PTP: Mendeley

I would introduce Mendeley in my classroom during an Inquiry/ Research Unit to help students organize their online sources and articles. As a student, there is nothing more frustrating than when you find a useful article and cannot find it again later. As a university student, it is hard for me to remember all the steps I went through to find it in the first place, so I can only imagine how frustrating it might be for a junior high or high school-aged student. By introducing students to Mendeley, students will be able to save links and citations to websites and articles that they can return to whenever they are ready to use them.

Also, Mendeley formats their citations in the style of their choosing, so students no longer have to worry about doing that themselves. I still recommend that students double check Mendeley's citations (because sometimes the program struggles to pick up all the information), but that is one less thing for students to have to stress about.

I would also recommend this programs for group work or projects. Mendeley can be particularly helpful if students are falling behind in their group work. By forming a group online, they can share sources, post comments, swap notes and get anything done at home that they could not do in class. It would be interesting, as well, to try coordinating with teachers and classes in other schools or districts to form inter-school student research groups. I'd have to think a little more about a reason and purpose for such an assignment. Inter-state/school sharing might be more helpful/ a better activity for university students.

I'm glad I chose to use Mendeley as part of my project. It has been particularly helpful for me at the end of the school year as I try to organize all that I've learned in my class readings. I can organize the articles I've read by subject: teaching reading, teaching writing, teaching grammar, etc. My professors use a lot of online material, so it's been great to be able to move all my readings into one organized location. I also love being able to put tabs and notes electronically on the readings so that I don't have to print and mark every article. It's also useful because once I'm done with the semester, I will still have access to all the materials that were available to me during the school year. I will be able to look back on them and use them for other classes or situations in the future.

PTP: Powerpoint Games

Creating a Powerpoint game was a great experience for me. Before this class, I didn't realize that you could create a game in that program. I remember playing "jeopardy-style" games in some of my junior high and high school classes growing up, but I don't think I ever made the connection with Powerpoint. It was nice for me to learn how Powerpoint can be used in contexts other than just presentations. One of the things I've learned this semester is that I don't need to be a technology/media whiz in order to use technology effectively in the classroom. I don't need to know and use every technology option out there, but I should find a handful and learn them thoroughly enough that I benefit from all the resources those programs have to offer.

In the case of Powerpoint, I understood the program from a slides/presentation standpoint, but I did not know what else I could do with the program. Now that I know I can make games in Powerpoint, it makes me curious to see if there is another way I can use the program. I want to experiment with this program more in the future to see if I can find new ways to incorporate it into my classroom.

I don't feel like I ran into a lot of problems as I created my Powerpoint game because it is a program that I already have some familiarity with. I created my game much like I would a presentation. Only the hyperlinking to other slides made this project different from creating a slide show, but it was easy to do. The process was not difficult, it just took time to get all the information for the game and then put it into the program.

I would probably use powerpoint games as a way to review for a test or a quiz. I could use the relatively simple questions to spark conversation and then go into greater discussion from there. Hopefully, the ideas we discuss as we go through the questions will help students gain greater insight that they can use on essays.

Internet Safety

For this assignment, I watched the PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online. I was struck by the subheading, "Just how fast is the internet transforming the experience of childhood?". I thought it was an interesting question, so I kept it in the back of my mind as I watched the video. I have to say, I felt like the documentary shed light on a lot of the ugly aspects of internet use: lies, cyberbullying, predators, etc. It made me feel like growing up with the internet is a terrible thing. I had to remind myself that the internet was around for most of my teenage years and I turned out just fine. In fact, I found a lot of positive ways to use the internet in high school. I think I have to remember this as a parent and a teacher-- the internet really can be a tool in my students' education. The key is to help them see it as a tool and not as a lifestyle, a tool can be used for both good and for bad.

I believe that students understand the dangers and the importance of keeping themselves safe from strangers and potential predators on the internet. They seem to have a good handle on what is appropriate and what is not. The one major problem I interpreted from the video is that teenagers see the internet as a place for self expression without consequences. As one person in the video put it, "discretion and privacy become a thing of the past." Teenagers believe that the internet is a safe place for them to be completely honest because there is no one there to scold or judge them. The problem is, nothing said on the internet is ever erased-- what they say now as teenagers will be available forever. As a teacher and a parent, I think that's what I'll tell my students more than anything else. Even though they feel like they don't have an audience, they do. And that audience can become a lot bigger or more dangerous than they ever intend.

As a teacher and a parent, I can't control what my kids and students do, even if I take their passwords and monitor them, but I can teach them to use discretion in the things they share online about themselves and others. In the video, they used the example of a boy who committed suicide. His parents explained that they don't blame the computer for what their son did, but they believed it played a part in leading their son to his death. Students need to be aware that the things they say in passing on the internet can have a lasting effect on the lives of others. Just like in their face-to-face interaction, a little kindness can go a long way.

After I watched the video, I talked to my mom about what I learned. I focused my comments on the importance of parents monitoring how much time their children spend on the internet and communicating with their children about what they do while they are online. My mom has pretty strong opinions on internet use. She blocked youtube on our family computer, not because you can find inappropriate videos there (although you can), but because she didn't want her family to waste hours watching videos when we could be doing something better. This may sound extreme, but it is a personal choice that my parents made for my family. She and my dad also keep the family computer in a location of the house where no one is alone for long. My parents trust their children and each other implicitly, but we know that it's better for all of us to

be in public places when we are online. Somehow it keeps us from becoming so focused on the computer that we forget about life.

I also shared with my mom some of the things I learned about cyberbullying. I think the information surprised her. She's always assumed that the biggest dangers for teens on the internet are online predators and pornography. It's hard for my mom to imagine teenagers going to the internet to deal with their problems or to say unkind things about each other. I think she found the information useful, in spite of the fact that it was difficult to hear about some of the hurtful things teenagers do to one another. My mom works with the beehives in our ward-- she told me that more parents of teens ought to learn more about how to keep their kids safe on the internet.

Instructional Video

Here is the instructional video I made for class.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkRMrQTjiMc

It is meant to show one way that students could use technology in the classroom to make a video of their favorite scene from a book. This is a scene from the novel, Anne of Green Gables. It is also in the style of the Harry Potter Puppet Pals videos.

Storyboard

Here is the link to the Google document with my storyboard:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Onw-CSz4QxDa3Is7V0X8kRuskamopZ8zIb72YOVGGKA/edit?hl=en#

The storyboard is for a book trailer I will do for my multimedia project.

Copyright Assignment

This is a video that a veteran made in honor of the 4th of July. One thing that he did well with regards to copyright was that he cited the song (in this case, "America the Beautiful") and the artist (Ray Charles). Also, some of the pictures that he used had the name of the photographer in the bottom corner, giving them credit. The majority of the photographs, however, do not mention the name of the photographers. He also does not give the names of any of the photographs, nor where exactly he accessed them. At the end of the video, the veteran acknowledges that he took the images from "Various Internet Sources," but he does not specify which websites he used, nor if the images were Creative Commons sources.

To correct his mistakes, the veteran would need to make a caption on each image, stating who took the picture and the title of the images (if they have titles). He should also make a note of where he found each image (the URL where he accessed them). Since he is not making this video for educational purposes, he should seek permission from the right sources/pay for the right to use the images, unless he uses creative commons sources, in which case, he should specify that the photographs are free and accessible to the public.