Ashley’s Weblog

I recently bought a new laptop and somewhere along the way, I misplaced a whole bunch of lessons and units from my other computer!!! I was hoping to put a lot of that stuff on my Blogfolio. I am not sure how it would have been misplaced, or lost. But it has. I have some of my lessons printed so I suppose I could scan them and put them on. But until then I will just post some of the things I have.

Has anyone had similar problems? Once again it is one of the joys of technology ha ha. It seems everyday that I realize I can’t live with or without technology. Sometimes it can be a love-hate relationship, but more often than not it’s a love relationship! Does anyone have any stories they have about computers and troubles that can help make me feel like I am not the only one who has these problems? I would love to hear them…it might help relieve some tension between me and my computers lol.

My last tech task requires me to reflect upon my blogging experience. To start off with, I would like to say that I do like blogging, as well as reading other peoples blogs. I do however, find it hard to find time to do it everyday or even every second day for that matter. I tried my best to get something done every week. One thing I don’t like about reading other people’s blogs is when they are long. This sounds really bad, but I hate reading, and I my mind gets distracted really easily, so I can’t focus to read the long blogs.

I think one way to improve the blogging for the class is to give more ideas or topics to blog about. I know I didn’t really want to just blog about my daily life or thoughts to much because it was supposed to be directed towards technology or education. It was usually finding things to talk about that prevented me from blogging as often as I should have been.

One blog I loved was Rachelles. It was about Cyberbulling and she discussed the idea of teaching using rules of poker. We should be trying to send out students home each day with more chips than they came with. Its a really good blog.

I will continue to blog after this class. The topics will probably begin to vary a lot, but I enjoyed having the experience and becoming more knowledgeable about blogging. I am excited to finish my “blogfolio” because I think it will be an awesome tool for interviews.

During class last night I couldn’t help but be amazed at some of my fellow classmates presentations. They were all amazing! I am not going to comment on all of them, but will comment on the ones that I think will be the most useful for myself/students. I will comment on my own project that was completed with Jordan first.

Business Education Enrichments – This is a wikispace that we created to help our students go beyond the curriculum and introduce them to some technology that they may have no experience with. There are many activities within the wiki which are to be completed when students finish their work in class and have class time left. They can do these activities rather than playing games.
Photoshop Tutorials – This is Ryan’s final project that includes 6 tutorials about Photoshop. If I don’t ever use this in my classroom, I will be using it for my own personal use.

Math Collaboration -  This wiki was created by Mark. He has put together some great resources for Math 9-12. With Math as my minor, this will be extremely useful in the future!

Pure Beauty 101 – This is a site dedicated and created for a female audience. It’s goal is to create positive self-esteem and encourage every girl to feel they are beautiful. It was created by Rachelle and Leanne.

All of the other presentations were great, and when they get posted onto a wiki I can put the link on my blog so you can have a variety of resources.

I loved the presentations and thought it was interesting to hear about everyone’s struggles, why they decided to what they did and how they might change it or advance it in the future! Thanks to everyone who shared and I’m looking forward to the rest of the presentations (and pizza) in class tomorrow!

This past weekend I was supposed to go on a houseboat with a group of my girlfriends for my stagette. The houseboat company was out of Saskatchewan and I won’t say where because I do not want to give away the company. But, on Thursday (the day before we were supposed to leave) my friend got a phone call saying that they weekend before there was a stag on the boat. The boat managed to have a fire start on it and the hot tub was broken. My friend told him that we would not come unless we got half our money back. Not talking her seriously, she asked her dad to contact him. Later that evening (11:00pm) my friend got another phone call from the company saying that the water heater was broken and he canceled the appointment with the repair man because we had canceled our trip. That was not what was discussed earlier in the day, but my friend told him that now we would no longer be coming because we want to have hot water. He got off the phone saying make your decision, but don’t call back tonight because I won’t answer.

We ended up paying $600 and not going on the houseboat. The company would not give us a full refund for something that was broken and clearly not what we asked for. My friend told him there was no reason we shouldn’t get a full refund because this is not the product we wanted.

My purpose of telling this story is that I am going to be a Business Education teacher and I hope that if any of my students go on to own their own business, or even be part of a business, that they do not act the way this man did. Would you like to pay for something, only to have it broken when it arrived? No. When you buy a computer or product that has a manufacturers defect, you take it to the store and get a full refund, or exchange. I think this man was extremely unethical and we paid a deposit to reserve the boat, not to have it taken away when the boat was broken.

My grandpa owns a truck rental company and when they rent a truck, the customer pays a deposit. If something happens to that truck which enables them to rent it out in the expected condition, the deposit is refunded. I believe that should be the case. This was not however this weekend, and I think some people can be very greedy and dishonest when it comes to businesses. I will use this story when I am teaching my students so they can have an example of how NOT to run a business.

After discussing the issue of Digital Citizenship in class, I decided that is something I could learn more about and discuss in my blog. After reading more about this, I realized that it is basically the same as everyday citizenship. Just as we have rights, expectations and laws as humans, we have these same things while using technology.

In everyday life we must follow social codes and morals in order to present ourselves in a positive way. Much goes the same for our behavior when we are using the internet. A Digital Citizenship website contains nine themes of digital citizenship. Topics such as etiquette, rights and responsibilities, law, commerce, communication, literacy, security, access and health & wellness make up the nine themes. I assume you will see the familiarity between these themes and the themes of our citizenship in society.

Alec does a good job analyzing these themes and discussing them on his blog. I am also wondering about a lot of the same things that Alec does when he asks what we should do about things such as the Star Wars kid. One thing I think we can think about with digital citizenship is to use our morals and values as well as good judgment. As I stated in an earlier blog, this will vary from person  to person, so not everyone will do the right thing, or present themselves in an appropriate manner.

For students I think it is important that we let them know the dangers of presenting yourself inappropriately on the internet. We should have our students set up blogs so they can be seen on the internet in an educational way, not just on facebook or other social networks. Someone in class said that if you wouldn’t put it on your front door, don’t put it on the internet. This is a really good saying and I will  be sure to use it when I am teaching. I think it ties into digital citizenship because how you present yourself on the computer
reflects yourself off the computer as well.

So I haven’t blogged in a really long time…or so it seems. The last post I made was last week about my youtube video I posted. I feel like I am lost in my own world sometimes with everything that is going on and I sometimes find it difficult to find 15 minutes to sit down and blog (or find articles to blog on for that matter). Thankfully Alecgave us a bunch of ideas to blog about. I decided to write about a youtube video on cyberbullyingfound on Alecs blog. The video was originally aired on ABC. You can find the video below.

This video discusses a case in which a 15 year old boy was teased by a group of students at school about being gay after he received a rectal examine in the emergency room. A group of girls began to lead him on over the internet making him think they had a crush on him. After he believed this, they began to tell him that they were too good for him and would never date anyone like him. This could have been the beginning of the end results. However, there was another form of online communication going on. Ryan was having online conversations with a boy who was obsessed with death. These conversations helped influence Ryan to actually commit suicide.

Ryan’s dad eventually found out who was talking to Ryan about killing himself and contacted the parents of the boy. He was disappointed to find that the parents were in denial. When I heard this, it made me think about how big of an impact parents have on their kids lives. These parents chose to not believe what their son was doing, and were obviously not involved enough with their child to know what he was doing.

Today, some parents are more wrapped up in their own lives then their children’s. I believe that the way parents raise their kids has a big influence on how they will turn out when they are grown up. Parents need to instill values and beliefs in their children that will help them become a member of society.

Ryan’s dad made a comment that really stuck out in my mind. That was “My biggest mistake was buying Ryan that computer”. Perhaps the bigger mistake was not informing Ryan about the types of things that can happen over the internet. A computer can be extremely useful for homework and school among other things. But as the media has shown us, it can also lead to many problems with cyberbullying.

I guess the one thing we can learn from this video is that parents should try keep up with what their students are doing on the internet. Of course it is pretty much impossible to know what you child is doing every time they are on the internet.

Basically after seeing this and thinking about what our kids do on the internet, I was trying to come up with ways that we might prevent something like this from happening.

1. No Computers in Bedrooms – with the computer in a common area of the house, children will be less likely to go to sites that may be inappropriate, or engage in conversations that are inappropriate. Perhaps once the children are out of high school they can get a computer in their room.

2. Check History – if you can access your child’s computer, get snoopy. Check the history.

3. Awareness – for both you and your children. Get information on cyberbullying, what can happen in chat rooms and where to go if something should happen.

I am not a parent, so I don’t know how well any of these would work. But it wouldn’t hurt to think about it and give them a shot!

Bisphenol A is a chemical that is used in making some plastics. It has been linked to obesity, infertility and insulin-resistance in animals. Over the past few months there have been plastics have been removed from some stores to reduce our exposure to these plastics. On each bottle there is a recycling number from 1-7. The following numbers are bad: 3, 6 & 7 as they have harmful chemicals. Better plastics include 1, 2, 4, 5. I used this site to find my information, and there are some tips on the bottom of the page that are really helpful so you should check them out. But now, on to my story of the day…

I was filling up my Dasani water bottle today that was previously filled and thought to myself…”I wonder if I’ll get cancer because of this…or will filling this water bottle make me sick??” With all the talk about not using plastic water bottles anymore, I had to stop and think. My thought process soon turned to the fact that we are worried about getting sick from plastics so they have started to take some off the shelves, but we continue to sell cigarettes (among many other products that cause illnesses). To me this just doesn’t make sense.

I sometimes think that we get ourselves worked up over things that may not be as big as they seem. I am sure that there is probably some harm done to our body when drinking from recycled materials, but there are other things that are just as bad. Think about the air we breath everyday…probably not the cleanest. There are so many things that can cause harm, but we cannot stop a lot of these things from occurring. Of course we should be trying to prevent them which is what they are trying to do by not selling plastic bottles anymore and that is good, and it’s a step. I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes there are things we can’t control, and they will happen no matter what. I think we need to stop worrying about so many things and start enjoying life and living it. What are you thoughts and opinions? Any?

For more information on Bisphenol A click here.

I was looking for something to blog about today and I came across and new blog for beginning teachers. It is called New Teacher Assistance – “A place for teachers (or those interested in becoming teachers) to learn, share, and discuss the ups and downs of being a new teacher.”

There aren’t many posts yet, but the ones that are there are really interesting! Keeping Kids Motivated and Staying Positive When Teaching Gets Rough are the first two posts. Both of them provide things to think about for new teachers.

I really liked the discussion of how a boring textbook is suppose to be able to compete with video games. It is hard to keep kids motivated and I also think they need a lot of action to keep them entertained and interested in class. This post goes on to say that gaining students attention requires the material to be related to their lives and to have meaningful activities. In my pre-internship I tried my best to relate learning material to students lives whenever possible. At the end of each unit I had the students complete a questionnaire about the relevance the unit had to their live. In most cases, students said it was relevant which I was happy about.

The blog also gives pointers on how to stay positive during the first years of teaching when everything is pulling you in different directions. This is a great website for all of us new teachers to read. I know I am happy I found it and will continue reading it as it makes me feel more comfortable being a new teacher!

After a presentation in class given by Dean Shareski about presentation design, we were asked to critique a presentation from SlideShare . Our critique is to be based on the rules and guidelines that Dean provivded us with in class. These rule and guidelines were presented in the form of a youtube video titled PowerPoint Extreme Makeover.

This video discussed the do’s and don’ts of creating a PowerPoint presentation. As I was watching, I felt a little embarrassed knowing that I make all of the mistakes that Dean discussed. I started to feel really sorry for the people who have had to watch a PowerPoint presentation created by me. I understand that many others have made these same mistakes, but while watching, I knew I need to the change the way I make presentations in the future.

Some of the don’ts are as follows: try to stay away from templates, do not overuse bullets, do not have information overload on each slide, do not overdo transitions, do not use clip art, and refrain from animations. There are others that I’m sure I have missed, but those are the ones that have stuck out in my mind.

I found a presentation on SlideShare that does not have good design formatting. It is titled Communication Skills. This presentation doesn’t do a good job highlighting key points. There is too much information on most of the slides and the writing is quite small. The highlighted text boxes do not change, therefore I think it is hard to tell which information is the most important. Bullets are overused and it again makes it difficult to see what is important. There are a few slides that are good such as #29 because it gives an acronym and is simply stated focusing on one idea.

Some do’s for a PowerPoint presentation are as follows: stick to one idea per slide, use real meaningful pictures, set a high contrast between background and text, set the screen black to the audience focuses on you and highlight text in a text box to emphasize something.

This second presentation I found titled Designing Effective “PowerPoint Presentations” shows the difference between a lot of the do’s and don’ts listed above. I was supposed to try and find a presentation that used good design principles and I was unable to, so I decided to post this slide show. It is really interested to actually see how a presentation can be improved by changing simple aspects of each slide. I encourage you all to watch this presentation because you can learn a lot from it!