunes University is a free service hosted by Apple that allows instructors, administrators, and affilliates to manage, distribute, and control access to educational content. It helps users easily search, download, and play educational content. To download iTunes University you can go to the website: iTunes Download .

Teachers can podcast lectures on iTunes University. It allows students to be able to go back to difficult parts of a lecture and take better notes say Dan Mckinney according to Science in Society website:
Science in Society . iTunes University features free lectures, language lessons, audiobooks, and more. You can explore over 200,000 educational audio and video files from top universities, museums, and public organizations from all over the world. To learn all you can about iTunes University you can watch a video at iTunes U Introduction .

iTunes University can help me as a teacher because it will give me and my students a good resource to receive information about a topic we may be studying in our classroom or may be getting ready to study. I can even as a teacher listen to a lecture on a topic I am getting ready to discuss with my class and here how another teacher talked about it. Then I can see if the way they taught will work for me and benefit my students or maybe even just be able to get a few ideas from it to enhance my classroom.

Dr. Alice Christie's Website

Dr. Alice Christie's website will be very useful when becoming a teacher or even as a student. It gives many websites and information about many different things that can help you as a teacher. She made the website to share what she has learned from being a teacher for forty years. It has many different sections such as multimedia, educational technology, Web Design, photography, etc. The section that I found most useful was the educational technology section. It gives many ways in which teachers can use technology to enhance their teaching and to help their students' learn. I looked under the sub section Multimedia. I found it very interesting because it had all different type of multimedia that you as a teacher can teach to your students in the classroom and still use the curriculum. For example, how to make an electronic postcard. Dr. Christie gave many websites that you can use to find out how you can integrate postcards in =to the classroom, what activities would work, and how you can still use the teaching curriculum with it.

It also had websites to different glossaries, where students can look up important terms and vocabulary. It had sites on Art and how you can use it on the Internet. It gave different links such as, Museum of Tolerance Multimedia Learning center. The link had an extensive collection of Holocaust Pictures. This would help me as a teacher if I was teaching History to my students and we were studying the Holocaust. The website also gives instructions on how to use a digital camera, a resource page about them, and the different features that digital cameras have.

I really enjoyed looking at Dr. Christie's web page because it will be very beneficial to me as a teacher and allow me to integrate fun and interesting things into my lessons to help keep my students excited about learning.To look at her website or see her photo from above go to"Alice Christie

The Wired Story on Wikipedia

On the Podcast that I listened to about Wikipedia, the senior editor of Wired Magazine was interviewed. He discussed the new program called the Wikipedia scanner. The Wikipedia scanner was invented by a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology named Virgil Griffeth. To be able to post anything on Wikipedia, Nicolas Thompson says that you either have to leave your name or you can post anonymously. However, when you post it leaves a trace of a number that identifies your computer. Virgil Griffeth came up with two different databases.The first database is a database of all the IP addresses from several different companies. It shows all the changes that was made to the Wikipedia page.

The other database makes it to where you can go back and see that there was a change made to the Wikipedia page and you can see exactly what the changes were. Wikipedias main concern, Nicolas Thompson says, is the accuracy of their program and the source of where the changes came from. For the fact that anyone can make changes to Wikipedia and their information, it changes the way you look and use Wikipedia. Nicolas Thompson believes that because the information you make to Wikipedia can be traced back to the source it will scare companies away from making any changes to Wikipedia. He believes that the Wikipedia Scanner will be beneficial to Wikipedia and allow Wikipedia to become a better website.

To listen to the podcast about Wikipedia with Nicolas Griffeth go to:
Wikipedia Podcast and click the LISTEN button.