Fraronda’s presentation posed a lot of good questions, one of which was: What will become the role of the teacher if technology use keeps growing at the rate it is now?  The image of the Asian students with their robotic teacher was really creepy, but I think I can safely say that animatronic educators will never be able to take the place of a REAL teacher.  The whole scenario reminds me of Harry Harlow’s experiments on the influence of maternal nurturing on social and cognitive development of baby monkeys.  Harlow discovered that those monkeys needed a real mother to love them and care about them in order for them to develop into social, capable, normal monkeys.  I think students need the same individual attention from someone who cares about them and their education.  They need someone who will take time to get to know them and their strengths and weaknesses in order to develop personalized educational plans for them.  Students can’t get that from anything but an actual teacher. 

Today, I think teachers’ role in a technology rich classroom is that of faciltator.  Teachers need to direct and instruct when necessary, but otherwise,  they should let students explore the possibilities and opportunities given to them.  Technology is a tool meant to expand students’ understanding and creativity, which can only occur when teachers let students have lots of choices and a little bit of freedom.

The last video we watched about Second Life really kind of amazed me because I didn’t realize there were so many things you could do with it.  I’d heard of it before, but dismissed it as some online community where peopple just hit on each other and were generally creepy.    But the idea of having virtual meetings and using avatars to represent our physical selves is interesting, and definately more life-like than most other virtual communication venues.  I actually read an article once about how students are more relaxed and apt to express themselves in virtual communities like Second Life because the immediate pressure of interacting is off.  Apparently, creating avatars helps their self esteem too because they are in control of their own appearance, which is an important factor in adolescent interaction and communication.  Plus, a community like Second Life allows students to feel connected to their peers in a location other than school, and shows them that learning can take place anywhere, not just in a classroom.

One final note:  the Shakespeare videos were great! 

I enjoyed Ro’s presentation and the examples of student work she brought with her.  The Photo Story projects that conveyed specific emotions were great, especially since she could work in practice writing works cited pages with that activity.  I was really impressed with the “after exams” movie projects that her students did too, and she made them fun requiring a dance sequence.  Those were very entertaining, but also very thoughtful and well executed!  I’d love to use either of those projects with my class. 

I think the 3 minute Shakespeare presentations are going to turn out well.  They’ll be just as entertaining as Ro’s students’ work, I’m sure!  But projects like those are very engaging, and I think they’re the types of assignments that students really enjoy doing!  Our group (Romeo and Juliet) is working with still shots and Photo Story, and we found that it’s best to edit the pictures before we put them in Photo Story because our editing options are more varied with other programs.  We used Picnik (www.picnik.com) to add captions, speech bubbles and graphics to our pictures before we imported them to Photo Story.  I can’t wait to see everyone’s finished projects!

I am looking forward to working more with RSS feeds, which I read about in Will Richardson’s book last night.  I immediately subscribed to GoogleReader after reading Chapter 5 and started playing around with some subscriptions.  Of course, I’m not really sure yet which subscriptions will yield the most valuable information, and I should probably do some more searching to find other sources outside the normal news sites.

I really like the Forms option on GoogleDocs, and it’s a cool way to create original quizzes and surveys.  It’s so easy to use, and I like how the answer formats are changeable, which will present an original quiz/survey format that will just change things up for students a bit.  I can see myself using it all the time for pre-reading surveys to get students thinking about themes and major issues.

I never knew until I read this chapter that there was specific conent that defined a blog.  Richardson’s definition of a blog leans more toward reflective/editorial/opinion-based content, whereas I thought blogging was pretty much an “anything goes” sort of concept.  But more and more teachers are using blog space to post things like reading lists,  other types of assignments, links, etc.  Students and the general public seem to use their blog space for journaling. 

In other news, John’s presentation this morning reminded me that I need to check out kickyoutube.com and experiment with it.  This is totally unrelated, but I found myself watching stand-up comedy on youtube this weekend for about an hour.  I have found some really interesting things I would love to save for teaching purposes on youtube, though,  like Christopher Walken’s reading of “The Raven,” and if I could save things like that for easy access, that would be great.   

I’m all for moving class into the computer lab in the library, and this is why:  The computers in the Odyssey room are s-l-o-w!  I couldn’t do anything with diigo until we got to the library, and I kept feeling like I was getting so far behind.  Aside from technical problems, I think diigo is pretty nifty and is by far the easiest to use tool we’ve downloaded yet.  The only thing that could make diigo better is if it had the organizational capablities of zotero (i.e. compiling bookmarked cites into folders, etc.).  I really liked being able to highlight and use sticky-notes right on the internet page, which is so helpful when you’re just beginning to do research and are browsing through a lot of different resources at once.  It lets you easily relocate the most relevant information on the page.

As we were discussing in class, other cases are much harder to judge and determine what actions should be taken.  At my high school, there was one teacher who friended his current students on Myspace and actually had pictures of himself drinking at a friend’s house.  The fact that he likes to drink with his buddies is fine, but I don’t think it’s responsible to give your students access to those images!  This was never brought to the attention of our administration, though, so he suffered no real consequences. 

I went to school in Lexington District 4, and I would like to go back there to teach.  As the class was searching for information and board policies on teacher conduct, I searched for my old district, and found nothing at all in the guidebook about the way teachers should conduct themselves.  I was sort of surprised becasue we’ve had some situations where teachers and current students were involved in intimate relationships,  and I would have thought an incident like that would have caused an addition to the guidebook concerning (at least!) matters of that nature. 

I didn’t know that copyright laws were so strict before Wednesday’s class!  I really enjoyed the Disney video; that was creative.  That’s something else (in addition to internet conduct) teachers have to be extra careful about!

Finally, I really enjoyed experimenting with Zotero.  I went home immediately after class and downloaded it on my computer.  This tool will undoubtedly prove to be one that, as a teacher, I won’t be able to live without.  I love the interface; it has an iTunes feel to it and is fairly easy to use.  I’ve already started organizing some of the things that I’d had saved in my “Favorites” folder online.  Zotero is a much more organized way to keep up with websites than my old methods!

But I think the good outweighs the bad, overall.  Once iGoogle and I made peace, I realized how much time and energy it could save students when they have to collaborate on projects and work on them outside of school.  I missed the quiz-making demonstration because I was wrestling with the collaboration portion of GoogleDocs, but those types of quizzes/surveys would be great for initial assessment or as a fun way to introduce and get opinions on a new topic of study. 

Ning is pretty much amazing.  The English Companion page has so many resources and good ideas that I was surprised to see so many useful postings in one place.  Having searched for inspiration for lessons online before, I’ve never really found anything helpful, but the English Companion page could really prove to be a very vaulable reasource in my future lesson planning endeavors!  I’m not sure yet if I would use it as a classroom project tool, but that would require some more thought and planning. 

Once I got logged in to WordPress (after about 20 failed attempts and several e-mails, literally), I discovered that this website could be my new best friend.  Personally, I love to blog, and I would use blogs in my classroom, especially as reading logs/writing journals.  Not only is it an easy way for me to have constant access to all my students’ writing, but students can comment on each other’s ideas and have conversations about well, just about anything.  Blogs are a great community building tool. 

Oh, yeah…and I really like the class wiki, especially the way we used it in class to get to know one another better.    I’ve used wikis before to create collaborative webpages in a literature class, and those were by far my favorite projects in college!