J'aime la technologie!

Ok, this is my copyright assignment that I hadn’t done yet while I was working on the IIC competition… So here it is.

This video at first seemed like it would be a violation of fair use because it uses the whole song, not just 10% but there are ad’s attached and it is for a education purpose so I think its okay actually. They didn’t site where they got it though.

This next video sites a website so that’s good, and it’s for an educational purpose because it’s in French. There are ad’s so maybe that’s why they can play the whole song too.

So, I like Wiki’s. They are easy, simple and a great way to collaborate. I think it would be great in the classroom for students working on group projects or maybe a group project. They are just so many possibilities! Here’s the link to the wiki with the links I added to “Lesson Pronunciation”. So my best work of the semester. Well, I like the video Ashley and I made for the Innovative Instruction Competition. Also I feel like my website was something very useful that I will use in my classes.

So I talked with my Dad about what I learned and how what we can do as parents to help our children be safe on the internet. We talked a lot about Elder Ballard’s talk and I shared with him the 7 suggestions that Elder Ballard gives and how we can implement these things in our homes. I think it was definitely a valuable experience and I hope that it will be helpful for my family, especially because I have two younger siblings that are teenagers and could be susceptible to some of the dangers on the internet. In our home something that I think is useful is that we have the computers in the public places and so there’s less temptation in that way. Also, my dad said that limiting the time that my siblings have on the computer would be good and something my family could improve on.

Videos I watched on Internet Safety:
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This video called ,"Growing Up Online" was a very accurate depiction on how the lives of teenagers are so different today with technology and the internet. Alot of parents are worried on how they can protect their children. I think overall what I got out of these videos and articles that I read is that we must educate our children (and students) and then we kind of have to get them their space to an extent and let them make right choices. Like it said in the video and the article I read (Parenting in the Digital Age), children can find ways to get around our monitoring. So being so strict and monitoring too much or restricting them from using social networking sites (like Facebook) completely is just going to make many of them rebel. What I think the best  to do is to teach them the dangers, teach them what you expect of them and then let them govern themselves to a certain extent like what we're taught in the gospel. I really like the talk by Elder Ballard, "Let Our Voices Be Heard".  If our children have a testimony of the gospel they will make correct choices in regards to the internet. I liked the suggestions he gave:

"Seven things that every parent can do to minimize the negative effect media can have on our families:

1. We need to hold family councils and decide what our media standards are going to be.

2. We need to spend enough quality time with our children that we are consistently the main influence in their lives, not the media or any peer group.

3. We need to make good media choices ourselves and set good examples for our children.

4. We need to limit the amount of time our children watch TV or play video games or use the Internet each day. Virtual reality must not become their reality.

5. We need to use Internet filters and TV programming locks to prevent our children from “chancing upon” things they should not see.

6. We need to have TVs and computers in a much-used common room in the home, not in a bedroom or a private place.

7. We need to take time to watch appropriate media with our children and discuss with them how to make choices that will uplift and build rather than degrade and destroy."

I love these suggestions! I think that having the computers in a public place is probably one of the best ones. If we are at home enough and in close proximity of the computer it will be hard for our children to hide what they are doing. Also if they start acting suspicious when we come into the room, we'll know something is up. This will decrease the temptation that children might have to look at or participate in inappropriate things. Also being close with our children and being someone that they can confide in will decrease the chances that they will hide things from us and we can have greater trust in the choices they are making. Also knowing who their friends are and the influences that they have in their lives. I think as far as being a teacher some of the challenges we might face with internet safety is that as technology progresses and we require students more often to do things on the computer, such as homework or projects, they will be on the computer more and there is a greater chance of them being exposed to inappropriate things.  Something we could do is in meeting with the parents in maybe parent-teacher conferences discuss with them how they encourage safe internet practices in the home, what filters they have, how much their child is alone in front of the computer, etc. Starting with educating the parents is probably the best way to go because hopefully they know their children well and they will know best how to instruct them. Also in class it could be helpful just to have a class discussion and go over how we can be careful on the internet, being polite-not cyberbullying, and not meeting strangers we meet online.

I liked the Google Wave idea by the Lit 6 group. I think that it’s a neat way that students can interact with each other and the teacher and get immediate feedback and help on their work. I think a potential problem would definitely be the cost of the blue tooth keyboards. It seems like it would be a big investment but useful in the classroom. I think it is innovative because like they point out, a pad of paper and markers is kind of an outdated way for students to collaborate. I think it responds well to the need for students to use technology for writing a persuasive essay.

Ashley and Alicia IIC Competition Entry So Ashley and I just finished our project the other day for the Innovative Instruction Competition for the School of Education. It turned out to be really fun and I learned alot. Some things turned out to be more complicated than we realized (like putting a video up on youtube!- well it wasn’t too bad but we didn’t realize that it takes a few hours for it to be published, and that you have to convert it to quicktime before you upload it). Some of the technologies we used were Audacity, Google sites of course, Jing and moviemaker.

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So Ashley was able to get some ideas for our project from Brother West and we’re excited to try them out.  One of them is Audacity which is a free program that lets you record live audio , which we can use to record the vocabulary words for the project. I downloaded it and tried recording myself and now am trying to figure out how to embed it on a site. The other one is called Jing but I haven’t done too much with it yet. It seems like a cool way though to capture images or videos on your screen and then share them online. Anyways we’re planning on recording this upcoming week!

Ok, so me and Ashley have our idea for the McKay School Of Education competition but are still trying to figure out exactly how to do it. We want a way for students to access a sort of interactive pronunciation tool where they can listen as well as record themselves (if possible) to hear how close they match the speakers. When I was in the MTC we had a program called TALL where we could do pretty much that but obviously the vocabulary that we would be teaching in the classroom will be a little different from that of a missionary.  I’m also wondering if school textbooks have programs like that already that are in a companion website? Also if we could somehow make the  words they are learning contextualized that would probably be best.  Anyways I know that this could be useful as just last week I was observing in a French classroom and the students were reading out loud from  a story book and their pronunciation needed a lot of work and I thought how cool would if be if the students could hear the text read to them at home and they could practice recording themselves saying the words until they got them as close as possible.  So another possibility could be on online book of some sort with corresponding vocabulary so that the words are contextualized.  A way for students to make their own online books would be a cool project as well, maybe with their own voices reading it? SO.. these are some ideas, now just how to do it! If you have any ideas please share!!

I’ve been having a lot of fun making my class website this week.  Please check it out!

Anyways I read a little about the possibilities of video conferencing with schools in France by using Skype. This is something that I’ve been thinking would be really neat to do in my classroom. Check out the presentation here.