Blog Post #4

Don’t teach Your Kids This Stuff. Please? By Dr. Mcleod
Dr. Mcleod takes a completely different approach to telling people about technology. He is asking teachers to not use it and keep their students in the dark about what is going on in the world. He asks them to not use cell phones and social networks because this will only get them in trouble. He is using as much sarcasm as he possibly can because at the end of the blog, he ask teachers not to use it because he is and he wants to see whose group of students turn out more successful. I loved the argument he made because it shows the ridiculous things people say about technology and he turns it around and puts it back on them.

Technology in the classroom is very important but there are still teachers who won’t use it. This is because they are scared of it and don’t know how to use it themselves. It can also be because the fear of showing the students how to use it can turn the students into cheaters and expose them to cyber-bullying. While this may be true, there are still more benefits to using it than not. Dr. Mcleod had several good reasons to his post and I am glad that I read them.

The iSchool Initiative
This video clip amazed me because not only did it have informative information, but because it was made by a high school student. The school the student was attending had a major budget cut and the result of it was to cut technology out of the classroom. Not only was technology affected, but the budget for books was cut and the teachers were also cut. This put more students in the classrooms with fewer books and very few teachers. The point the high school student is trying to make is if we had more technology like the iSchool, there would be less reason to have books and paper. The cost could go down because of the resources the iSchool could bring.

The iSchool is an iPhone with school apps on it. It can do all the required subjects with fewer items required. By this I mean paper, pen, books, and calculators. The iSchool would have everything the students and the teachers need with fewer resources to work with. The student did a wonderful job explaining this and I admire his gesture for trying to help the school systems.

The Lost Generation
I absolutely loved everything about this clip. The technique that was used to present it was better than the actual point of it. At first, I thought it was depressing and it was starting to lose my attention, but by the middle of it when they flipped the script, it suddenly became better. I am not sure the point of it, but I did like it a lot. It gave a new meaning to what life is supposed to be like versus what people are actually doing with theirs.

Virtual Choir
I must say that this video gave me chill bumps. I have watched it over and over again and I am still amazed by it. This is a group of people singing and while this may not seem like a big deal, the truth is that they have never seen one another. They recorded this through the internet and put it on YouTube. It is amazing to see and I am so glad that I have. I have emailed a link of it to my friends so that they can see it too. It just goes to show people what technology can do for the world.