Goodbye For Now

Goodbyes are not forever.
Goodbyes are not the end.
They simply mean I'll miss you
Until we meet again!

Summary Post

What I have learned this semester:
*Blogs- I know how to make them, write posts, connect with people, and follow fellow students and teachers.
*Presentations- I gave a few Google Docs presentations orally in class. I know how to put together a slide show and present the material to the class.
*Google Docs and Forms- I love this! It is saved online so you can pull up your presentation from any location!
*Posts that I have read- I would say I have learned the most this semester from the posts that I have read. I loved hearing what other educated people have to say about the information I am interested in.
*Personal Learning Network- I used this many times this semester, especially for group projects because then the websites that you got your research from are visible to all your group members.
*Twitter- I like Twitter! I don't really see how it is used for education purposes, but it's fun!
*Comments4kids- Watching these little kid's videos and reading their blogs made me really want to do that in my class when I am a teacher! I will do it!
*iTunes and iTunesU- I use iTunes on a daily bases. For long car rides, iTunesU is a great learning tool! Keeps your mind active and you get to learn from different professors around the world!
*HTML tag modifiers- These are SO tricky! I am glad I learned how to use them though, because now I can accommodate a person with a visual impairment.
*Me as a professional- I created a professional blog to market myself and to display the values that I enforce as a teacher.
*Data Bases- I always use data bases for sources when writing papers. A great resource!
*Google Earth- This was a really fun project. I liked learning how to create a tour.
*Skype- This is a free and easy way to stay connected with people from all over the world. My teacher uses it for guest lecturers. Last week we had a speaker from California!
*Delicious-My partners and I used this bookmarking site for group projects. So convenient!
*ACCESS & ALEX- Definitely resources I am going to use when I become a teacher. There are over 2000 lesson plan ideas on there!!
*Foliotec- I like Foliotec because it stores all the work that I have done and organizes it for when I am getting certified as a teacher.
*technological literacy- I came into this class very technological illiterate! But now, with the patience from Mr.Sullivan I am very literate!
*the future of schools- I think the future schools will all have SmartBoards and webcams and blogs. The students will develop PLN's and stay connected with the world around them.
*my "intellectual trail"- I guess if I had to rate myself in walking on the trail on knowledge, I would put myself in the deep deep jungle, bending at a secret stream and cupping my hands full of water and looking at my reflection.





I would have loved to have learn how to make a website!

I am going to use most of the stuff I have used in this class, but I think I will stop writing blogs until I start teaching, in the event I might develop carpel-tunnel.

This class excited me. I liked learning creative things that I can do in my future classroom and I especially liked the lecture videos that we had to blog about. They really made me think. This leads into the next question about "intellectually challenging" material in this course. I think the hardest part of this course was the reflecting in blogs part.

I was bored in class because of the computers themselves. We need new ones because these freeze up ALL OF THE TIME!!!!

I really learned a lot from this class and have already taught my friends a thing or two. My favorite part of this course was pod casting!!!!!!!! I would say that I am Good technologically literate, but there of course is room for improvement. I am going to stay up-to-date with new technology and in the future, implement it in my classroom!

3 Lists

Here are my top 2 favorite points from each of these 3 lists:
1. Seven Stupid Mistakes Made by Teachers
1. "Not backing up data. "You mean having two copies of my files on the hard drive doesn't count as a backup?" The first time a teacher loses his or her precious data, my heart breaks. The second time, well, stupidity ought to cause some suffering." Well this was #1. Off of the bat I was like YES!!! I do this ALL of the time! I write an amazingggg paper, forget to save it when I am typing, then something happens and i lose it! It is SO frustrating!
2. "Thinking online communication is ever private." People I have known have fallen victim to this. They post personal information on facebook and get stalked or they post a picture of that crazy Saturday night and their Grandma sees it. Anyone can see the pictures you post and the things you do online. I have heard of people getting fired from a job because of it.
2. New Classroom Rules by Education Innovation
1. "Bring required materials, including your laptop and cell phone every day." UM.....YES!!! I wish my teachers would have let me bring a phone to school growing up! I have sat in detention many times when I was in Middle School because of my cell phone! Great new rule!
2. "Be polite, courteous, and respectful at all times in both physical and virtual space" Everyone needs to use good manors, and online is no exception!
3. Seven Brilliant Things Teachers do With Technology:
1."Put kids in touch with the world." I am tired of seeing these kids with such narrow and selfish views of the world. Our way of living is not the only one. We are the minority of the world.
2. "Use the kids’ own devices to teach them." Teach the students what they want to learn and what they will benefit from.

Importance of a collaborative professional blog

I think that collaborating on anything is better than doing it alone. Two brains are better than one right? I found the 'attheteachersdesk' blogspot very interesting! I liked the post that talked about the children creating fake money to get real money to clean lead- contaminated soil. Because of this teacher's blog, I saw what they were trying to accomplish and maybe other teachers saw this too and made their students draw some fake money. I like how it mentions a blog as a digital portfolio. I have never thought about that before.

Reactions to Michael Wesch's video

I have read George Orwell's book 1984. I agreed that when media changes our lives and culture. the core ideas happen on television, and the conversations make up our incompetent culture. We hope that the new media will change the front lines of society. The classrooms today and not politically engaged. Kids today get bombarded with news all day, yet they don't care about the world's problems. Everyone has the lonely "one in a million" insignificant feeling, and this is portrayed on TV, such as American Idol. Michael Wesch goes on to talk about the MTV generation. He says that they are narcissistic, materialistic, short term memory, and not easily impressed. I agree. He says that they say 'whatever' and that is there attitude about life. Since this is my generation, I can relate really well. My generation has had everything handed to us and we really don't care about much. I see this in college too. My friends don't strive to get A's, they are fine with C's.
In the future, when I am a teacher, I think that these bad characteristics will only worsen. I will have to show my students that hard work pays off and not to give up. I will give them opportunities to get involved in programs bigger than themselves.

The Importance of Blogging

I think that blogging is an important tool for learning. Like the video of PS22 Choir singing the song Landslide by Fleetwood Mac would never have been heard or seen if it wasn't for blogging and sites like Youtube.
If it werent for blogging you would not be reading my thoughts right now. Some people don't understand the point of blogging, but those people aren't thinking about it from an educators point of view. When we did "comments for kids," we encouraged young minds to continue to be creative and we encouraged them to keep blogging! Blogs really do open up the communication barriers between ages, races, and even whole countries! I love going and reading fellow educators blogs to get information or ideas!

ACCESS

ACCESS, or the Alabama Connecting Classroom, Educators and Students Statewide, is a distant learning program aimed at Alabama High schools. Their vision is: The State of Alabama will provide equal access to high quality instruction to improve student achievement through distance learning. It allow high school students to take part in AP and other courses that may not be offered to them in their current school. It is also a way for educators to share ideas and gain new experiences with coworkers and students.
I think that ACCESS is a great tool for students who go to schools that don't offer the classes that they need or want to take. If students don't feel challenged enough, they can go to this site and pick up another class and earn credit for it too! I think ACCESS is a great tool for students seeking to go beyond their high school for education.



The state has set these goals for ACCESS:

The goal of ACCESS is to continue to meet objectives of the ACCESS plan, expanding the availability of ACCESS Distance Learning to all public high schools in the state.

- Provide access to advanced diploma courses.
- Provide access to additional course offerings.
- Provide access to Advanced Placement and dual enrollment/dual credit courses.
- Provide access to remediation and supplemental resources.
- Leverage existing resources and distance learning offerings.
- Provide teachers with additional multimedia and tools to enhance instruction.
- Provide access to courses and resources through the Alabama Supercomputer Authority statewide network infrastructure assuring quality of service delivery.
- Utilize outside evaluation to assess weaknesses and strengths of the program in order to make appropriate adjustments to the implementation of the objectives of ACCESS.

ALEX

ALEX, or the Alabama Learning Exchange, is a easy to use tool for teachers, students, and parents. The website is http://alex.state.al.us. It is a project of the Alabama Department of Education, and is designed to compile educational materials and information into a time-saving one-stop resource for teachers and administrators in Alabama. Their goal is for Alabama's students to reap the benefits of Alabama educators sharing their wealth of expertise and knowledge with colleagues. ALEX is a way for teachers to share and write lesson plans,share and find resources, connect to course study standards, and show students the benefit of learning. ALEX has a library of lesson plans for all subjects and grade levels. Alabama teachers can log in to their account to access a personal space to create and adapt lesson plans. However, teachers everywhere can access the lesson plan library. Although lessons are targeted to Alabama state standards, they can be easily adapted to any school's curriculum. There are over 2,000 lesson plans supplied by Alabama teachers available on ALEX. These resources are designed to engage students and teachers in 21st century learning, and expand new opportunities.


I never knew that this site existed! This excites me so much because one day I will be a teacher and I will use this!!! I love that it has state-approved lesson plans on it and that it shows how long they will take. I like that it has a search engine in it, so that I can find what I'm looking for quickly! ALEX has won various awards so I know that it is a valuable teaching tool!

Mr. Chamberlain's class blog and Dear Kaia

This was so cool! I can't imagine how happy and surprised Mr. Chamberlin's class was when Kaia's dad wanted to speak to them! I bet they loved it! What a way to get students involved and getting them to love learning! When Kaia's dad wrote to the class I bet it showed them that their efforts were not in vein and that their hard work paid off! They got to talk to a real person! I see more and more of this kind of teaching and learning in the future! This is big!

My Google Form Be Poppin'

Click here to take my survey!

New Media Literacies Project

According to Newmedialiteracies.org, "Project New Media Literacies (NML), a research initiative based within MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, explores how we might best equip young people with the social skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants in an emergent media landscape and raise public understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural world."

So it is a set of skills that these people from MIT came up with to help people become more technologically savvy.

The skills they talk about are:

judgment
negotiation
appropriation
play
transmedia navigation
simulation
collective intelligence
performance
distributed cognition
visualization
multitasking

I think that all of the qualities that the NML stands for will be of great importance in the future. I know that I multi-task every day, I am doing it as I type right now. I think it is going to be even more important for my children to know how to do it. There is so much to do and see now. Collective Intelligence is good because people can accomplish so much more when they are connected, rather than individually. They receive support from their PLN.

The New Media Literacies by the NML Staff

I think that all of the skills that were mentioned in this short video clip are essential to be effective in the future. I think to be an effective artist in the future you will for sure need to know about graphics on the computer and how to use photo editing and manipulating programs. To be a citizen of the future, you will need to know about collective intelligence and trans media navigation because it will be a part of your daily life. Your performance at work will be effected by your skills involving technology. I definitely know how to multitask, as do all of my friends. It's rare these days to meet someone under 30 that doesn't multitask many times a day. The pace of life is very different these days. People are no longer just consumers, they are producers. I am pretty good at judging something on the Internet and deciding if it is appropriate or not. I think that I need to work on appropriation or realizing the norms of the workspace I am in. I could work on that by getting more involved with people of higher education online and learning how to interact with them. I want these skills to connect me to something larger than my individual level.

The Networked Student by Wendy Drexler

The first thing that stuck out to me in this video was the concept of 'connectivism.' I have never heard of that word before and apparently neither has the spell check tool. It is the theory that learning occurs as part of a social network of many diverse connections and ties through technology. It encourages students to strengthen the learning process by getting involved with each others learning. The student has a Personal Learning Network which he uses to keep track of websites that are beneficial to his education. He is connected and learns through sites like Delicious, Blogspot, and Google Docs. He understands that blogs are more opinions and discussions rather than facts, so he makes comments on them and gets involved in the discussions. The student takes advantage of iTunes University and other free educational sites.

I'm not sure if I am ready to be a teacher of such a networked student. I feel as if I am just now becoming a networked student myself! Maybe by the end of this class I will have the knowledge to teach such a technological student. I will try to offer guidance to that student, show what sites are reliable information, and be a guide through the internet. I hope that my students will be prepared for the future and develop PLN's that will follow them to college!

This is How We Dream Parts 1 & 2

I watched this video and thought it was really interesting. Richard Miller wrote a book and it is available online for like $0.60! I think that it is awesome that books are so readily available these days. He talked about his workspace and how it has become a laptop and his research is not library's anymore, its all online. He studied the school shootings without ever stepping into a school. He talks about how once he writes a book it leads a double-life, on the internet and in a library. In a library it is bound to one place, but having it online it is on there forever and available to anyone anywhere. It won't get thrown away or dusty on a shelf. He could add sound to documents along with the visual aspects. He used materials from the past along with materials of the present day. The document became print based and moving picture based. It was an incremental change, not a fundamental change.

I think having books online is awesome! By having sound and moving pictures in documents, it really makes them interactive. It saves time, money, gas, and paper! When you need a book on the go, they are where the internet is. I think it makes learning easier for larger groups of people and even underprivileged people.

Using iPods in the Classroom

http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/12/ipodupdate.html

I found many sites on the internet talking about how useful iPods can be in the classroom. One site in particular talked about how the teacher of a special ed class recorded the test questions onto ipods for her students to listen to them while taking tests.
I looked up what Duke University was using iPods for. They give all incoming freshman a brand new iPod!!! I'm so jealous! They are using them in classrooms and enhancing the lectures. They are not banned in classrooms, they are welcomed. Ipod's are so well known in society, i think it is smart of the education arena to start using this technology. Teachers can record their lectures so that students can listen to them over and over again and even to study by! I wish my university did this!

iTunes University

www.newscientist.com/article/dn16624-itunes-university-better-than-the-real-thing.html




Even before I was enrolled in this Microcomputing class I knew about iTunes University. I saw a segment about it on the news and thought it was the coolest idea! It gives you an inside view into classrooms across the nation, and for free!!! You can go into iTunes and type in any subject that interests you and there will probably be a few college lectures on it! I found a website called newscientist.com and it found that students who downloaded lectures and then took tests scored higher than students who actually attended class! I think that this is so because students do better when studying on their own time. They make the argument that online learning is better than the real thing. Colleges all over the US are on iTunes U! I found podcasts from Harvard, Berkley, and Yale. I think that it really opens up education to the whole world!

As a teacher this tool would be useful for students who were homebound or absent. The teacher could post lectures and make them available to only the students that have an excused absence so they wont fall behind. Teachers could also post extra credit lectures or program enrichment opportunities.

Dr. Christie's Geocaching

Dr. Christie's website is full of useful information and ideas that I could use in the classroom. I was drawn to the section about geocaching! I have never been, but I want to go so bad! If you don't know what geocaching is, it is like a treasure hunt! You have coordinates and a hand held GPS and you go find the 'cache'. I think this would be cool to do with a class because it gets the students using new technology and also teaches them about geography! "Using these tools and activities gives classroom teachers opportunities to instill in students a curiosity about geography, science, mathematics and the world in which they live. GPS units are multidisciplinary, inquiry-driven, field-based tools useful across the K-12 and university curricula." Geocaching would be a great way to spend a few hours outside on a pretty day and at the same time learning about earth!

WIRED by Virgil Griffith

I have never used Wikipedia as a source for school work, as much as I may have been tempted to. However, I do use it for personal knowledge or to look up something that I have a question about. I always knew that anyone can post or edit articles on Wikipedia, that is the point of the website. In the article "WIRED" by Virgil Griffith, he talks about how he invented a tool that tracks down people that post things on Wikipedia. It also said that this doesn't always work. Say you are at Starbucks editing Wikipedia, well Griffith's tool would only trace your edit back to Starbucks not to you personally. So I think that even though this tool exists, Wikipedia will never be a creditable source for school work.

Response to Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Randy Pausch was a great speaker, teacher, and such a brilliant man. After watching this video and knowing that he has died makes me look at my own life. He accomplished so much and even when he had 2 months to live he wasn't out traveling the world, he was teaching. His teaching methods were so hands on and friendly. He was the kind of teacher that everyone loved because he was excited about the subject he was teaching and it showed. He didn't teaching using the conventional methods, but he was innovative and made his own curriculum. I like how he talked about never giving up. He was saying that you should never give up on your dream and he spoke so eloquently I felt that I could do anything. People could listen to him and think he was just lucky. like who in real life is an imagineer?? Randy himself could have taken the first no as the answer, but he kept pursuing and it happened. Same with the zero gravity flight. Everyone told he that he couldn't go, but he didn't take no for an answer. He got a press pass and politely explanined that he was going on that plane, and it would benifit them both. Randy also says that there is a right way and a wrong way of saying the same thing. My mom and Randy are a lot alike. They both are very driven and graceful, but they get what they want. My mom has always taught me to say things in the nicest possible way. His boss gave him a flat-out no, when asked about the imagineer job. The other guy said that it sounded great and he was excited to see one of his best teachers excited about it, but he needed more information. Neither of them say yes, but the first man was just rude. Randy had a lot of wisdom to pass on and I think that he did a good job of it. He encourages group enteraction and learning rather than just lecturing. Teaching should be a process and a journey, and Randy acknolowges that. I am soooo jealous that he got to be an imagineer!!!! I have a few friends that work for Disney and they love it!!!!! I hope to oneday be a part of something like that!!! Thank you Randy for your inspiration and motivation! It seems like you lived an amazing life!

Response to "Is it okay to be a technically illiterate teacher" by Karl Fisch

"Headteachers and Principals who have staff who are technologically-illiterate should be held to account."


This blog was amazing. Karl Fisch is so right about everything he said. People, especially in education, should be ashamed if they are technology illiterate. That to me is the same as saying, "I am so set in my ways and stubborn, I have every opportunity at hand but I will just do things how I have always done them". Or, "I'm too lazy, I don't want to work for anything." I agree with the quote above from Mr. Fisch. Things won't change unless the people in authority say something must be done. I don't understand why some people are proud of their computer illiteracy. I also don't understand why computer classes aren't available at every school, but reading and math sure are. Technology is our future so if children don't have access to it does this mean they have no future?

Response to "It's not about technology" by Kelly Hines

Mrs. Hines touched on some great points in her blog. She seems to really be knowledgeable about not only teaching, but learning too. She listed 4 facts that can help teachers to be successful in the ever evolving teaching field:
1. Teachers must be learners. She was saying that at the beginning every teacher has to pass the same tests and take the same classes, but decades down the road all of their experiences will be different. Teachers continue to evolve and learn what methods are most effective and they learn what doesn't work as well. Teachers must be learners to be effective, period. They must learn what new tools are available and learn how to use them. They have to keep up with what interests their students also.
2. Learning and Teaching are not the same thing. She was saying that if no learning is accomplished then no teaching has been done either. Teachers need not put students in a box and only expect certain things from them. Their ability to learn is limitless as long as they have a teacher that is willing to do some work.
3. Technology is useless without good teaching. She said that no matter how many thousands of dollars a school may spend on technology, if a teacher doesn't use it correctly or at all, then it's worthless. There are sooo many free tools a teacher can use in the classroom today, if their budget is limited. It's really up to the teacher to be creative and up to date on all of the technology available to them.
4. Be a 21st Century Teacher without the technology. This means that as long as a teacher adapts his/her teaching to the students then they will be relevant. A teacher needs to be creative and receptive. Teachers can be modern without all of the modern conveniences. "Those teachers who know how to foster communication and collaboration within their classrooms and school buildings are equipping their students with the abilities to apply these core skills to more areas in their own lives."

Response to- Michael Wesh: A Vision of Students Today

This movie seemed really homemade and it was hard to follow. I liked the concept of it and it caught my eye from the beginning, but it was the camera man didn't do a good job. The camera was never held straight or long enough to read some of the statistics. I like the message of the movie, just not how the footage was shot. Some of the words were written too small and others I just couldn't read. I liked how there were a lot of people involved in this movie. I think the music added a nice touch to it.
My college experience so far has been a little bit of everything. I have lived in dorms for a year, while I went to University of Mobile. Now I live alone and go to South Alabama. At UM all of my teachers knew my name and it was like a family. Everyone knew each other. At USA its totally different. I know one or two people in my classes, the teachers in my major know my name, but for the prerequisites there were like 200 people in my classes. I agree that I have spend hundreds of dollars on textbooks and never opened them. I think this video is great overall, they just need to work on the camera work.

My Presentation

Response to Next Generation Learning

This video was so cool! I have never even seen that interactive whiteboard! I loved how even if students couldn't afford a laptop of their own, they could rent one from the school! I also liked that even when the kids were away on a field-trip the teacher kept the parents up to date on the kids via a blog. I know that if i was a parent I would love to see pictures of my child on the field-trip that very night! I liked how the kids could play the Wii and let off some steam between classes. I know I get fidgety during class and I'm 20! This video made a lot of great points and was very well-made. I am glad that they gave every child an equal opportunity, no matter their religion, social status, or even how shy they were. They make learning accessible to everyone! Go UK!

Reviewing Podcast Resources

I listened to the sound-clip from the NPR Ideastream first. I liked how short it was. I sounded really professional, probably because it was. I think they should have showed the picture that they were discussing on the website so that it could be viewed while listening to the commentary on it.
Second I listened to is the Eagle Nest Radio & Class Blog (3rd Grade Podcasts). I loved this podcast!! It is so well done! I liked the background music and the little kids voices! This just shows me that anyone is capable of making a good podcast. I liked how there was a picture of the class above the sound bite. The children sound like they like what they are talking about and put a lot of emphasis into their words. I like how it was ordered kind of like the news! I love this podcast! When I am a teacher I want to have a podcast with my class!

Response to last semester's videocast

I thought the opening credits looked nice. There was music in the background and it sounded clear. When the podcast started and the people introduced themselves, they didn't look at the camera. They also didn't speak very loud. I think they should have been seated at a smaller table so that the camera could zoom in a bit more. I think the people in the video cast make it more boring than it should be. I think Dr. Strange does a good job as the mediator. I like how clear the camera is and the microphone is good too, its just too far away for some of the people to be heard as well as the others. I don't like how the students look like they are reading from a script. They may not have been, but it appeared that way. In my podcast, if I do a videocast, I will not use a script, maybe just rehearse before we film. Are we going to be given a topic for our podcasts? If not, I want to do something interesting! (no offense) I thought that the lady named Kitty was a really good speaker. She had good comments to add to the discussion and she used her hands to talk. I don't like how long this video was. It was a little redundant and it took my computer like 15 minutes to load.

Picture Modifiers

Podcast Response

I was kind of familiar with Podcasts and Video Podcasts even before listening to these podcasts. I subscribe to some surfing video podcasts, The Soups podcast, and few others that spark my interest. I don't know how some people don't use these or haven't even heard of them before! They are so cool! I like downloading them to my Ipod and listening to them when I am driving to my parents house across the bay. I didn't know how to search for specific podcasts. When I first started looking up the podcasts I was a little bit rusty, but then I caught on.
I listened to all of the recommended podcasts and gathered many ideas of what I liked and what I wanted to put on my own podcast. I liked the SMARTboard podcast the best. It was entertaining, had upbeat background music, and had clear microphones. I also liked the tone of voice that the main guy had. His voice was very smooth and overall I liked that podcast the best. It was also very easy to find. I had trouble finding some of the others, maybe they weren't as established as SMARTboard. In other podcasts, I liked how there were interviews and there were guys and girls on the podcast. I liked when they changed things up because I could see how listening to one person talk for an hour could get boring.
I got a lot of ideas I want to incorporated into my podcast and also some that I want to avoid. First off, I want to buy a really clear microphone! I listened to one podcast where their microphone made them sound like they were in a tunnel, I think it was the Ed Connect one. Anyway, I thought that it didn't sound professional and maybe like they made the podcast in a garage or something. I also didn't like silence in the background. I am going to try to put some music into mine. I didn't like how some of the podcasts were really long and rambled a bit. This made me want to turn it off or focus my attention somewhere else.
Overall, I really enjoyed the podcasts that Mr. Sullivan selected for us to listen to. I found out what I liked and what I didn't like and what I would do differently. I want to invest in a clear sounding microphone, do an interview, and definitely have more that one person on it. I am going to try to make it easy to find on itunes, and with a cool picture by the title.I am so glad that I learned a lot from listening to each of these podcasts!

My First Picture

My First Link

Click Here to go to the homepage of my university!

Response to Vicki Davis: Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts

A couple things struck me about this video! Vicki Davis is a very effective teacher. She is so open-minded and knowledgeable about the things that are happening around the world by using technology. Although she isn't young enough to have grown up with computers, you wouldn't have known it by the way she acts. She is a very good teacher and you can tell the students learn a lot. She adapts what she teaches to whats going on in the world or what new technology has come out. My computer teacher in high school made us stick to learning word processing from a book the whole year and it was every one's least favorite class. These kids are learning how to learn and they are enjoying it! She is thinking about the future and where the jobs will be and equipping the kids for them. She doesn't stick to a manual that has been around for years, she evolves with technology.

Response to Sir Ken Robinson: The Importance of Creativity

I have never heard of Sir Ken Robinson before this assignment and I was pleasantly surprised. All the things he said about creativity and how the arts should be just as important as math are what I personally believe in also. I like how he said that we view college professors as the job to reach for and it shouldn't be like that. They are just doing their job and being a part of the life cycle, like everyone else. That's just their gift, it's not every one's.
I have grown up going to private schools so I have always had art and music as part of my education. Because I have had access to these creative outlets I have discovered my own talent and passion for art. I hope to one day be an art teacher and help all kinds of children discover their talents just as my teachers have done for me.
My mom is an art teacher and I have been helping her teach summer camps for about 5 years. I also babysit a few times a week, but whenever I ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, its usually a ballerina or an artist. Children crave being able to be creative. I don't understand how educators can be alright with doing away with an art or music program. What if they took away a reading program? The parents would be furious and the state would go crazy! So if research has shown that creativity in schools help children at life then why do we put so little value on it.

Response to "Did You Know? 3.0"

Wow. I loved this video. It really made me think about the future of the human population. I think it's absolutely insane that people are building computers that are smarter than their creators. Have they not watched 'Eagle Eye'? Technology has become so mainstream that people don't even question the long term effects of it on their mind and overall well being. Yeah it make life easier, but at what cost? Do we not realize what we are losing? Now that I think about it, everyone I know owns a cell phone, lap top, and an Ipod and it has just been in recent years that all of this technology has come about. If people have gone thousands of years without a supercomputer with a brain smarter than a human, why do we need one now? I would be happy with the bare minimum of technology, getting away from man's creation, and just enjoying the simplicity of life.

More About Me.

Like I said in my previous post, I am a junior at the University of South Alabama majoring in Elementary Education. I want to be an art teacher, but if I can't find that position after I graduate I want to be a first grade teacher. I originally was a Visual Arts major, concentrating in ceramics, but I recently changed.
I am from Fairhope Alabama, which is just across the bay. I chose to go to this university because it is close to my family and it isn't a very big school.
My interests include surfing, kayaking, watching my boyfriend skim board, making things on the pottery wheel, babysitting, cooking, wandering around Super Target, and doing my EDM310 homework.

Welcome to my EDM310 Blog!

Hi, my name is Julie Szteiter. I am a junior at the University of South Alabama and my major is Elementary Education. I chose this major because I love kids and couldn't imagine working in any other field.
I created this blog for my Microcomputing Systems class. I have had a personal blog in the past, but I haven't kept up with it because my life just isn't that interesting. Because this blog is for a class and will be graded, I will keep up with it and make posts regularly. Thanks for reading and check back often for updates!