Journal 9: (NETS-T I, II, & III)

Teaching Green

Water, J.K. (2011). Teaching green. The Journal, 38(4), Retrieved from http://thejournal.com/Articles/2011/04/06/Teaching-Green.aspx?sc_lang=en&Page=1

Summary: This article provides a comprehensive list of online tools that can help educators inform and instruct their students about environmental issues. Surprisingly, it has been 41 years since the first Earth Day was established. Within nine months of this day, President Nixon passed the National Environmental Act, which produced a new subject area to arrive in schools. Some key websites for educators to use and latch onto that are discussed in this article include:

Classroom Earth:

- The content at this site can be included in daily lesson plans.

- The National Education Foundation in partnership with The Weather Channel created it.

- The aim is to enhance and strengthen environmental education in high school classrooms nationwide and to include environmental education into all high school subjects.

- A resource library includes lesson plans, videos, and links to other websites.

A Walk in the Woods:

- This site is aimed towards urban students in the 3th-5^th grade.

- A virtual trip through the woods with photos and sound effects and voice over narration provides students with a look into the wild.

- The Urban Programs Resource Networks of the University of Illinois developed it.

- This site also has a list of activities for teachers to do with their students.

Power Up:

- Free downloadable game where players have to learn how to save our planet where environmental disasters threaten our world.

Question 1: Which site can you incorporate into your classroom?

A1: A walk in the woods would be a great site to use to show my students about places they may not ever get to see. Classroom earth also seems like it would have some great lesson plans that I can incorporate into my subjects effectively.

Question 2: How can I help my students be greener?

A2: Incorporating environmental issues into my lesson plans will be valuable but also spending time explaining how they can help. A lot of families do not recycle or teach their children about recycling. By devoting time to this issue in my classroom, my students will be more informed and educated and be able to help our environment more and be proud of it.  

Journal 8: (NETS-T IV, V)

Point/Counterpoint: Should Schools Be Held Responsible for Cyberbullying?

Bogacz, R., & Gordillo, M.G. (2011). Point/counterpoint: should schools be held responsible for cyberbullying? Learning and Leading with Technology, 38(6), Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading/issues/Point_Counterpoint_Should_Schools_Be_Held_Responsible_for_Cyberbullying.aspx

Summary: The issue of cyber-bulling greatly affects students, schools, and parents. This article discusses the two sides revolving around the question of if schools should be help responsible for cyber-bulling. The results show that 30 percent of those polled responded yes and 70 percent responded with no. The reasons for each side are as follows:

"Yes, schools should be held responsible for cyber-bulling."

Due to the fact that cyber-bulling affects classrooms and schools, then schools cannot ignore it. However, all groups need to be involved in order for the issue to be addressed correctly. This includes teachers, students, school administrators, and parents as well. Teachers need to listen to students, know rules, laws and resources to help those who come forward as victims. They also need to know to never assume that bullying is typical behavior. Students need to be educated about what they can do to help victims because bystanders are sometimes fearful of getting involved. Administrators should establish clear rules and enforce consequences of bullying. Parents should also be more involved in monitoring children’s phones and internet usage.

"No, schools should not be held responsible for cyber bulling."

From this viewpoint, parents are the one who should be the responsible party. Schools have too many other serious issues to address that this cannot be one of them. There are too many children problems rooted from the parents that the schools cannot fix. More support at home can possibly fix the children’s feelings of needing to harass others. Parents are the first to educate their children and need to learn how to be the primary education provider. Schools should establish an open communication with parents if possible in order to help this serious issue.

Question 1: Should schools be held responsible for cyber-bulling?

A1: This question is hard to answer because I believe that parents and school should both be responsible. Parents should monitor their children more closely and schools should not be afraid to step in if something is brought to their attention. I think having law enforcement come in to talk to the students would be a great way for schools to get more involved. At home, parents should not be afraid to check internet history and monitor online activity such as Facebook.

Question 2: How should children be punished if caught cyber-bulling?

A2: There are many ways to enforce consequences of cyber-bulling and each case is different. However, one good idea would have the child read about effects of bullying and stories about some students that have actually ended their own lives because of it. Then they should have to write a substantially lengthy essay about it compiled with community service.

Journal 6: (NETS-T I, III, IV)

Grow Your Personal Learning Network

Warlick, D. (2009). Grow your personal learning network. Learning & Leading With Technology 36(6), Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading/digital-edition-march-april-2009.aspx

Summary: The concept of personal learning networks are difficult to understand. I believe I am a person capable of learning things quickly and doing enough work to grasp any concept. When I don’t know about a specific topic or how to do something, I feel confident that with a little time and research I can figure it out. PLNs are simply put, really difficult to figure out. I am working on this and grasping it is taking a lot longer than I expected.

One of my favorite parts of this article was that Warlick said, “preparing children for an unpredictable future means helping them learn to teach themselves,” (pg. 16). This couldn’t have been said any better. In our society and with our technological advances and the uncertainty of what will come in the future, we are a culture who individually needs to learn how to ‘figure it out’. People are busy and life is so high paced now that if you want to know more about something or don’t know how to accomplish a task, sadly and rarely will others have time to talk you through it all. Children need to learn how to accomplish knowledge on their own.

In regards to PLN logistics, there are three types of PLNs that are described in this article.

        1. Personally maintained synchronous connections.

   - This includes people and places you consult to answer questions, solve    problems, and accomplish daily goals.

   - This includes chat, instant messages, text messages, teleconferencing, iChat, Skype, Twitter among others. 

2. Personally and socially maintained semi-synchronous connections.  

   - This includes texting, facebook profiles, Twitter, group discussion boards, blogs, wikis, google docs and mailing lists, etc.

   -  Semi-synchronous is collaboration but does not have to happen in real time.

         

         3. Dynamically maintained asynchronous connections.

   - While the first two connect us with each other, this type of PLN connects us with sources that we think are valuable.

            - This includes RSS aggregators and sites like Diigo.

Educators have to be learners as well and they need to gain and develop skills to use the tools that are available to enhance their teaching. While traditional tools like phones, chats, emails, and mailing lists are still valuable; there are many new ways to effectively accomplish gathering information through PLNs where the heart is it’s members.

Question 1: What are some examples of PLNs that are not utilized among educators as much as they should be?

A1: Although I cannot take a survey of every educator, I do know what tools are not being used that often amongst the teachers I know. These include blogs, Twitter, and Diigo. Among these, in my opinion, Diigo is a great tool to help find information that is valuable. For example, as the article points out, typing into google can return an infinite amount of resources. Typing that same subject into Diigo can return sites that others have bookmarked as valuable. It saves time and can be more effective.

Question 2: Which tool(s) would I like to utilize more as a future educator?

A2: Diigo is a very valuable tool to retrieve relative, valued information so this would definitely be one of them. The other tool I would like to utilize more would be Twitter. The chats are amazing and so valuable. Another tool I would like to use as a teacher would be a blog. It would be great to have a parent blog and a students blog where everyone could communicate with each other independently and also with me. 

Journal 7: My Personal Learning Network

A personal learning network (PLN) is basically a system for lifelong learning. For educators (like my future self) it helps to take control of their teaching by compiling resources that will aid in setting learning goals, and will help tremendously in the arena of communication with others. A personal learning network is also problem-based in that with any question one may have; they can most likely effectively, efficiently, and quickly find the answer. This type of network can be manipulated to the individual. This means as a hopeful middle school math teacher, I can adapt my PLN to my liking and my needs as a classroom teacher.

Twitter is a great tool to learn things from others across the nation and even the world. It is intriguing and exhilarating to connect, share, and learn from others who share the same common education enriching goals that I do. My network currently consists of not only other students who are in the same process and school as I am but it contains valuable people who can aid as a resource in my teaching. I have a male principal I am following who provides a lot of information to new teachers, which will also be beneficial in the future if I decide to get into administration. Another person I am following is a male math and business teacher from Canada who caught my eye because he posted an interesting Dateline NBC story on school bullying. A female primary teacher who is experimenting with new teaching tools is also in my network. She has some interesting tweets about technology tools that can be used in the classroom that I have not thought about before.

Another member is a male math teacher from near by (in the Pacific Northwest). He seems to be working in a middle school and a math teacher, which is directly in the field that I would like to be in. An exciting thing happened when a male math teacher from the UK responded to one of my tweets asking for referrals of who to follow so of course he is part of my network as well. I have quite a few others that I am following as well and I hope this number grows with valuable tweeters to add to my PLN.

On Wednesday March 30, 2011, I attended a New Teacher Chat (#ntchat) that started at 5pm PST. This chat is dedicated to helping new teachers become acclimated to the teaching profession and allows attendees to share ideas and collaborate through supportive information. The topic featured the website TeachHub and the issue of active engagement in the classroom. Ideas included using individual dry erase boards in the classroom, letting students select their own topic when doing a project, google apps and wikis, twitter, interactive white board, an app called multiplication battle, saying things like snap once if you agree, a website that allows you to create cartoons easily called toondoo or bitstrips, a website which shows how to use SmartBoard, thatquiz.org which produces math quizzes, studyisland.com, response clickers (or pollseverywhere.com), and edmodo.com (social learning for classrooms) among many more useful ideas.

Along with Twitter, Diigo can also be a great networking tool for teachers. My library and saved links can be shared with others and I can look into what teachers in my field have also saved as important. There are so many different resources and websites available that it is impossible to get all of the information just by hearce. Diigo offers individuals a chance to share and get answers even when you may not know exactly how to ask for what is needed. Some of the websites I found were saved under the tag PLN. One of these include a website which beaks down exactly what a PLN is. Defining this can be difficult and this site does a decent job of accomplishing this task. Another site saved is a PLN for educators. Here podcasts, chats, videos and event information is provided. Another site provides a wide range of PLN examples that educators can use. A final site tagged under PLN describes how educators keep updated with technology information.

The digital discussion forum that I joined and added the badge to my blog was Classroom 2.0. I explored this site and learned a lot more than I expected to. One of the videos that caught my eye is about iPads in the classroom. This correlates with the discussion I participated in on Twitter and is interesting because I have an iPad. At Puster Elementary, a 3rd grade teacher Mrs. Price, persuaded her school to get iPads instead of iPod touches for her classroom. The students love this tool and it’s a wonderful way for them to engage and participate in the classroom while having fun. Although this is a wonderful idea, it’s a reality that many schools can not afford technology like this.