I appreciate what my peers shared during this semester. I have learned a lot from them. Although ECMP 355 is a online course that we may not know each other in person, but at least we know each other online. That’s so nice. Every Thursday night we could see each other on Zoom. I like watch people chatting, discussing in the “chat box”. We are growing together! Twitter: Honestly, I was not so active on twitter, I usually “dive” and see people’s sharing and posting, but I did learn many things. At the beginning of the class, I was confused why we should use Twitter. As I started to use Twitter more often, I find I could learn so much! I followed so much educators, future educators…I can almost find everything about teaching on Twitter. People share good stuffs and resources. I love watching videos, so I shared lots videos, mostly TedTalks on Twitter. TedTalk is excellent! I inspired by those teachers and speakers. Blogs: It is really an excellent idea to allow us post blogs weekly online. I appreciate all the works my peer done throughout the whole semester. So nice to see their thoughts and sharing on their blogs. Their thought often make me feel that I should think deeper and wider. Through sharing blogging, we know more about what we were learning and think deeper about what we are doing. I usually comment with my appreciation to their work! You guys are excellent! Google Community:
I reviewed class recording video, watch people sharing, communicating, but I did not spent so much time on this tool. Thank you all for helping me grow!
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Can online social activism be meaningful and worthwhile? It depends. The development of increasing accessibility to communicate with people makes the Internet become a tool for individuals or organizations to spread their social message to the world. Activists use Internet as a tool to find people have the same or similar idea and build their community online. The key to make online social activism meaningful is making some change. For example, I find the Regina food Bank asking fro donation online, and I share it. If I just share it online without donate some food to them, then for me, the posting of the food bank is meaningless. Just think about yourself. How many times you share events, articles, and other social posting on Facebook or Twitter without read through them? I mean, many people read but no action, some even just “like” them without read through the content. It is true that online social activism can be meaningful when they got more followers and more people take actions. It could also be meaningless when people just simply “like” or transpond without reading, thinking, or making any action. Is it possible to have productive conversations about social justice online? It is possible, but hard. I often find people discuss social justice online. They comment under posts and communicate with other commenters. Sometimes, when people hold different perspectives or stand in opposite sides, they would fight online. It is because many people just want to be agree; they want people believe what they believed. People who disagree with them make them angry. Some may use bad language to attack other people online. It’s weird, but it happens. Many people read and understand social justice in a very subjective way, which may influent their perspectives and even cognition. However, we should look at social justice in an objective and rational way; avoided to have much personal emotion towards social justice. I found a nice TedTalks on YouTube teaching how to have better political conversations. I had so much fun when doing Scratch! That’s my first time. I have never heard coding before. At first I have no idea how to make selected sprite move, make sound… I watched the tutorial tips of the website. Thanks for the tutorial steps and finally I work out! For the action, just simply pick any action from the action category. It is funny that when you pick piano, you got the sound of piano, you pick Trumpet, you would have its sound. I was pretty enjoyed in making my sprite move and making music. I was happy because I felt I was a child again when doing scratch! It’s silly, but being silly makes me happy, haha. For my creation, I make made a little music with a bear and a hip-pop guy making action. Not so long, but I was so engaged. I think I’m going to have my students to use Scratch. I think kids would engage in designing their own coding. Making code help students become more creative. They can create various sprites, making various actions or move, creating music and dance, etc. Students could choose different themes. There are bunch of themes including Star wars, Frozen, Moana, Making music and so forth. They could choose whatever they like. In the Sprite library, students could choose from people, animal, letter, and other various patterns. Scratch has recorded various sounds of musical instruments. We would find surprise in the sprite, action, and sonund… library. I’m sure kids would have fun in making their codes. Coding is really important to students. Learning how to program early in life help students gain a deeper and more complete understanding of the logic and advanced thinking behind programing or coding. It influences children’s development of their brain. We living in a digital world and our kids born in to a digital world. Learning programing in a young age help kids building integral thinking and problem solving skills, which are important for their future successes. Since we were considering it is great to use technologies in classroom. Maybe it is generally for common students, but I start to think about what benefits that special students could get by using technologies and tools for learning? Can students with disabilities use the same tech or tool that typical students use? I just curious; so I Googled trying to find some related stuff. I found a website that convey the information of how special students could be benefit from technological education. Accordingly, “children with learning disabilities often have better technology skills than their teachers and are drawn to computers and other gadgets, so using them in the classroom makes perfect sense. For children with physical disabilities, technology can give access to learning opportunities previously closed to them. E-readers help students turn book pages without applying dexterity, and voice adaptive software can help students answer questions without needing to write.” Fortunately, students with disabilities also involved in; they could get lots benefit form the use of tech and devices in classroom.
Another article examined a seventh grade student with physical disabilities. The student has used “a desktop version eye-gaze device, which allowed him to type papers, participate in art classes, conduct online research, communicate with his teacher and do well academically.” Students are pretty involved in group activities, class discussions, working with peers. Tech help special students engage in classroom. “Technologies not only help students better understand concepts and keep up with their peers, they also allow the school to better and more easily integrate special-needs students into general education classes.” I’m happy to find out that educational technology and tools are set for all students! The two webs: http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/6917 http://www.edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2013/03/how-technology-helping-special-needs-students-excel I have always wondered how to make my Powerpoint more interesting and creative. Prezi lights my world! It’s fabulous! Prezi is a cloud-based and storytelling tool for exploring and sharing ideas on a virtual blank slate. Unlike Powerpoint, using Prezi we could zoom in and out of our presentations with in one slide instead of multiple slides. It is pretty creative and more fun. We can see the slides moving on the screen: left, right, up, or down. It depends where you want place your next slide when you are making your stuff. Prezi is pretty good for using in classroom. First of all, there is more fun in there. We can see where we go as the slides moving around on the nice screen rather than merely changing slides. We can choose Blank background to design on our own. Teachers can put a picture as their Prezi background that could make more sense to students. For example, let’s say we have a class today talking about dog; we can definitely Google a nice dog picture as the Prezi background. Both teachers and students get more options on free version. We could keep our slides simple and zoom in, which keeps students’ attention. Instead of having the whole slides of information there, we can put key points. Besides images, we can insert videos, graphs, or play videos in Prezi. In addition, through using Prezi, it is great for when using web mapping or concept maps as our teaching tool. However, for cons, we can only present Prezi online, which means that we must have Internet access in classroom. We need to pay for using the whole program, but it is free for the basic stuff. We have to pay for the high-level design maybe. However, I think it is not necessary. What’s more, we can’t print the slides on Prezi. I think I’m going to use Prezi a lot. I’ll use it for my next presentation! By the way, Prezi website has a good tutorial on how to create a Prezi presentation. You can see the YouTube video as well. Just learn everything on YouTube! Video from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_740258&feature=iv&src_vid=9z9SF5N5b7A&v=tolWEl7oBQg Teacher: Blue Parents: Black P: Hello Mr. Bezanson! I heard from my son that they are using Facebook live these days. what’s that? I don’t think Facebook is good for kid. T: Ms. Wang, Facebook live is a tool provided through Facebook that allows people to stream video in real time. One can view comments and respond to questions from viewers. People can also send likes or reaction while the video is streaming. P: But my son almost on Facebook all the time, it distracts him too much. How Facebook live suppose to help students learn? How you use it in class? T: While it’s still rather new, the school has plans to utilize it for things such as promoting fundraisers or showcasing school events such as rallies and sports games. There has also been discussion of using it to bring in guest teachers into the classroom via Facebook live so the students can interact with them. Unfortunately we cannot control how much students are on Facebook itself or Facebook live outside of school time. P: Oh, so kids could know what’s going on in school lively. Sounds a good way for both guest teacher and students when the teacher can’t come to class. Could students review them? Everyone could access those videos or just teachers and students? T: The videos do stay on the school's facebook feed and can be viewed later if students want to watch them again. For that reason the video’s would be censored and regulated to keep privacy as high as possible. P: But how to protect the privacy? T: The school only friends people who attend the school. In order to facilitate classroom usage each teacher creates an account for their classroom and friends only the students in the class to ensure the video and content is directed toward the intended audience. P: Sounds good. Okay let’s see how it works. Hope kids will get some good stuff! Thank you Mr.Bezanson! T: You’re welcome! Video from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3ZZzGoRI2o Carol Todd had detailed the story of Amanda. I feel so sad for the young girl. She was beautiful; she dreamed to become a superstar. Unfortunately, the little angel had gone forever. That makes me feel that we should take the issue more seriously. We should teach children how to protect themselves online right way! Children were given cell phones, ipads, laptops, and other technological devices before they really know how to use them appropriately. Some people may think children are young, they don’t know much about Internet. However, the danger is that young people don’t know much about Internet. For example, most children are on Facebook, they share almost everything on line to their followers. Do they know everything they share online would leave footprints? Kids will go and grab apps from anywhere; there may “bad” things in those apps. There are bunch of ads on website pages, kids would click on them just because curiosity. Kids go into the world of Internet before they knew the rules. They need to know the rules; we have to teach them those tools and devices. They should know how to protect themselves online. Here is a video we can share to young children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgCNGvL0g1g Teaching digital citizenship is a big challenge for us. We live in a world that technology changes faster than we do. We may probably meet the challenge that we teacher do not know a new technology. How to teach when we don’t have the tools or skills to effectively integrate new technology into our own classroom? We may sometimes have the situation that cannot get enough support from school. I have been worked in an elementary school; they only have 30 laptops, some are broken. The whole school students have to share 30 laptops. Teachers and Students lack access to technology in classroom. The most important challenge is how to teach students to protect themselves online. Most younger people even adults have little knowledge about online-abuse. They may have little idea about what possible danger they may encounter, like cyberbullying, sexting, cheating, plagiarizing, etc. It is challenged because we cannot always know what students would do online. And it is hard to teach when we ourselves do not know how danger would come. Like Treaty Education, Digital Citizenship Education is mandated in curriculum. Schools and teachers are required to teach about it. It is important to find connections between digital citizenship and the Saskatchewan curriculum. We can connect with Health curricular; issues like cyberbullying can bring huge influence on students’ emotional and mental health. For English Language Arts (ELA), when we teach students about identity, it is important to teach digital identity as well. In law class, we could talk about the digital law. Unfortunately, I did not fine many connections, but I think there are still room there for digital citizenship education to fit in. I want know more about teaching digital citizenship in classroom. Unfortunately, not so much educators address digital education in reality. We teachers should take digital education seriously. Citizenship education aims to teach students and younger generation how to live and act appropriately in our living society. Well, digital citizenship is to help children and young people know how to use technology and live in online world appropriately. Unlike us, children nowadays are born in technology and they have little knowledge and ability to use Internet properly. Too often we are seeing students even adults misusing and abusing technology but not sure what to do. It is our responsibility to teach and help students understand technology and learn how to use it. I found a web says we could start with “9 Key Ps”. Passwords: we should teach students how to create higher-level secure passwords, especially for online banking and email. Avoid using the same password for all their accounts. Privacy: encourage students to be aware of protecting their private information like address, email, and phone number. Personal information: remind them to be careful what they share online. Photographs: they should know that not to post any picture showing their location or important privacy. Some facial recognition software can find them by inserting their latitude and longitude in the picture -- even if they aren't tagged. Property: teach students about copyright and how to generate a license for their own works. “Some students will search Google Images and copy anything they see, assuming they have the rights. Sometimes they'll even cite "Google Images" as the source. We have to teach them that Google Images compiles content from a variety of sources. Students have to go to the source, see if they have permission to use the graphic, and then cite that source.” Permission: show students how to get permission and how to cite properly. Protection: teach students knowledge about viruses, malware, phishing, ransomware, and identity theft, and how to protect themselves online. Professionalism: how to act professionally online when necessary. Personal Brand: let students be aware of what they do and share online and help them realize that they all have a “digital tattoo” online. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/digital-citizenship-need-to-know-vicki-davis http://www.digitalcitizenship.net/ Video from: www.youtube.com When we enjoying the convenience and entertainment that the Internet brings to us, we should take our digital identities seriously. Almost all website requires our personal information to sign up or create an account. It is really important to be aware of the Internet safety and digital identity. In China, some people would “steal” your account and change your password. They pretend to be you and deceive your family and friends for money. One time I could not log in my QQ (an online chatting app) and I realized that someone “stole” my account. Then I called my family and friends tried to tell them that wasn’t me. They said the guy pretend me and asked money from them. Fortunately, they did not believe that guy. I changed my password and got my account back. Lots of my friends have been experienced losing their accounts. As educators, we should teach our kids to be aware of their digital safety and preserve their online identities. We should help them know that every time they get online they will leave a digital footprint. If we Google our names, we would realize that whatever we do online are making us become more and more traceable. We need to teach students to be aware of what they post and share online. As educators, we should role model for students and show them how to keep themselves safe online. A digital footprint is like the Internet would remember what we did online. We could ask students to think about what would people learn about them if they look them up online and are there anything they don’t want other people know. Share with students:
I found a website that show us how to teach students about digital identity; there are some nice videos that we could share with our kids. http://floydboe.sharpschool.net/blog/One.aspx?portalId=11494286&postId=14692025&portletAction=viewpost |
AuthorXiaocan (Catherine) Wang Archives
April 2017
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