The students have a test coming up on the typing techniques that they have been working on so they have been practicing with a partner the last couple of minutes of every class. It is fun for them to review/study in a different way then they are used to!
http://quizlet.com/_14wre3
The students have a test coming up on the typing techniques that they have been working on so they have been practicing with a partner the last couple of minutes of every class. It is fun for them to review/study in a different way then they are used to!
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The two resources I chose were on cyberbullying since that is one of the topics that I am able to cover besides keyboarding during the quarter. The first resource is: http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/dgn09.la.rv.visual.elements.salifeonline/life-online/ from PBS Learning Media. I really like that you can make the students their own accounts and that they can go through at their own pace to complete the activity. It has a different video for each segment and then thought provoking questions that they need to answer after they've watched the videos.
The second is http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=/newliteracies/jaal/4-04_column/ from the M.O.R.E. site. This starts off with a chat between some students and ends up talking about rules to use when online to stay safe and be a responsible Internet user! Anything that uses their online language usually catches their attention so I think they'd enjoy this resource! The podcast that I shared with my colleagues was about personal and professional digital footprints and whether you should separate personal and professional social media. It is something that none of us have ever talked about at our staff meetings or anything but you are constantly hearing about in the news how some teacher got fired over something they posted on Facebook or tweeted about.
I only know one of our teachers here that uses social media in his class as a resource. After going through each of the resources, my favorites for having the most on the topics that I searched for were TeacherTube and SchoolTube. They were very easy to sign up for and search for content. The students thought it was neat how they were almost like home videos that they could make on their own and were real people and students like them learning how to type on the keyboard. The one I ended up using on my class website as a tutorial and for the students to reference for hand placement was http://www.schooltube.com/video/72fea4567c54a813de3c/Basic%20Keyboarding. They liked having the visual of a real pair of hands showing them how to hold their hands/fingers to use the proper technique on the keyboard.
Mistreamnet was also interesting with how it tags where the videos came from (what organizations or topics covered). I like how many of them are from conferences that I'm familiar with and have been to. I choose to research articles about the topic "digital footprint" since that is something that I cover with my students and is always an issue that both parents and students have a hard time understanding. I found an academic journal with a good article on the impacts of social media. The citation is below!
O'Keeffe, G., Clarke-Pearson, K., & Council on Communications and Media. (n.d.). The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families. Pediatrics: Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, 800-804. http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/fisher/
The website does provide dates with the pictures and captions but they are all outdated. It looks like the website was created in 2004 but I don't see anywhere that it has been updated. I would not use this site in a bibliography for any type of paper or research that I was ever doing. When you start reading the information one the website it does not make sense and is hard to follow. You would definitely be better off using a book or encyclopedia. It looks like Tim Vasquez is the author of the website and I cannot locate any type of credential that he would have to create a website with this type of material on it. I do not see anywhere on the website where he has cited any other information where he collected his information from. It is a .com site and the URL, "weathergraphics" has nothing to do with the content and does not make sense. It is not linked to any reputable sites of any kind. It is a personal site that is designed to inform the reader about the Fisher Price Airplane. He talks a little bit about the government but it is a .com, personal site. I don't believe that he has an underlying message or is trying to persuade anyone of anything - at least I didn't detect anything. It is easy to navigate but that's only because there is just one page - no tabs or other links to click on. The images go along with what he talks about but are just silly. I particularly like one of the last lines where he says that the Fisher Price place would easily connect people to Sesame Street :-) http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html First of all, this site made me smile! They do cover the topic comprehensively I thought, although very silly. It is definitely a unique site as I have never seen or heard anything quite like it before. It looks like the website was created in 2002 and last updated in 2011. One of the links doesn't work but the others work and all make sense with what the site is about. I would not be including this site in a bibliography because I can't imagine that I would ever be using information like that! It's a .com site and has links to both the CEO and two of the co-founders of Google. It doesn't say who the actual creator is but it is a Google site. There are many other sites that have linked it but are all spoofs and joking around about it that I have seen. I think that they are trying to educate people on how Google searches are done. They provide graphs and data and everything that possible to convince of the validity of the program. If someone really didn't know better they might believe what is on the site! I don't think there are any hidden or underlying messages. I just think that they are being silly and pretending like they are educating people on how Google really works when it comes to their searching techniques. I think that the site is easy to navigate. There are several links and I only found one that didn't work. I didn't see any grammar or spelling mistakes. The graphs and images go right along with the content on the site. It's not a very large site but all of the content makes sense for what they are talking about. I added 4 websites that students could use to research information on technology. These are listed with the rest of my resources for me students on my Resources page.
My 8th grade students are learning about earthquakes in science so that is what we did the search on. The students liked that they got a lot more hits using the Student Edition, 942 versus 67 with the Junior Edition. Both databases seem similar in their content giving images, videos, podcasts, and then academic journals, books, and news. Both databases seem appropriate for my 8th grade group. They both are set up in a very similar manner so once the students and I explored the first they were very comfortable with the second. Based on the types of magazines and names (many of them we agreed we were familiar with like Science News) both databases seemed credible. Usability wasn't a problem once you explored the database for a little while and understood what all of the tabs were and how to narrow your search or look for specific things. The students and I both agreed that both were great resources to use for searching for information but the Student Edition had a lot more choices than the Junior Edition so that was everyone's favorite!
I love plagiarism checkers! When my students come to me in middle school they have no idea that teachers can simply copy and paste their document to check it. So many of them are used to simply copy and pasting work from websites and turning it in as their own. This is a great tool to be able to not only keep the students on track but also help them really understand that their writing needs to be just that, their own. This is great to go over before they start a research project. Taking a paper that you say you have done that is made up of a bunch of plagiarized material and letting them check it and see what it comes up as would really be an eye opener for them and hopefully deter them from ever doing that on any of their own work since they see how easy it is to check. Having them check their own paper as they go through the writing process would be beneficial to them to see how they are doing will paraphrasing and putting things into their own words.
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AuthorI am a computer teacher for middle school students in the Melvindale-Northern Allen Park School District. I have a beautiful 1 year old girl named Alexis and love being a mommy! We are expecting our second child (a boy) at the end of July! Archives
April 2015
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