Week+6+Monday+Feb+22


 * Class Presentations**

Today we had presentations of lesson plans by the following groups:

Amanda and Jenny

Prominent Canadians: research --science.ca is a good site about scientists --cbc archives --look for .gov and .edu --don't use Wikipedia as a reliable source, but can use it as a starting point. (Wikipedia is a great source sometimes, but it don't get no respect.)

--judging sources: is this person scholarly? Does he/she have credentials? (you know, I would tell this to my students too. Yet it's an "appeal to tradition", since scholars can make mistakes and write stupid stuff, and people interested in a subject, who have no official credentials, can be experts.

I would say **whatever** source you use it's best to verify with a second and third source.

Photo sites:

--stock xchange photos --google images --flickr --getty images

Create a Podcast about your prominent Canadian

X and Y

Online bibliography maker bibme.org []

What a great resource! It was created by students at Carnegie Mellon University in 2007, and is free! Doctoral students must be cheering!

Shannon and Graham: Finding pictures to illustrate stanzas of a poem --explain why you chose the images you did.

This seems like a great activity!

Could make a photostory with music as the background.

I disagree with one thing: S and G said that this activity was about interpreting the poem in different ways. But it's not about the **meaning** of the poem...it's about the poem's significance **to you**.

"What stands out for you" is not the same as "what the poem means." This is a very important distinction for me.

Luca and Lily

Learning to use Prezi

--advantage: no crash worries, as prez. is stored in the cloud --a good resource for organizing your thoughts

--disadvantage: if your internet goes down, you can't do your presentation. This happened in a class last week to people who had not made a backup on a thumb drive.

Here is a Prezi I made today (March 7): []

I love Prezi, but it's not as easy as they say. Powerpoint is more intuitive in terms of inserting and moving images.

Also, it hurt my hand a lot trying to move things.

Want to insert pics, but must rest my hand now.


 * Readings **


 * Internet Filters and Censorware

Censorware** is a contentious issue for me --I very much dislike the idea of governments or churches or other organizations limiting the amount of information one can see about politics, religion and lifestyles --As an adult, I do not want anyone except myself to restrict what I see on the internet



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(My **favourite thing about writing this wiki is finding pictures**. I LOVE pictures, how they brighten up a page, and how much they can say! That pic of Annency, France, on last week's page cheered me up instantly.)

--On the other hand, I understand some filtering for children, especially of pornography, violence, and chat room sites where they might be victims of cyberstalkers.

The Wikipedia article links to this Newsweek article: [], about people accessing porn in the workplace. I feel I have a right to look at porn at home if I want to, but I understand why workplaces, schools, and libraries would filter it.

I worry about kids because --kids do not always know what they are getting into when clicking on certain sites --my kids are very trusting and might not think about the way someone online is deceiving and luring them --I would discuss with kids how to navigate away from sites they find "yucky", and how to be wary of anyone they know only from the net.

That said, I have several friends I know only from the net who I trust implicitely. If you read someone's blog for several years you can find out their basic character.

Back to porn, though...even though I myself sometimes like accessing porn, it distresses me how much of the internet is consumed with porn, It's kind of sad how ubiquitous it is.

This advice column by Cecil Adams ( []) looks at what percentage of internet traffic is pornography, and it does not really come up with an answer. It is reassuring in a way as it says many searches are about sex, but many more are about travel, music, and ebay. Buying things is hotter than sex, it would seem. (Adams, Cecil. "The Straight Dope." October 7, 2005).


 * ISTE: Osuna versus Johnson**

I find Johnson's argument more convincing, but I wish that in his answer he had tackled the idea of anorexia sites. I've never suffered from anorexia, but I know people who have and I looked at some of these pro-anorexia sites. --they advocate extreme thinness and provide a "support group" for teens and others who are in treatment programs --they are seductive, confirming the anorexic patient's deadly ideas about the virtues of not eating.

I do partially see the point of Osuna's analogy that some things on the internet are like alchohol...we keep them from children. However, I do not think that children need to be protected from sexual imagery, for example, until they are 18. Perhaps until they are 14. After that, it is better to take the filtres off slowly, and help them learn how to cope with the information out there.


 * OSAPAC resources

Looking through the list** of OSAPAC resources, I found one called Tinkerplots, and I googled Tinkerplots I thought it might be something to do with English, and something I could use for my lesson plan, but it is about graphing. All the same, I'm glad I checked because it's very interesting. The commercial site had a link to a video about a museum using the software to teach kids about graphing and data management. --this is a version for use in schools --this particular data was about reaction times to pushing buttons on a museum exhibit --the teacher/guide shows museum goers how data can be separated, --by age, for example. are kids faster than adults (no) --by gender...are girls faster than boys? (yes, a little)

This is the kind of thing I needed as a kid to make math more fun and more comprehensible!

I'd like to know how to **load this video** into my wiki. Also the accompanying picture.

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