Week+5

A critical evolution is the best evolution... awareness and questioning is key.

We began our discussion today by talking about Smartboards. We were given a short, but content-laden presentation on how to use the many functions of Smartboards. I was honestly very impressed with what I was seeing and look forward to utilizing Smartboards in my own classroom. They seem like a wonderful tool to engage students in your classroom. However, they seem like they would be more wonderfully paired with an iPad or tablet for each of the students - empowering them to utilize the technology for themselves and engage directly with the educational medium.

Today's reading discussion reviewed what Marc Prensky calls, digital natives (i.e. individuals [usually younger] that have grown up with and are fluent in the 'digital lagnuage'). I have a couple of comments to make on this reading:

Firstly, its not a problem that we are altering our way of educating to fit into a new technological context... but has anyone actually stepped back and asked if the transition into a digital native is a good thing?? The main characteristics of a digital native, it seems, are no real attention span, and always bored by 'real life'. Are these qualities we want to re-enforce in the educational system by just accepting the fact that students have a lower attention span, for example?

Its not about longing for the good ole days when chalkboards and rulers ruled, its about actively educating our students against the rising tide of electronic fundamentalism. Cell phones and social networking, for example, do not necessarily build our brains or allow us to develop academically... they merely allow us to perpetuate idealized versions of our lives (which undoubtedly would lead to cognitive dissonance) or promote the offloading of work onto their technological matrices.

We continued our class by discussing a recent workshop held on cyber-bullying. This new form of bullying is quite pervasive and often very easy to do - students are more comfortable to bully in a //relatively// anonymous environment (at least they dont have to bully face-to-face - makes it easier for more people to bully). For example, from our readings on cyber-bullying, we are told that a quarter of bullies also bullied others offline and that the remaining three quarters have never bullied others in person.

-- From: [] "Nancy Willard of the Responsible Netizen Institute explains that technology can also affect a young person's ethical behaviour because it doesn't provide tangible feedback about the consequences of actions on others. This lack of feedback minimizes feelings of empathy or remorse. Young people say things online that they would never say face-to-face because they feel removed from the action and the person at the receiving end." ---  The internet also provides an environment where students can easily join groups in support for or against something, thereby increasing the impact of the bullying on an individual while also allowing students who would not otherwise bully someone the opportunity to indulge in this power struggle. Unfortunately, and as we discussed, cyber-bullying is often quite hard to catch...

We also discussed the fact that teachers simply cannot have facebook! If they do, they must be very careful to monitor what kind of content is put on their facebook page while being mindful of the fact that students are quite technologically savvy and WILL seek you out over the internet.

Now, aside from the myriad of troubles and hurdles I need to dialogue with further mentally, today's evolution was not without real 'physical' evolution as well... To this end I was able to add yet another appendage to my technologically evolving self. Photostory is a program that uses images to tell a story. You can add text, narrate and/or add music to the pictures in order to fully illustrate your ideas. I can see this software coming in handy across many classroom situations and assignments. From English class to Geography, I can see applications for this program for students who are looking to explain a story or process.

We were also introduced to a couple of helpful programs and websites which would help in assessment and evaluation in the classroom. Markbook, a wonderful piece of software, allows you to look at the class in many ways... statistics, graphs allow for easier tracking of progression... class summaries... seating plans (with photos)... marks (individual and class) allows for comparison/assessment... All of these functions would prove extremely helpful to help teachers in the classroom save time and energy for teaching and providing meaningful assessments.

We were also i ntroduced to Rubistar and Turnitin, two online resources available. Rubistar seems like another time-saver by allowing one to either enter information directly into a rubric-style grid or choose from an existing series of templates. Turnitin, a popular resource for teachers looking to weed-out any plagiarized material provides a couple other functions i.e., Grademark, and Peermark which I was unaware of. Grademark is a tool which allows teachers to save ample amounts of time grading and providing feedback. Peermark is a wonderful collaborative tool which allows students to review and provide feedback on their fellow students' work while also offering a WriteCycle option which helps students to develop their ideas in a writing process mediated online by the teacher.