Project #3

I was doing some searching on instructional challenges in today's secondary classroom and came across these common ones:

(1) creating a personalized and orderly learning environment, (2) assisting students who enter high school with poor academic skills, (3) improving instructional content and practice, (4) preparing students for the world beyond high school, and (5) stimulating change in overstressed high schools.

I have decided to address the first challenge--creating a personalized and orderly learning environment. I think that one way to address this is through podcasting.

Because I have a lot of other things to do right now, I will work on this project by myself. I won't be focusing on the IIC competition for now, but might when I wrap the semester up. That's about all I've got for now.

Keeping Students Safe

I think that the most important thing that I can do to help my students stay safe on the internet is monitor what they are doing. My mom did that as a librarian when I was in high school. She used a program that linked her computer to all others in the library and could "silently" observe what students were doing, or even take control of the computer if necessary.

I would also say that establishing clear guidelines is essential. If your students know what is and isn't appropriate, as well as the consequences involved in overstepping boundaries, they'll be less likely to get into trouble on-line.

Russian Video

This is my video.

Video Chat

I just experienced Google's video chat for the first time. It was pretty easy. Once I had downloaded the software, all I did was ask my old friend Mitch to chat and the next thing I knew, we were looking at each other for the first time in months. The quality was great, Mitch could hear me just fine. I could see myself using this a Russian classroom. I would have my students chat with some of my friends from Ukraine and Russia.

Lesson #6 - Ripping a DVD/Downloading a YouTube Video

I downloaded the YouTube video Numa Numa. It is a video that I thought was hilarious in high school of a fat kid singing and dancing to an upbeat foreign song. Here's the link.

Downloading it was easy with the help of the Mozilla Firefox 1-Click YouTube Downloader add-on.

I have learned that I can legally rip DVDs for educational purposes, and that once I have that DVD ripped, I can keep a copy of it for myself and am not violating any copyright laws.

Copyright

In class today I really enjoyed learning about Creative Commons--"a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright (quoted from their website, see http://creativecommons.org/about/). I have always thought that if I were a musician or some other type of artist I would not want to keep those who enjoyed my works from sharing/downloading my material. I think it is cool to know that I could still have my material licensed to me thanks to Creative Commons, but that it could be a lot more accessible to the public.

Video Idea

I'm going to make a video that serves as an example of an assignment I would have my Russian students do. The idea is that I would arrange for them to have video pals--students in Russian speaking countries who agree to send video messages back and forth to my students. The first assignment (this video) would be a basic introduction. My students would:

1) Introduce themselves - tell who they are, where they are from, and what they like to do.

2) They would provide a picture of themselves and their family, telling who each person in the picture is and indicate their relationship to the student. This would all be done in a voice over of the picture.

3) The students would include a 10 - 20 second clip from their favorite song, giving the name of the song and the artist.

4) Finally, the students would ask their video pal one question.