Keep the Lid on It!

Some of us are parents now and others may be parents in the future. I got inspiration to do my voicethread on fire safety from an experience my friend and her daughter had. My friend was in the kitchen cooking dinner for her family. Her daughter, to make a long story short, got burnt pretty badly. I have a two year old daughter and I feel that sometimes as parents we don't think bad things like burns will ever happen to us or our children. The scary thing is that they do and all they take is one second.

Better safe than sorry!

Digiteen Project was a look into our future and the digital world. With new websites like myspace and facebook we have to be careful of what our children are publishing on there pages. The video shows us ways to take digital images add sound or voiceover and address serious topics such as, texting while driving. Think about how easy it is to find people on the web today. Then think about how many people you know that have picture and personal information that can be compromised. This is a serious problem that our future generation is facing. It can only benefits us as teachers to teach our children to be able to distinguish between fake and real websites. In school I was always taught that anything the has edu or org on the end of it is a reliable source. The problem today with that is that people are hacking into things and changing them. In this video the teachers chose to allow the students to teach about online safety. This approach worked well for the students. Most of the students said that they learned more about the topic because they were doing the researching and then forming the projects to teach others. Almost all classrooms are getting computers in them today. Even if it is two computers and not one for every student. The problem with this is that if the teacher steps aways from the desk her information could be compromised. Also we need to know where are children are going on the web. If we are turning to all this technology I think it is very important we know how to operate it.

Learning Things We Love.

The video project learning an overview is all about the children learning not by a classroom setting but by a hands on approach. Today teachers are finding that children would much rather be active doing things they want to learn about rather than what they are told they have to do. This makes sense to me because I feel some students are learning things they will never again use in their lives. We should be allowing them to learn information they will be able to put to use. There are many ways for kids to express the things they use through power points, orally, and even written. As said in the video the children are becoming the directors of their own learning. Eventually when I make it to my own classroom I would love to allow my students to be able to learn what they want. This isn't always possible in classrooms because of the certain curriculum we have to have and also all the testing. But even just doing something as simple as asking the children their top five things they want to study could help. This shows that you are interested in what they like and it allows them to be active. Then maybe I could work it into my lessons somewhere. Also I really don't want my children to be stuck reading text books all the time. I think that works well for some children but not all. Overall the video was a great look at allowing children to explore and learn more.