Wiki

This is such a cool discovery for me! I think Wiki's are great, I would definitely use them in my classroom. This is an excellent resource for collaborative group projects as well as teacher/student communication. I would probably use the Wiki as more of a class website where I could post homework assignments and links. Students could post their finished assignments and I could comment on them, edit them, and utilize the Wiki for peer editing as well. Here is a link to one of the lesson plans I have posted on my Wiki.
The blog that I added for the Language Arts section was huffenglish.com, a blog that I have found highly interesting and will be even more useful to me when I am actually teaching.

INTERNET SAFETY

From the readings and videos I watched, I learned two important things: the importance of staying safe on the internet and not giving out any personal information, and how crucial it is for us teachers to stay on top of technology so that we are aware and can use it to the benefit of our students.
Such a technological world can be harmful, however, if students aren't aware of Internet Safety and its importance. A lot of times we tend to think that bad things won't ever happen to us. We hear stories of other people's horrible experiences but shrug them off after an hour or two because we have better things to think about. Internet safety is not something we can shrug off. I don't know how predators, hackers, or phishers choose who they will target, but we need to be proactive in staying safe and helping others to stay safe as well.

all of the articles and videos I watched were linked on our Class Diigo Website

"WordPress as a Learning Management System – Move Over, Blackboard"

- "BuddyPress" interactive online community for class...teacher can't really monitor it

- good points about how important it is for us as teachers to teach our students how to be flexible and learn how to access and use all different platforms of technology

- I'm intimidated by the thought of such an entirely technological classroom...I guess I'm old school at heart 

"Provo man buys old cell phone, finds amazing list of numbers"

- Moral of the story: don't donate your phone to a thrift store? I guess the thing to learn from this is just how long personal information can stick around. What you think is private, may not be so private later...especially if you forget about it and someone else stumbles on it 10 years later.

"Building a Better Password"

- Scary! my password system is definitely a mess, I am motivated to fix it now...but it's so intimidating because it seems like hackers can get into pretty much anything these days

"Internet Safety: A Cautionary Tale"

- Again, this is a really intense, scary look at what could happen if you give out too much information. This is a little over the top but it reiterates to me how important it is to be overly cautious. As soon as I finished watching this I did a thorough google/facebook search of myself to see how much information people can see. I recommend this for everyone, also make sure and review your privacy settings on sites like facebook and myspace.

"Finding and Sharing the Gospel Online"

- A nice, uplifting way to finish off this assignment. The internet can be good and can be used as a missionary tool. We can be successful in online missionary endeavors as long as we are safe and smart about it.

 ---After learning about all of these internet safety warnings and suggestions I taught them to one of my roommates. We both got on our facebook accounts and edited our privacy settings to make sure that we weren't sharing too much information.

Reflections on the IIC Competition

My favorite presentation from the competition was the SS6 "Road to Revolution" pitch. This project presented a number of technologies that could be used in the classroom and focused on how to best bridge the gap between "research-based elements of effective teaching and the real world that we, and especially students, face: a world of technology."
The thing that I appreciated most about this presentation was that they focused on how, as teachers, we want to use technology to enhance our teaching but we need to be careful not to let it take over. I thought it was funny when they used the term "bot students" because that is exactly what we don't want; robot students who aren't comfortable unless they are safely behind a screen. We don't want technology to dominate our classrooms and I think that unless teachers have a clear idea as to how they are going to use technology, it can easily overtake everything.
Basically what this group did was create a class website that compiled resources like Prezi, Wufu, GoogleDocs, and YouTube, to make them readily accessible for the students. The resources are all aimed at helping students learn history by creating building blocks; getting them out of the textbooks and into the mindset of interactive, historical thinking.
Another really cool thing about this website is that it can be translated into different languages. I think this would be especially helpful for ELL students as well as students with non-English speaking parents.

Video Project

Video presentation of a character sketch of Asher Lev! At this point students have read the first half of the book so they are analyzing Asher as his character evolves through Book One.

Storyboard

Here is the link to my storyboard for the multimedia project

"The Perils of Teaching the Books We Love"

As I was looking over one of the blogs that I follow, huffenglish.com, I came across a post called "The Perils of Teaching the Books We Love." I thought it was really interesting since I too have experienced the disappointment of recommending a favorite book to a friend and them not liking it or appreciating it as I do. However, I think that as an English teacher this is just something that we need to be prepared for. Because lets be honest, what kind of a world would it be if everyone had unhealthy obsessions with Chaim Potok? I think our job is to share our enthusiasm and try to cultivate appreciation and understanding of good literature. And I'm not talking about Twilight.

Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things

Like the "We Didn't Start The Fire" video, this video includes a song and a number of photos of ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. I find nothing in this video that violates copyright laws except for the song. If she was just showing it in class it would be fine as long as she had obtained the song legally. But since she has it posted online without the permission of the artist she is breaking the law.