cyber communication

OK, I think I prefer blogging to voice thread. I don't want to feel like I have to rehearse what I want to say before I say it and go back and cancel and save again. If I don't like what I'm saying in my blog, I can delete as I go before I make an official post.
Anyway, I read the Keteyian article on cyber communication and, well, while I can understand finding a way to communicate with kids by using methods that they are comfortable with, I think there is a risk of creating forms of antisocial behavior by encouraging instant messaging when you are within the same building. My wife and I do it once in a while just to be foolish, knowing the other is in the very next room, or with one of the kids who may be online on their own computer upstairs. 99.99 percent of our communication in the house is face-to-face, or at least through the use of our voices. If the parent and child find it more comfortable to IM each other, fine; I just don't see the need to encourage it. Sometimes we have to learn to leave our comfort zone (which I did by posting my voice thread....not comfortable, but I did it).
As far as the overuse of technology, I have to concur with Keteyian that it (use of technology) is becoming more prevalent with today's youth. Between cell phones, Internet communications, television and other various media, and online gaming, kids today are spending way too much time in front of the tube and not enough time getting physical activity (like I'm one to talk here). Hey, I work 65 hours a week, and it's all physical, so I've earned my right to a little tube time. 7.5 hours a day with electronic devices is almost half of kids' waking hours-------->obesity in America. It does kind of add up, if you look at it long enough, but by doing that, you're not getting any exercise. I'll save the obesity speech for another time, though. It's just the concept of what technology and its roles in communication have become over the last 20 years. Is it a problem? That depends on how you want to define what should and shouldn't happen in communication.

morning news

This is something that, as a participant, we tried back in 1983 as a class. It was a one-time thing that we did with the given technology of the day. We wanted to get an idea of what newscasters and anchorpeople did on the air as part of our current events studies, so we did a news program with local news, sports, and weather. We added our own little twist to it so it looked a bit more like Saturday Night Live than a real news broadcast, where the "audience" would throw paper and other harmless stuff at the news or sports anchor while they were trying to read their script, just to have some fun with it, and that we did. It was a learning experience that we managed to turn into fun.
Today's technology would make it so much better. Classes can actually utilize YouTube to put their "news" on the Internet and view later on, even a year or two after the fact, like an archive of sorts. I believe it would be exciting for the kids in high school to go on YouTube and view themselves as sixth-graders doing a news broadcast and looking at the posted replies. It is also a way for kids in other states and countries to view the same thing and see what you do in your school. That's just my viewpoint, anyway.

project learning

This is what it is all about. By the seventh or eighth grade year, students should be actively engaged in this form of learning. You might ask why. I believe that students will get more out of their education by seeing and experiencing first-hand how subject material comes to life and is used. One thing that really comes out of project learning is the life experience that comes along with the learning. Another important benefit is that, through the experience of projects, the students can "fail" without actually failing. That may sound a bit funny, but we can't expect that all projects that are undertaken by the students will be successful. However, if the students do everything that they are supposed to do and perform well, the "failures" that they may experience won't be crucial. In fact, it would do the students well to occasionally "fail" a project. Now I'm using quotes around the word fail because they are still learning. It's not like they are designing the new engine for the space shuttle and if they mess that up, okay, that would be a critical failure and lives would be lost. By experiencing their mistakes through project learning and actually learning from these mistakes, those mistakes won't be made when it actually counts in real life. Project learning is like a simulation machine for life; if you screw up, it's okay---no one gets hurt but you see where you made your errors so you don't make that error next time. Life is not a multiple-choice test, though sometimes it seems like it when we're faced with options and more than one answer seems likely. I'm pretty sure I would get a failing grade if that were the case. Let me get back to the word "fail" again for a moment. I don't want to come across as believing that the students will fail. I want to come across as being the one to say, "Okay, so this didn't go as planned; let's back up and see what went wrong and correct it." By doing this, the students get to deal with temporary failure, but eventual success. After all, isn't this what we want the students to do?

a bright idea

This sounds like a facetious title, but actually it's not. Gathering just from the news story, Vine Street School here in Bangor conducted a project recently that integrated math, social studies, and phys ed. What the students did were, in groups, chose (or were assigned, not sure) countries which they were to study, the history and culture and the like. This was the social studies portion. Then, they "represented" these countries in their own Olympics that ran concurrently with the Winter Olympics recently held in Vancouver, British Columbia. This integrated the math and phys ed portions. Whoever dreamed up this idea is an educational genius. The kids got actively engaged in the study of their prospective countries and had fun competing in their "Olympics", which allowed them to perform some physical activity and get much needed exercise, especially during the months where kids generally don't get that exercise. You think we can come up with some similar ideas for integrating subject areas and genuinely show how what we study in school is applicable in the outside world? This is how we should be teaching our students, not putting a bubble sheet in front of them and making them take multiple-guess assessments and using that to measure their performance. They won't be taking these exams when they're in the real world solving real-world problems.