Activity # 6 Teacher Guide to RPC

Here is the other post that my blog is missing.

During class on Oct. 17th we were introduced to the Research Project Calculator. During class on Oct 22nd Liz Roth had several of her classes in the Media Lab, and she introduced the RPC to her classes. I had the pleasure of joining in and helping with a couple of her classes. I liked how she gave her students points for participating. So I decided to do this with my advisory. I just have to come up with an incentive as this is a group of students who meet once a week to build a community within Henry.

The last time I accessed the RPC website it has been updated. I like the new website. I found the teacher guide to be full of ideas.

Activity # 7 Getting to know RCP

Well here I go again hope I can remember all I said before. This is one of the posts that is apparently swimming around in cyberspace.

Shortly after the Research Project Calculator was introduce to us I took advantage of my small advisory group of ninth graders to introduce the calculator to them. I went on line prior to class and added a link from the media website to the RPC website. I did a short lesson on how they could use it in the media lab. Several of my students are part of the open/IB programs and this will prove to be a great tool for them to use in future research projects. That is not to say that our two other SCL can not take advantage of this tool, but they are not as enthusiastic participants. What I did was have them pretend that they had a project due on a specific date. We then went through the options and explanations of time lines. Because advisory doesn't have a grading system other than credit no credit I offered a edible treat to anyone who completed the setup procedures and printed a final product. I do hope they take advantage of this resource. I have been helping Liz introduce it to her classes.

Activity # 32 Wikis and Activity #10 Copyright

At our class on Jan 16th we covered copyright through the use of a wiki developed by MILI. I enjoyed searching for the answer to one of the questions. Unfortunately I picked a question that required a longer time to search than time allowed. I did get the experience of posting it to the website. Perhaps someone else will find the answer and post it. As far as creating my own wiki, I will be truthful and say no way. Too much work to up keep unless it was part of my work requirements. But it was fun to play with one that someone else created.

I do want to thank the individuals that created the copyright wiki we used as it contains links, explanations, and resources to copyright questions that come up during the year. If I was teaching a course in media this is definitely a wiki that I would use.

Activity # 36 Social Networking

I searched on line for different explanations of the types of social networking websites other than MySpace and FaceBook. I came up with the understanding that the concept of social networking is the linking of individual through the network either as a small closed community where all the clients either know each other or share common values, goals, or experiences. That small community does not open itself to new ideas or contacts like a large social network allows. The larger your client base the greater the possibility for new ideas and contacts.
I sometimes wonder are we being overly concerned? Will these sites be nothing but a fad and disappear as the new latest technology comes along to attract students. I remember when I was in school if you didn't join in with the right social crowd you weren't "cool". Or the Fraternity and Sorority "rush". We joined in to get that post graduation social contacts (I know some joined for the "social" aspects)to get those future jobs. The technology wasn't around like today's future graduates will use. However with that said, students need to be taught the proper etiquette for the use of this technology. Especially high school students who post photo and information that future employers may not appreciate in their future employees.

Frustration with Blogging

I decided today that I would enter a new blog about Social networking and some of my fustration with students using backdoors to get past the block from the district to MySpace, but before I began I took a look at my past postings. Surprise three of my posts are not there. I hate having to redo. Did I forget to press post? Did the internet goblin have it for breakfast? Or am I just imagining my self typing away? and someday the internet fairy will find them in space and they will suddenly be there?

Activity # 12

Here I am jumping around through the different activities, but I had need to locate other serach engines to help a group of students find a health article for class, so I took the opportunity to explore the web for a variety of search engines to help find current articles.

The first search engine I came across was dogpile.com that was nice for the students as it combined the results from google, ask, yahoo, etc and it appeared to filter and narrow down the results. Very little advertising websties.

The second search engine was findearticles.com. Linked to BNET Recseach Center with over 10 million articles. One nice feature was that students can search by category, publication, or keyword. There were also links to additional websites and search engines. Not a lot of help for searching by the category history ect, but great for my health magazine article searches.

The third search engine that I found was AllSearchEngines.com. The site is copyright protected, but they encourge you to link to their page. I really liked some of thier links to websites under their topic headings such as government and health, but you have to watch as there are ADULT sites listed. I would use this only under extreme supervision.