Chapter 6 Video: World Wide Weather

The Chapter 6 video showed a lesson utilizing weather data from the internet.  The students were asked to research a particular city’s weather and construct a slide which would be published as a class for Tech Night at the school.

• 1. Basic operations and concepts: students appeared familiar with navigating on laptops and web browsers, scrolling/clicking etc.
• 3. Technology productivity tools: the students prepared slides to report the results of their research
• 4. Technology communications tools: the slides were collected and published with the class to be presented at Tech Night.  The instructor also mentioned that the class participates in an e-pal program communicating with other classrooms.
• 5.  Technology research tools: students used technology to enhance learning by obtaining current weather information for many locations                                                       

I liked that the teacher did a walkthrough with the class to look up San Diego so they all saw where to go and what the information looked like when they got there.  I noticed that she told students to double click on web links; at least in my experience, it should be single (unless it’s a Mac thing?)  Not to be nitpicky at all J  I thought she spent far too much time bringing students up to the front to click on this or scroll down to that.  What I did not like in this video the most was that the class seemed to be rather chaotic and the teacher did not give very clear instructions about who was supposed to be doing what and where (maybe it was nerves and she was trying to over-direct); perhaps it is because she mentions that some computers were not working so when I was watching I was trying to figure out just what sort of setup they had (1 laptop per group?).  I think I’d have a better understanding observing the lesson if I had a better feel for what resources they were actually using.

Week 3: Video - "Trouble Online"

This week, I viewed the presentation by C.L. Lindsay III titled “Trouble Online: Campus Computing and the Law.”  The first topic he discussed was copyright infringement of intellectual property.  I found this to be an interesting update on the topic since I wrote a research paper on this around 2000, back when mp3s were still unknown to a large proportion of society.  (I remember having to explain to my entire class and professor what an mp3 was!)  This also reminded me of a little run in my roommate and I had with campus computing back then—we had our dorm room ip blocked for a couple days because of a copyrighted video clip she had shared on the campus network (which caused us to exceed the bandwidth limits).  We also got a little warning about sharing copyrighted materials then.  I found Mr. Lindsay’s explanation of how the RIAA typically handles lawsuits both reassuring and frightening.  I’m glad to know more about how the system works and who they tend to go after—but the amounts of money involved are staggering.  Theft is crime, but I think the punishment is excessive compared to the actual damages.  In addition, the strategy of scaring people as a deterrent is sort of scummy in my opinion!

In his next topic of plagiarism, I was shocked to see that people can actually buy papers!  Back in college, I only came into contact with buying old exams (which were sometimes free and even kept in the libraries sometimes).  I’m sure people would have written papers for others for money, but I’d never dream of ordering them by mail or on the internet!  Finally, I was interested to hear about social networking sites and photos.  I had heard before that employers sometimes look up candidates on Facebook.  Personally, I do not post photos of myself for any reason because I don’t want them to exist electronically on the web.  It might be a little paranoid, but even posting my photo for TEP classes bothers me and so far I have refused every time (and unfortunately, have lost points for this a few times).  Overall, I found this presentation to be a lot of fun.  I loved the pictures and the action figures were hilarious!  I think some friends at other schools would find this worth their time to watch.