Our Digital Selves and Us reflection

While watching the Our Digital Selves and Us the speaker asked us to think about the following questions: Is there a clear demarcation between who you are online and elsewhere? What parts of you are people missing out on if they do not interact with the online you? Why (or why not) should you manage your own personal cyber infrastructure? What does this mean to you? Who are we in this space where the online world is not something distinctly separate? To start with the first question, the answer is no. I really don't think there is much of a change or difference between who i am online and who i am in real life. I really try to be myself online, and i don't act any different. It helps because i am friends online with people i know in real life, so i don't have to change or be any different with them. For the second question, i don't really think people are missing a huge part of me if they don't interact with me online. I like talking to people and getting to know them in person. Though, the pictures i post online kind of allow people to know what i do at home and where i go on day to day basis. The pictures can kind of help people know me better because it allows them to see who i am when i'm not at school. For the third question, yes, i think it's important to manage your cyberinfrastructure online. It's good to keep up with your online profiles. For the final question, in the cyber world, we are still ourselves. We should still be the same person we are in real life, because people trust other people, and it's not right to not be honest and lie about who you are online. Overall, even though we have lots of ourselves online, we should still be who we are.

Learning Analytics and customization video

This is the link to my Learning Analytics and customization video that i posted on Flatclassroom and youtube. http://youtu.be/OvD6HJjcKFY

How is continued communication in various ways important for this project

Communication, as we all know, is very important for many things. It is especially very important for this project! The one thing that we have to do for this project, though, is continue to communicate. Why? This project involves the creation of a wiki and requires extensive research to obtain good and reliable information. We also collaborate with people from all over the country and the world. Communication is a REALLY BIG DEAL, and to be able to pull it off and have each group create a reliable wiki, we have to continue to communicate to each other. Each group has to use teamwork, and in order to have effective teamwork, communication is needed. Continued communication is needed especially. Because each person in each group has a certain job or thing they have to do to help the team, each team member must communicate to each other. Continued communication will allow the group to decide "who does what" and help with corrections and decisions the group has to make. This will help get work done. There are very many different ways that each team member can communicate to eachother without being close though! They can contact each other via email. The netgen flatclassroom ning also allows messaging. Facebook is also a site that can be used too. Diigo is also a good place to help communicate to people. Cell phones have texting and calling, which is another option, and Skype allows video chats. The internet is full of sites that help with communication, and technology today is always full of ways for communication too.

How Diigo can help improve collaboration

Diigo is a very usefull site that can help us save websites on the computer. What's best about it is that it can be accessed over the internet, and the internet, as we all know, can be accessed from anywhere in the world! Anyone, ANYWHERE can get on Diigo and use it, and thats why Diigo makes collaboration so easy and simple! Diggo allows us to share our work with groups of other people on Diigo, so we can choose who we want to see it. This makes collaboration and the sharing of information so much easier. Another great thing about Diigo is that it saves things for you! You can share your thoughts over the internet, and the people who you allow to see your bookmarks can view that. Everyone who has a Diigo can look at it and comment on what you said, and that ultimatly can help you. It also allows for back and forth communication, so you can discuss things with your group over Diigo. Diigo also alows you to highlight things. You can highlight things in text that you think will be helpful for your group. It helps your group locate the important information and narrows down the things you need. The biggest way, though, that Diigo really helps with collaboration is the fact that anyone in your group anywhere in the world can view it whenever they want. You aren't restricted to certain timezones and the information will always be there for whoever want to look at it. So overall, Diigo really is a very helpful web tool when it comes to collaboration. It's trustworthy and efficient and makes collaboration fun and easy.

How can Learning Analytics improve education?

A common trend for the netgen is learning analytics. Learning analytics is basicly observing data about students performance in school and using that to predict how they will do in the future. One major thing that leraning analytics leads to is customization, or forming a learning method around the student so they can ultimately learn better. Customization is a major step up in teaching. By looking at students past results, teachers can formulate the best way to teach the student. For example, if a teacher finds that most of the kids in a class react better and work better when the teacher shows them things rather than tells them how to do them, she might conclude that the majority of the class are visual learners. She could then customize how she teaches around the students, and might involve more visual things so they can learn better. Schools use learning analytics all the time. Our school, Pleasant Plains is an example! According to https://sites.google.com/site/week12socialanalytics/learning-analytics , schools can " measure overall performance through students’ performance on state standardized tests." We take standardized tests all the time. We take the ISAT, Explore, and PLAN. Teachers use the information and scores from those tests to figure out what the best way to teach us is. So, Pleasant Plains is just one of many schools that uses learning analytics to improve education!

My reaction of Chapter 5 of Growing Up Digital

I seriously think every teacher should read this book. The entire 5th chapter focoused on teaching methods for the Net Generation and how teachers and schools today can improve students education for the better. I thought Chapter 5 was really cool and informative, and gave alot of insight. I found myself saying inside my head alot, "yes! This guy is so right." I agreed with so much that he said. Tapscott talks about how the ecucation system is 1oo years behind in some areas, and talks about how schools today should focous on modern day teaching methods. He says that the education system should focus on the student, rather than the teacher, and that teachers should interact, not lecture. He also says teachers should encourage students to collaborate , and on page thirteen he says "Schools should be places to learn, not to teach."I completly agree with this! Another thing he talks about is what WE the students want. He says on page 5 that "Kids who have grown up digital expect to talk back, to have conversation." he also says, we "want education to be relevant to the real world," and that "They," meaning us, the students and the Net Gen, "want it to be interesting and fun." He goes into describing how students today get really bored with school becaue alot of teachers just make us sit down and lecture us, not bothering to interact or conversate with us. He's pretty much saying that teachers these days need to keep up with our faster paced generation somewhat. He says that we expect more and that "The Net Gen wants to interact while learning". This is very true. If more teachers were interactive and made more use of their teaching time, i think more students would learn more and enjoy school way better. I think that Tapscott nails this topic. It's true and he's obviously done his research.

Reaction to Growing Up Digital

I thought this was a really interesting thing to read. It was very cool to see what someone (namely an adult) thought about OUR generation for once. It was even cooler to find out this writer had good things to say rather than bad. We usually hear alot about the bad things our teen generation has to offer, but this book focoused on the good things, and valued our abilities with internet and technology. I thought it was funny when the author described how adults acted when technology and computers first were introduced. The author told some crazy stories about people not knowing how to properly control a mouse, thinking they could use White-Out to erase files on disks, and 'copying' and disk using a photocopy machine! At that time, i'm sure it wasn't as funny, but to me, it was hilarious. Very few young people in this highschool would be confused if someone asked them to do somthing using a computer or the internet. I thought that the author was right when he said that for our generation 'Technology is like breathing'. We don't question technology. We just understand it. The writer also said something about older generations, if they got a new gadget they would get out the manual to see how to use it, while our generation would just USE it. We figure it out ourselves and thats how we learn. It was refreshing to know that theres a book like this out there encouraging our generation rather than putting it down.

The Pros of Zoos speech

So I did my second speech on zoos. This one was about the good things of zoos and i'm actually for zoos rather than against them. I thought I did pretty good. I've noticed that i've been getting better at doing speeches since i've been in this class, so it's really helping. Of course, I did make some mistakes. I had a few flubs, like when I was listing off the things that zoos do. I said 'They conserve, protect, research, rescue, educate, and conserve." Later, I realized that I said conserve twice, so I had a laugh about that. I was nervous, so my words didn't flow as well as I wanted, but I did better at saying where I got my information, I thought. I did better at this speech than my last speech. I thought I spoke louder and faced the audience more. I rememberd to say my sources too. I made more eyecontact than my last speech, I think, but I still was pretty dependent on the power point. Overall, I thought I did a fair job, but there are still things I need to work on. I plan to work better on memorizing more of my speech next time so I can focus on the audience more.

What could i have done better?

I thought I did a decent job on my persuasive speech about the cons of zoos, but their were a few things I think i could have done better. I think i should have spoken louder because i noticed some of my words were lost when i turned away from the camera. I think i could have made more eye-contact too. But the voice was the main thing.