New Website about Twitter

For my final project in CEP 452 I created a website about twitter and the ways in which it could be used effectively in schools.  There's even a twitter 101 video that can help new comers get started with twitter!

Click here to visit my new website!

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MSNBC Report on U.S. Education

I was planning on going to see Waiting for Superman this weekend, but then I got tied up with homework and couldn’t make it.  So that was what this blog was originally supposed to be about, but sadly that will have to wait until another day. 

                Instead I am going to talk about a video I watched on YouTube recently.  The video is a recording of an MSNBC report on public schools.  The reporter who is doing the corresponding is Cenk Uygur, a Turkish American journalist who grew up in New Jersey and attended college in Pennsylvania and New York.  He was bringing to light how, as he put it, “abysmal” our public school system is.  Uygur talks about how of all the countries in the world the U.S. ranks second in the amount of money they put toward education and how they still only rank 23^rd among test scores of eighth graders.  When he started to talk about these numbers I thought back to last class about how Ira said that U.S. public schools teach more than just math and science, they also teach creativity and how that doesn’t show up on those achievement tests. I think allowing kids to discover and develop their creativity is so important and if that means our rating is somewhat lower than so be it.  I know our schools could be better, but sacrificing creativity and creating child robots is not the way to do it. 

After he talked about the statistics I thought Uygur was going to start going off about all of the changes that need to be made to public schools, but instead he did a little PSA to all of the parents of public school children.  He told parents that they need to demand more from their children and expect nothing less of straight A’s and 4.0s.  I have many problems with this.  First of all Uygur complains about how the public schools are so awful, but he himself went to public school in New Jersey and went on to get multiple advanced degrees and even says in the report that his own public school experience was good.  It seems that most people who bash on the public school system had pretty good experiences in school themselves.  Secondly he doesn’t propose any real solution to helping make the schools better.  Instead he calls for parents to put even more pressure on their already stressed students.  As a student myself, I hope that parents don’t see this report and start to demand straight A’s from all of their children.  I myself have struggled to make the grade and know how much pressure is attached to that already without parents breathing down your neck.  Students have plenty of pressure on them already and don’t need any more.  All students have the pressures of growing up and dealing with social stress, but then they also have to combat with the stress of school, doing extracurricular activities, possibly family issues, and now on top of that this reporter is advocating that parents exert even more stress on their children by demanding perfection.  I do think in the case of some students that they could do better with some encouragement, but demanding perfection from every student across every level of learning seems too extreme.  I would hope that parents would believe in their children and teach them to work hard and do their best, but if their best isn’t always perfect in math or science that it’s okay because there’s more to life than that math test on Friday.


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I Taught My Blog to Talk!

Hey! Good news everyone.  I was playing around with Vozme.com and finally figured out how to link mp3 files from their site to my blog.  Now you can listen to my thoughts instead of just reading them! I'm going to try and incorporate as much of the accessible technology I learn about in class into my life and into this blog.  Making my blog talk is the first step to using the technology I have learned about.  I'll keep you updated if I make any more upgrades. To listen to anyone of my blog posts you can click on the link that says "Listen to This Post" at the bottom of every post above the time stamp. I can't promise that the voice sounds like me, but it's better than nothing.

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Accessible Text

Accessible text should be available to all children and not just to a select lucky few.  I think that if every school was outfitted with books and text books that also came with the companion audio for students to listen to that test scores and reading comprehension would be much higher than it is.   I have been to many schools where when they do literacy centers that one of those centers will be a listening stations.  This is a good start, but it is not nearly enough.  Only having a select few books to listen to in the classroom is limiting.  Children with reading difficulty would benefit more if they’re subject area textbooks were made accessible in the same way.  Then when they are trying to work on social studies they don’t have to worry about missing the point of the lesson because they are behind in reading.  I’m not advocating that we cut out reading education all together and just hand our kids an iPod and a set of headphones, but for someone who is a struggling reader it would be a miracle.  They would only have to worry about improving they’re reading skills during reading.  When that student went to study other subjects they could focus solely on those and not be burdened by their reading disability during their entire day at school. 


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Let's Give it a Whirl

Okay so I've never been a fan of blogs.  Mostly because I feel like the people who have blogs are witty and clever or maybe just really egotistical.  Here I am though, now having to create my own.  Mostly I'll be posting my thoughts about the  technology we'll be  learning about in class, but maybe if I get into this a little more I'll post about other things too. Anyways I'm going to be a good sport about this and do my best.  So here we go!

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