The Educator's Best Friend

I thought I would share this with all of you. Below youwill find a link to the Education World website. It's a great resource for teachers to get ideas on how to incorporate technology in the classroom. With features like daily tips, current artciles, and tech lessons for the week, a teacher that wants to add multimedia in the classroom can very easily see ways in which to do this. I used this website for a paper I just wrote about technology in the classroom to generate examples where English teachers can break up the monotony everyday class

discussions and lectures. This is worth taking a peek at for all you future teachers.

http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/

Enjoy!

The Duke Case

I'm glad I get to blog about this because I got to talk to my family about it over easter break. My sister went to Duke and was following the case pretty closely. Certainly this is a devastating circumstance that reflects very poorly on the university. Avoiding a discussion of the case itself, I want to reflect a little bit about the role that technology played in the case.

The e-mail contained some fairly condemning evidence that helped officials work up charges against the parties responsible. I've stated before that I'd like to live in a world where e-mails, blogs, websites, etc. were private. I'd like to think that private information that I send to one of my friends stays just that; private. Unfortunately, the world is full of crazy people that put inappropriate information that links them to certain crimes. I have no problem with officials using e-mail and blogs if they suspect that the information in them will help in investigations as secondary evidence.

More and more cases are being solved using this information. Since technology has become such a huge part of our daily lives, it is understandably going to play a large role in holding people accountable for the statements they make on the web.

Flowerama!

I am at home, playing around with the computer, and I started looking at my pictures. I thought I'd blog this photo of a flower from my trip to Hawaii last summer. It shows all the detail of the image, even where the sun reflects off of the flower. This picture always amazes me because I tend to over-expose pictures with my digital most of the time. I thought you'd enjoy how pretty this turned out! Hope everyone has a happy easter!

Wiki Wiki's Wild!

I spent some time searching different topics that I am familiar with on Wikipedia. The topic that I read all the way through was for "filmmaking." I did not find any inaccuracies and was impressed with the technical terms used in the description.

I realize that the Wiki study showed that it is a reliable source to investigate any topic further, but the idea of ANYONE allowed to write collaboratively makes me nervous. We have talked a lot in class about being cognizant of the fact that the world wide web allows people to put just about anything out there. We talked about evaluating websites to see how valid and scholarly they seemed at a glance. This is another example of trusting that someone else isn't steering you the wrong way. I have known about Wikipedia, and I am intrigued by the idea, but I would never use this website as a reference in a scholarly paper.

As an English major, I appreciate that Wikipedia embraces the idea of collaboratively learning. I would encourage others to participate in this writing, but also tell them to get a second source if they are taking information from Wikipedia.

A Global Perspective on Privacy Issues

I was just thinking about the last blog that I wrote about facebook privacy issues. I did a google search further to see if this was an issue with blogs as well. Is law enforcement using blogs to catch people doing illegal activities. The answer is yes...

It's not just facebook. MySpace and blogs and any public record of any kind is being debated heavily to see what police can search for while still protecting people's privacy. It's interesting that we have these public documents that we want people to view, yet feel betrayed when these public records are used against us to hold people accountable for illegal activities.

I think the world needs to recognize that we are living in a different age where we are privileged to have this kind of technology that allows us to easily communicate with others, but we have certain obligations to uphold the socially accepted norms of everyday life.

Face(book) Facts

I am actually torn on this issue. I subscribe to the same reluctant hesitation that Dan Bauer of University of Dayton does, which is that he does not like the idea of public safety or police looking at facebook to catch people misbehaving, but it is justifiable. I have discussed this issue in classes and usually take the side of the students who do not want their privacy violated. These articles cleared some things up for me. I thought that law enforcement was looking at facebook and targeting underage drinkers based solely on pictures from parties. This seems rather deceptive and unfair as they are punishing college students after the fact. These articles say that most colleges use facebook as secondary evidence, which I can understand. If someone is causing harm to himself or herself or someone else, the situation needs to be rectified. If facebook can help to solve this matter, it should be used because it is a public record.

As a facebook member, I do not like the idea of pictures coming back to haunt me. I have been discussing this matter a lot with my friends that are fellow juniors and seniors. Some have said that medical schools or dental schools have an opportunity to look at facebook and see how applicants spend their free time. Students need to be aware that, though some of these pictures may seem funny to their friends, but can reflect poorly on the way others view them. I think before punshing underage drinkers and the like, the university should tell students that future employers could view these and to get rid of any pictures or profile statistics that they would not want their moms and dads to see. Though I am of age to drink alcohol, I have gotten rid of all the pictures from parties that I am holding a drink in my hand. As a future English teacher, I really do not want my students to see me looking unprofessional in this situation. I agree with the articles, but would suggest universities and colleges develop some sort of policy so that students do not realize too late the implications of their facebooking.