cyberbullying

It seems like a lot of people have been in favor of a zero tolerance policy when it come to cyberbullying. I have to agree that very strict policies and punishments should be in place for bullying of any kind. At the same time though, I think that it is very short sighted for schools to think only of monitoring and appropriate punishment as a means to ending bullying. I think that schools need to educate students, staff and parents. They also need to work hard at creating a school culture in which students feel a sense of belonging. Lots of opportunities need to be given for students to discuss bullying/cyberbullying and brainstorm solutions that are then carried out by the administration when possible.

Too Many Choices

I know I promised to compare Netvibes to Pageflakes (and I still will) but I have been thinking a lot about how everyone in this group commented on feeling a little overwhelmed by all of the choices in Netvibes. I think that all of the choices on Netvibes is great! It could just be that I'm kind of a geek but I suspect that the real reason I like Netvibes is because I have had to force myself to dedicate a lot of time to looking at it, since I'm blogging about it.

In this class we have been talking about all sorts of new technology that could potentially make teacher's lives easier. Technology is not much use though if teachers don't have ample training and free time to try it out. It's great for us to promote this technology to teachers but we also have to be outspoken with our administrators about a need for teachers to have this time and training.

Using BuiLDer

After spending a little time playing around with BuiLDer I found it pretty easy to use. In reading other student's posts on webCT a lot of people ran into technical glitches and I did too. For example, sometimes after saving my text the preview showed my text block appearing twice in a row. Overall though, I think that I have come up with a useful lesson fairly quickly. If the glitches were ironed out I know I would use this a lot, if only to save lessons for myself. Sharing and being able to search the lessons of others is nice too. I wish that those of us who are currently working in schools might have the opportunity to share how our lessons went. I don't think I will have time to use my BuiLDer before the semester ends.

Netvibes

This week I have been creating a netvibes page. To try this yourself go to http://www.netvibes.com I had some initial trouble getting started with netvibes. I signed up for an account then found myself prompted to login each time I tried to add a module. Upon logging in I got caught in a deadly loop that kept asking me to login again, never giving me the wanted module. ARGGG! very frustrating. I would not have gone back after this experience were it not for the fact that I needed more to blog about. I'm glad I tried again. Somehow 24 hours made everything right with my login and I have since been able to add lots of neat modules, rss feeds and blogs. It will be hard to compare this startpage to pageflakes which I also like alot. In my next blog entry I will try to get started.

Distance learning and disabilities

In following our reading and discussions about distance education I can't help but think of my youngest brother. He is in highschool and has ADHD. In spite of being very smart he has difficulty following a traditional class in which he has to listen to a lecture or participate in class discussion. After he failed Algebra II my parents signed him up for an online course through a university and he is doing great. He is able to work at his own pace and doesn't have to worry about missing verbally delivered information because he spaced out. I don't think a webinar would work for him though. The webinar seems more of a format suited to distance issues rather than alternative or special education needs.

Pageflakes! Is in the running

Well, I’ve been playing with Google and Pageflakes all week and the verdict is that I like Pageflakes better. I began by trying to recreate the page that I have at Pageflakes at Google. At first it seemed like a promising endeavour. Google has many options for personal organization in their “tools,” area. One such tool is the Google calendar, which allows you to enter detailed daily tasks. I could not find a similar calendar on Pageflakes. Like Pageflakes, Google has several “to do” lists of various styles. Google doesn’t have a message board nor does it seem to offer the versatile sharing options of Pageflakes. There are some blogs and RSS feeds available from Google to add to your page but they are hard to find. Organization of flakes, blogs and feeds is much clearer and easier to use on Pageflakes. Both Google and Pageflakes have an ample selection of time wasters, games and the like. They both also offer a lot of choices for news. I was feeling like Google was fairly close to Pageflakes in value until I realized that several items I thought I had deleted more than once were still there on my page. Out of the items that I tried out on both services, more items on Google didn’t work. Also, and perhaps this is petty, but it seems a little easier to move items around on my Pageflakes page.

Pageflakes

I have been playing around with Pageflakes, another personalized start page, this week. It has some glitches but, at a glance, I like it better than the Google start page. If you would like to take a stab at creating your own Pageflakes account go to
http://pageflakes.com
At Pageflakes, "flakes" are things that you can put on your start page. You have 106 options. A Pageflakes start page can be public, private or shared with just a few people, for example a committee that you serve on, or your close family. Several of the flakes take advantage of this sharing capability. A message board is one option. There are many options for adding bookmarks from various bookmarking services. Flakes are reviewable and I did find a couple that just didn't work. For example, Peerfactor file sharing seemed like it might be useful on a shared page but it would not work for me and another reviewer gave it one star. In addition to flakes, users can add RSS feeds and podcasts. Feeds and podcasts must be chosen from a list but users are invited to submit their favorites. I will try submitting something new and let you know how it goes. My Pageflakes page can be viewed at http://www.pageflakes.com/gdchouin.ashx
In my next blog entry I'm going to head back to Google and compare it a bit with Pageflakes.

Cyber Security

Our reading this week on teaching children cyber security and ethics was thought provoking. I especially liked the idea of appealing to computer game designers and manufacturers to create games on these issues as a public service. Again and again, the article mentions that websites that address these issues tend to be very wordy, somewhat unproffesional looking, and contain games that might appeal only to the youngest and or most unsophisticated gamers. The average kid/teen is much more savvy about technology (though not the ethics of technology) than the average adult, I would say. For the average teacher, faced with teaching these issues, it is kind of like having to teach technical writing skills to engineers when you know almost nothing about engineering.