I have had a couple of days to process the contents of my last on line class session. The focus was popular issues in digital media literacy…which was quite interesting. I have been embraced by technology more and more through the years and even more so in the past two months and have come to the conclusion that I need to utilize more thoroughly in order to move along with the demands of the 21st century. Some of the interesting information that is on the web that I have been looking at are some classroom blogs. I enjoyed reading through some of them but then found a few schools who use realplayer audio to add their voice. I thought that added an extra personal tough from the classrooms. I also looked at Youth Radio: connecting youth voices to the world, which uses Google video. The extent that we can go to with technology in the classrooms is absolutely amazing. I realize that I have alot to teach myself about media literacy so that I can teach my students. It can do wonders for the school moral, student self-esteem, community moral, teacher personal development, etc… I was reading this classroom blog Huzzah: A 6th grade class in Comox Valley, British Columbia and one thing that was mentioned on the page is “please note our success not our mistakes” I thought this was so interesting becuase it makes one look at the site differently. I looked at it with positivity and was seeing how I could use it as an example for my own classroom blogs. I didn’t look at in judgement about how they could do this and that better.
Part of the discussion in the on line class was the concern for offensive content, misinformation, scams, hoaxes, phishing, safety and cyberbullying. To this point in time I knew that these issues did exist but not to the extent that we reviewed in the class. It is interesting how Youtube carries alot of videos pertaining to these issues but at the same time there are so many uplifting and informative videos. I know that we have to protect our children from such things but how? In the blog ”Joho The Blog” there is discussion on protection for children with a clear statement that “there is no easy tecnological fix”. That is a scary thought when we as teachers and parents have to teach our children using the internet. Plane and simple fact is we have to teach them the safety and hope for the best…
dlink08 said,
February 15, 2009 @ 5:58 am
Hi Brandy,
I agree it is a scary situation, as I have my own children who like to go onto youtube and watch videos. I cannot be around all the time to watch them over their backs to see what they are doing. All I have to tell them is to not look for videos that are not appropriate for them. Yes, youtube is questionable and yes there are some really good stuff on there for educational purposes. I think everything can be viewed as educational but to what extent.
Later, Darren
jackie said,
February 17, 2009 @ 4:29 am
I hear you Brandy! It’s almost like we have to teach a new virtue on technology, what could we call it? I guess technology is like anything, we need to take the good with the bad. I am really starting to enjoy this on-line learning.
kimcottini said,
February 22, 2009 @ 3:55 am
I like how Jackie has referred to using technology responsibly as teaching a new virture. That’s a great idea. I wonder if we will have as many different points of view with a technology virtue as with many other virtues and where we draw the line as educators and models for our students?
trevor gerwing said,
March 6, 2009 @ 12:59 am
How to protect children from the ‘evils’ of YouTube has never been more in the forefront of my mind than it is right now. I am a VP of a Jr. High (7-9) and some of our students have videotaped fights that have occured between students and posted them on YouTube. I know YouTube has millions of fantastic videos that are of either educational or entertainment value, but it is also loaded with violence and sexual content, much of which contains minors. I wish that YouTube would do a better job of censoring this type of content so that we didn’t have to regulate computer usage to such a large degree.
Cheryl Morin said,
March 6, 2009 @ 3:36 am
Hi Brandy,
Re: Huzzah Blog
I’m doing a project on the K-12 Online Conference and was checking their Google Map and clicked on of the pins and it happened to be the teacher of this class who created Huzzah. I emailed her a few questions and within a short time she had responded with some tech help… I think she knows Alec C. because she asked me if I was in his class.
It’s so great to see other blogs and learn about activities to do with students. It still kind of freaks me out though that everyone-global wise- is just a click away.
My class is practicing how to make inferences based on what we see and learn about in other class blogs, although it’s really sad however,that we are only getting computer time now in Block 4. Great thing though that this class that we are taking is so excellent in terms of learning about tools , connecting and engaging!
Great Blog by the way… yours!