Laptops banned in colleges

I found the article "Laptops in the classroom: Mend it, don't end it
Teachers: Step down as the sage on the stage and learn to be the guide on the side"
By Justin Reich extremely interesting. I can't believe that at the college level professors would not allow laptops in the classroom. Even though professors say that laptops "turn students into stenographers instead of critical thinkers, or, more often, distract them with online shopping or e-mail" the college requires their students to purchase them. The fact that colleges would even sconsider doing this distrubs me. Aren't colleges suposed to be places for free thinking and higher education? How can we expect our students to be better global members if they can't even use their laptops in class?

I think that teachers want to ban laptops from the classroom as part of the implied teacher and implied student syndrome. Reich states,

. Computers can transform the way students learn only if instructors change the way they teach.

"As a teacher, I can confirm that most of us love to be the center of attention, and laptops threaten our fiefdoms. For years, we have pointed the desks toward us and shut the window blinds to maintain our monopolies. When we punish the class clown, it's not for being funny; it's for being funnier than we are. Admitting laptops into the classroom means facing the reality that in the competition for attention, our best lectures can't even beat solitaire."

Teachers are not banning laptops from the classroom because they are not beneficial to the students; they are doing it because they want to be the central focus. Professors need to reconsider their rule because it should be the students at the center focus of the classroom.

Furthermore, Reich states, "To productively use laptops in the classroom, teachers need to be willing to surrender their supremacy. Students no longer need us for the facts because facts are instantly available on the Internet. Instead, they need us to help them figure out what to do with all that data." This quotation reminds me of Friedman's text. Our student no longer need us for imformation. They need to learn to become composers.
I think that teachers should be stopped from banning laptops in the classroom. Professors should know how beneficial technology is to students and they must encourage its use in the classroom.

Throughout this semester, one of the concerns from the members of the class was Internet safety. On the New York Times online, I found an article that illustrates a specific way that the popular website, Myspace, is trying to keep children safe. The article "MySpace Gives Details of Its Plan to Reveal Known Sex Offenders" by Louise Story, describes the corporations idea to reveal th eidentity of sex offenders on Myspace. The corporation is willing to work with state attorneys to keep kids safe. Story states," MySpace, a division of the , said it would release information about its members as long as it was able to comply with the Electronic Communications Privacy Act." Furthermore, the chief security officer of Myspace, Hemanshu Nigam, "said in an interview that the site had already taken down the profiles of thousands of sex offenders since the beginning of May when it began running its own database check."
Many of us are concerned with Internet safety, but it seems that the incresing popularity of sites, like myspace, is increasing security. Check out the article!http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/technology/16myspace.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

Brief Reflection on this Class

Throughout this semester, I learned a great deal on what a classroom should look like. I realize that collaboration is a great way for students to learn and take the regins of their own education. Furthermore, technology is so important. During my student teachign I did not use enough. However, I plan on creating a class website and blog for my classroom next year. This class is extremely beneficial. Not only did we learn different types of technology to use in the classroom and several ways to do it, but we learned what it was liek to be students ourselves. We struggled and learned from each other. We experimented, succeeded, and failed. But the most important thing is that we learned how to integrate technology into the classroom. Thanks everyone, and good luck with the rest of your years at Cortland!

Facebook and Classifieds?

I recently found an article on the New York Times website that discusses facebook. I’m sure that most of you are familiar with Facebook, and maybe like me, you have wasted several hours on it. In the article, “Facebook to Offer Free Classifieds” by Brad Stone, the idea of adding free classified ads to the website. According to Stone, “Facebook, which has 22 million active users, more than half of them in high school or college, hopes that the new feature will offer yet another reason for users to return to its site regularly, instead of going elsewhere to conduct their Internet business.” Isn’t this the collaboration that Friedman discusses in his book? Facebook has hired people who came up with combining classified adds and the original Facebook to accommodate more people. Mark Zuckerber, Facebook’s founder states, “We don’t try to lock people up or take more of their time, but we try to provide them with easier ways to do the things they want to do on the Internet.” Because people are constantly on the internet, they like their sites to be more accessible and easy to use. The new classified ads on Facebook will allow users to create classified listings in four categories: housing; jobs; for sale, where users can list things like concert tickets and used bikes; and “other,” a catch-all that could include things like solicitations for rides home for the holidays.” This is an interesting article. Check it out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/business/11facebook.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

Technology and Interview

For the technology portion of the interview, I decided to create a class website. This site opens with a message to t he students and parents. This allows parents to see what their children will learning in the class. Also, the students and parents will receive personal information about where I atteneded college. I would futrther expand on this by creating different pages that students could add to. Students create pages that allow them to show their parents th different work they have completed. Also, districts willliek this because parents will be informed.

City Voices City Visions

After reading “City Voices City Visions,”I was instantly reminded of our 307 class last Wednesday. While we were discussing our media literacy projects, we, the students, were creating our learning. We were researching media literacy sites and projects that could help us create ours. Similar to the article, we were “discussing issues, planning and storyboarding, researching in books and on the Internet, writing scripts and narratives, and clustering around computers in cooperative work groups, creating meaning out of the curriculum and their experiences. They describe their classrooms as being filled with excitement and learning.” With the exception of the students working with video cameras, our learning environment was student centered. We were constructing our own learning just like the students in Buffalo.

Furthermore, to be more specific to the article, I think it is great that students are using technological devices to construct learning. In their videos, these student were able to research different concepts of English literature and personalize them. This is a great opportunity for students.

Chapter 6: Reading the World

Chapter six in Renee Hobbs’s book Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English is titled “Learning to Read the World.” In this chapter, Hobbs discusses the positive effects from teaching student “political efficacy and civic engagement” (93). Throughout this chapter, the reader is presented with several examples on how to integrate the reading of world texts through media. At the beginning of the chapter, Hobbs justifies why she would teach these skills to her English 11R students. She states, “Reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word or spoken language; rather, it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world and action in response to one’s learning” (93). This quotation is the foundation on which Hobbs’s belief of reading the world is based. Students must learn reading, writing, and listening skills, but they must be able to use these skills to assess and evaluate the world around them.

Furthermore, in this chapter and study of the English 11 students, Hobbs measured the “students’ ability to critically analyze television news and radio programming,” which increased students comprehension and message analysis skills”(94). By analyzing and evaluating different forms of media, these students will be more prepared to analyze the world around them. According to Hobbs, media literacy “affects the development of critical thinking and civic engagement skills” (94). These are the exact skills with which teachers would like their students to leave their classrooms. Also, in this chapter, Hobbs discusses viewing skills, listening skills, political efficacy, and gender differences.

The first aspect of this chapter that I found interesting was the students response to Al Gore’s speech. Al Gore presented a speech on school violence, but the students found an inconsistency with something Gore said. In relation to the Love Canal, Gore stated, “I was the one that started it all.”(94). However, after the students listened to a taping of Gore’s speech, they realized that it was not him that started the hearing on the Love Canal. By exposing this, the students were able to credit him “as falsely taking credit for too much”(94). Thus, by critically analyzing and researching Gore’s speeches, these students were able to expose Gore’s lie. This is what we want our teachers to do. If we can make are students not be passive but active listeners, people will not be able to take advantage of the ignorance of American citizens.

Another aspect of this reading that I found interesting was the portion on listening skills. As future English teachers, we will be responsible for helping our students become exceptional listeners. Hobbs states, “Attentions, memory, empathy, interpretation, emotional response, characteristics of stimuli, and context all affect the listening process”(104). Even though there isn’t a single method for teaching listening skills, Hobb’s illustrates how important they are. Another part of the listening section of this chapter that I found interesting is when Hobbs states, “With iPods, MP3 players, and podcasts now a ubiquuitous feature of the adolescent’s cultural environment, English language arts teachers should continue to explore the ways that students’ critical listening skills can be developed through media literacy activities”(206). This directly connects with many concepts that we have discussed in 307. These are audio devices that our students are using at home, so why can’t English teachers integrate them into instruction? By teaching our students to critically analyze what they hear, they will be more apt to questiont he world around them.

Finally, the last point in this chapter that I found interesting is the way gender plays a role in reading the world and political efficacy. At the beginning of the semester, we discussed how female students are more reluctant to participate in class. Well, according to Hobbs, females are reluctant to participate in politics. According to Hobbs, “Political efficacy is defined as citizen’s faith and trust in the government and their own belief that they can understand and influence political affairs”(107). During Hobbs’s research, she found that female students did not feel as comfortable and male students in discussing and analyzing politics.

After reading this chapter, I realized that using media to teach students to evaluate the world around them will make them better and more informed citizens. Hobbs states, “As students fain the ability to comprehend news and politics by asking critical questions about media messages, they grow in knowledge and feel more empowered about their ability to understand government and politics. But they also develop s skepticism about the extent to which political leaders truly represent their interests”(94) These students will not believe everything they hear or see in the media; they will obtain the skills to see through lies and inconsistencies in the media.