Sunday, 25 January 2015
Week #3
We looked into a couple of interesting topics this week. The first was the concept of PLN's, or personal/professional learning networks. These sound more complicated than they are.. at first I was weary, kind of an "UGGgg what do I need to create now?" sort of attitude. But once I had the chance to look into them on my own I realized they are more of a managing system of all your resources (human and not) needed for life long learning. With all the resources for information, sharing and connecting that are available today, and more will be coming, having a system that keeps it all organized and managed just seems necessary to be able to keep t all straight and actually use it beneficially.
I also looked at the Media Smarts report on young Canadians lives online. This was filled with lots of interesting statistics from surveys of today's youth on their online habits. Most of these stats weren't a big surprise, although I still find it hard to believe so many elementary students have cell or smart phones, this just seems weird to me. The stats seemed to stress that though our youth is very internet savvy and has more options then ever to connect, they are not using the internet to it's fullest potential. Like the “Ten Reasons to Stop Apologizing for your online life” video I watched last week implied, we need to commit to our online lives and create a presence that reflects our values. The students stated that they felt safe and well informed on how to protect themselves online... which OK sure, maybe they are, but are they informed on how to use it properly and to get the most out of it? Are they portraying a presence that reflects their values? If not, we should be providing them with the knowledge and tools to do so.
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Yeah its crazy to think how long we had to wait to get our first cell or social media device and today it is like once the kid is born, a phone is in there hand. The bad thing with these devices is that the kids are losing proper grammar skills and the device does all the work for them. The devices are even solving complex math problems just by taking a picture and letting the app do the work. It is going to be interesting in the next decade to see what happens.
ReplyDeleteI know a child who is 3 years old that goes onto the family iPad, goes to youtube, and finds his favourite song. It is not because he can read, but because he knows the images related to youtube and the music video. I thought that was crazy too. In my opinion its a different type of smart. We always focus on literacy and numeracy skills, but now kids are becoming technolog'acy. Like you said, we need to teach kids how to be safe online and how to portray who they actually are.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree, we need to make sure our students know how to be safe online! I've seen so many Facebook pictures being circulated that have a teacher posing with a sign, encouraging people to share, so they can show their students how far their posts can reach. I'm not sure how effective these posts are, but their existence reinforces the point that our students don't realize the impact they can have online.
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