The Big Brother Internet

Today in Internet for educators we brought up big brother, but with an internet twist.  The question proposed to us was whether the internet enforces the "Dominant White Male" society that the western world lives in or if the internet gives voice to the under privileged and under represented in our society.

There was a lengthy debate.  Some felt that the internet definitely gives a voice to the minority.  They spoke about how you can research on things and hear their voice through movies, articles and posts that you may not have been able to experience if it was not for the internet.  The internet also gives a sense of anonymity as to prevent a reader from knowing whether the person who created the article, post or video is of the ethnic or social majority or minority.  This helps to eliminate biases based upon racism and sexism.

Their was another group who believed that the internet fits neither strongly on one side or the other.  They agreed with all the things that the group above made but they struggled to accept that regulators of internet content in our country do not play a role in oppressing the thoughts of the minority.  When you google something, google spits out an answer based on who pays more to be found by google or what has been viewed the most before.  This limits the ability of under privileged and new views from being found and viewed, favouring the "Dominant White Male"  Also the government limits and blocks certain things from our internet.  In the USA the government has the right to track your internet use and use it to incriminate you.  These types of things are definitely not privileging the minorities.

I tend to agree that the internet takes a very middle ground on this issue of privileging the majority or minority.  The internet is a representation of society at large but it is generally dominated by youth making it a glimpse at society in the future.  This makes me happy because the internet my not provide complete equality for all people but it definitely provides more equality then society at large does currently.

The future with the internet looks good as long as it remains as open as it is and hopefully becomes better at representing minorities as an equal in the online society.

"If it is free you are the Product"

This is a topic we briefly discussed in our internet for educators class with one of our guest speakers in late January but it is a topic that keeps coming up.

So what does it mean? You may notice that when you sign up to a lot of things online that they are free.  Things like Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, and twitter are all free but these companies are rich.  That just doesn't add up.  It also doesn't make sense for a company to create a product and let people use it as much as they want for free.  The thing is you are the product and Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and Hotmail are just things to lure you in.  The companies use the information that you in put on to these sites to generate money.  They often sell the information to advertising companies.  The advertisers will use demographic or keyword information from you to give you targeted advertisements that are likely to work on you.  Also Facebook and Instagram have been known to sell your pictures that you post to advertisers to use in their ads.  They can do this because they own the things that you put on THIER site.

I for one don't mind that this is the way things are because I am aware of it.  I know that I am being targeted by advertisers and that photos I put up on the internet are no longer mine.  Being aware of these things allows me to be conscious of what I post online and not to take advertisements to seriously. Using critical thinking is important,

I see the problems with these things from people who are uneducated about how free internet tools generate money.  I feel that high school students are at a particular disadvantage.  They are very vulnerable to advertisers and often don't think about the consequences of their actions (i.e. posting certain pictures).  They also don't think about the big picture and why things online are free.

To combat this we need to have real and honest conversations with our students about these things.  Parents often will have less knowledge then we will have about how the internet works so we can not leave it up to them to educate their children on this.

A great video to activate a conversation about this is this video.  Check it out

Video Learners

Is Video important in the classroom?

Obviously yes.  I generally teach high school science classes and finding hands on, real life experiential learning is important but sometimes impossible.  Take an anatomy unit as an example.  Watching gas exchange in the lungs is impossible to see within the classroom.  This is where video comes in.  Having a video showing this exchange helps students to visualize the process, making the process real.  It gives those visual learners in your class clarification and gives everyone else another way to view gas exchange.

Video is also great in explaining things in a different way.  Have you ever been listening to a teacher explain something and you just don't get it until your friend leans over, whispers an alternate explanation to you and everything finally makes sense? I believe the answer would be yes.  A video can be just like your friend.  It can explain things to your class in a alternate way then you, as the teacher, have, and this can help get more students to understand.

Their are a variety of places to find video like Ted Talks, YouTube and Discovery Ed.  Though these can take a little work deciphering what is good and what isn't, finding good channels, people or streams do help.
For our project we are suppose to find video's that we would find interesting to teach in class but instead I am going to list a few good channels and websites where I have found some meaningful videos in the past.

Discovery Ed one I like but it requires a subscription so if you are in a school bug them to get one to this great video site.

Chrash Course: a great YouTube channel that you could use as a test prep or a way to introduce a unit or topic.  The videos are 10 minutes and go through a topic quite fast, just touching on the important details   They are well done and have great visuals

http://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse

Chumamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story, this is a great video that can be used to talk about racism in a classroom.  It could be used as part of the curriculum in a social studies class or just a time filler in any class.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg

Graphing stories-15 seconds at a time: This is a great website created by my favourite blogger, Dan Myers.  It shows different, real life events, and asks the students to graph the story.  It walks the student through the answer at the end too!  A math teachers must!

http://graphingstories.com/

National Geographic: This YouTube channel holds tons of great resources for videos.  They are well categorised and so are easy to find.  Great for activating a class!

http://www.youtube.com/user/NationalGeographic

This is just the tip of the iceberg   Just google top YouTube channels for teachers and I am sure you will find tons of other great ones as well.  

I also think it is important to let students create their own videos and post them to YouTube, Animoto, or whatever movie making site you choose to use in your class.  It is fun and makes students accountable for their work.  It also allows them the opportunity to share what they create with family and friends and if they post it on YouTube then in the future they could use it in job interviews or as part of having that positive digital footprint.

Connecting=Pride

Clarence Fisher thank you for skyping in with our class.  You talked about so much but what really drove home for me was how connecting your students with schools around the world you were able to make them realize how lucky they are to come from a small town.  Your students thought it must be awesome to live in LA until they learned they couldn't ride their bikes after dark or go swimming in the ocean whenever they wanted.  The students thought it would be great to live near shopping malls and celebrities until they realized they would have to give up the safety and freedom that they have in their home town.

I grew up in a small town about an hour north of Winnipeg and carry the small town pride with me every where I go.  When I was younger I wished I lived in Winnipeg because their was SO much to do their.  When I went to University in Winnipeg I realized I was wrong.  Sure I could go shopping whenever I wanted to and going to a movie didn't take up an entire evening but their was lots of things I missed.  I missed being able to run without almost being hit by a car or going quading through swamps.  There was also no privacy in the city and you could never see the stars.   Most importantly, small towns have a sense of community and support for one another.  For example, my best friend's mom has MS and needed to go for surgery.  The surgery was only available in the US and so it was going to cost a fortune to get the surgery done.  To help the family out the community put on a social, local businesses donated great prizes and they raised enough money and then some, to send my best friend's mom to get her surgery done.  It was amazing how much community support there is in a small town but you don't often find this in big cities.  For all these reasons I realized I want to raise my family and teach in a small town.

I have always thought it is important to help students have pride in their town and school but I struggled with how.  I know see that using skype and connecting my students with people around the world to do projects will enviable lead to this.  They students, while working in their projects with others students, will talk about their contrasting lives and in this the students will learn how lucky they are to live where they do.  Having pride in the school and their town will help the student to have pride in themselves as well and their is nothing more important then that.

How I became Twitterpated with Twitter

Like most people when I started twitter I wasn't sure what I was getting into.  I thought it was going to be like facebook but with only the status updates.  This was why I didn't want to get twitter. The only thing about Facebook that I liked was seeing the pictures and knowing what people were generally up to, not if they had a pb and j sandwich for lunch.
Once I got twitter I never used it.  I had no one to follow until I got into watching Sport Centre.  I started following Dan and Jay.  Their tweets were usually entertaining so it gave me something to read every once and a while.
Then when I took literacy for ICT last year, I started to following educators on and twitter became addicting.  I loved seeing the resources that other people are using in the classroom.  They also share their thoughts and ideas.  All this drives me to form opinions on things and search the web for resources.  I am not much of a tweeter myself, I tend to just take from twitter but I am trying to challenge myself to tweet things that I find online now to.  I use twitter even more since I got a tablet.  Using flipboard I can read article or view the websites that people tweet on one page without having to follow the link.  It makes twitter easy to use.  I now find myself spending the mornings scanning for new ed resources rather then watching Dan and Jay on Sport Centre. (Sorry Guys)

A Great Follow!

Dan Myers was a High School Math Teacher in the San Francisco area.  He is currently studying at Sanford University, getting his doctorate.  This is not why I like following him though.  I follow him because of his innovative way to look at math.  He believes that students need to formulate questions and find solutions to these questions that they developed.  Math texts book of today spoon feed students on how to answer question but do nothing to get the students to understand math.  I 100% agree with Dan.

Another thing I love about Dan is that he doesn't just talk about how math education needs to change, but he changes it and shares it ALL!!  When you follow his blog you get access to all his lessons that he makes.  He often takes problems you would find in a textbook, but then changes them to real life situations.  An great example is when he uses proportional reasoning by taking a picture that includes something of standard size in it(i.e. a credit card). Using the thing they know is of standard size they can determine the size of other things in the picture (i.e. a coffee cup) but he doesn't tell his students that.  He proposes a question like "how tall is the coffee cup in the picture?" and gets the students to come up with possible ways to find the solution.  After this he will bring in the actual coffee cup and see if the students are right.  He also uses this opportunity to discuss possible error in their problem solving.

I highly recommend any math educator to follow his blog.  He is very interesting.  If you are not sure if you want to follow him, watch the video below and I am sure you will be convinced.
Dan Meyers blog: http://blog.mrmeyer.com/
Twitter: @ddmeyer

Managing how you are Perceived

Man everyone was looking good last week at school!  Why? We had a career fair and some interviews with local divisions and superintendents.  They spent two days at our University checking out the new teachers.  We, the up in coming teachers, wanted to represent ourselves well to our prospective employers so instead of wearing the usually sweatshirts and loulou's we wore dress pants and a nice shirt.  We also polished up our resumes and readied ourselves to talk about our experiences.  This was all in an effort to get ourselves to be perceived in positive light.

The problem is that it is easy to give these impression on the day of an interview or career fair, but to always be giving these impressions is hard.  The internet demands us to be always on our best behaviour.  Every thing we do is recorded and even though most of that is not easily detected by people some things are.  Everyone (or most people) have a Facebook page with pictures and posts that are either uploaded by themselves or their friends.  These pictures and posts can easily be found by people, including our future employers and students.  This means that when we are out having fun on our own time and someone snaps a picture, we could be incriminated.  Everything we are doing may be legal but it is not necessarily respectable.  We need to be careful of this.

What can we do?

For one we can control the privacy settings on our Facebook pages but more importantly we need to focus on controlling what comes up when someone googles our name.  To do this we need to put things up on the internet under our name.  Having your own eportfolio/website really helps this.  Also when you do something, such as a prezi, glogster or other online project, save it under your name.  When someone googles you, these things will come up, not the negative things.  This will shows you in a positive light.  If you simply change your attitide to how you use the internet you can become your greatest friend when finding a job.

It is like being in an interview whenever you are googled!