Log 7-7-09

Tuesday started out with setting up our blogs. We then added blog links. We took a minute and posted our first blog about our first day. We shared our blogs. Alena suggested that technology could be a specific type of genre in writing. We then took time to refelect on Matt's response to the article for today. In Matt's blog he stated that,"We must meet students where they are and build on knowledge they already have." He summed it all up by stating, "we do have to rethink the ways we teach writing and reading. That can be an exciting challenge." Each of us posted a comment on Matt's blog. Casey expressed his frustrastion with Mark Bauerlein. Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University wrote a book called The Dumbest Generation.

This is a short summary about the book.
The Dumbest Generation presents an uncompromisingly realistic study of the young American mind at this critical juncture. The book also lays out a compelling vision of how we might address its deficiencies. To fail to do so may well mean sacrificing our future to the least curious and intellectual generation in national history.

Casey believes that Bauerlin's views about technology and digitial writing are "poorly conceived and ill-informed." However; Casey does feel that our curriculum does need to be plugged into our students. He shared a video entitled Lost Generation before breaking for lunch.

After lunch we were introduced to Facebook. It was interesting to find out that there are more grandparents using Facebook than High School students. Then we briefly discussed Wikis. Casey stressed how this is a storage hub, but information can accidentally be deleted.

Glogster is a site to compose interactive, digital posters. After creating an account, each of us took time to create a poster of our own. It was fun to see how music, sound and video can be incorporated into a poster. We discussed different ways that this could be used in our classrooms.

Finally, we began building websites on weebly.com. This is a free site where anyone can create web pages. We learned how to create hyperlinks, copy and paste videos from YouTube and experiment with all of its different tools.

We ended our day by viewing the video The Machine Is Using Us.


To learn more about blogging we visited Blogs in Plain English.

AI Reflection

Monday was great! I was really nervous before we began. Technology tends to really intimidate me. I was really afraid all of this would be over my head! I was relieved to get here and see how comfortable the atmosphere was. We discussed the two articles we read and how important technology is now. I learned the new word multimodal. Then we learned about powerpoint. I couldn't believe how easy it was to use. It got my wheels turning about how and when I will use this with my class. Then we experimented with moviemaker. I am really excited about this! I have wanted to learn how to do this for my students and family. I liked how Matt said we should try to incorporate using the computer into lessons we already teach.