Reflection

This class was very difficult for me.  I am not tech savvy at all and this class just proved it for me!  The reason I say this is because I had problems, not really with making each of the technology assignments, but with submitting them.  My favorite assignment was Animoto and making the book trailer.  I am glad that this assignment was easy for me because I want to use this with my students this year when I start the book club.  I also can help them make comic strips as well.  The screencasts were also fun, but submitting them and embedding them into my blog were very difficult.  I  looked at the tutorials, but they were not helpful for me.    I did not care for the Vine. I guess because it just kept going over and over and over again.  It really was annoying.    I believe this class was difficult for me because I am old and not use to working on the computer. I will keep working at these assignments to get myself better at them, but right now, I will concentrate on the book trailers for my students. Do not get me wrong, there is a lot of good technology with this class and hopefully with a lot more practice, I will get better.

The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing is Taught in Schools

Purcell, K., J. Buchanan, L. Friedrich. (2013). The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing is Taught in School . [Report]. Retrieved from: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Teachers-technology-and-writing I chose this report because I used to teach English in middle school and I wanted to see what it says about using digital tools. It talks about the same things that I found when I was in the classroom. Of the 2000+ teachers that were spoken with they see the social networking sites, cell phones and texting to facilitate teens' personal expression and creativity, widens their audience, and encourages them to write in more formats than other generations. But on the negative side, the students use informal style into formal writings and it makes it easier to plagiarize. When I was in the classroom, the students would use their text writing in their formal writing. They really had a hard time understanding why they couldn't use the texting language in classroom assignments. Teachers who say that the digital tools have beneficial ideas about students' writing, they also worry about the bad effects on their writing. Some of the bad effects are line between formal and informal writing, having the students write to different audiences and using different voices, and students inability to write longer texts. These teachers gave many lessons on copyright, plagiarism, and citations because of the students' deficiencies. 58% of students write short essays, short responses at least once a week and 41% write journal entries on a weekly basis. English and social studies teachers assign research papers, math students write out math problems and some science students write lab reports. Students think that the only writing they do is in school. They do not believe that texting is writing because they do not write in complete sentences. It also showed that today's students are expressing themselves more often. This report talked about how teachers and students perceived writing with digital tools. I saw quite a bit of both positive and negative writing skills mentioned in this report in my classroom every year I was teaching. 114 pages

10 Things to Know About How Teens Use Technology

Purcell, K. (2013). 10 Things to Know About, How Teens Use Technology. [Powerpoint]. Retrieved from: http:// www.pewinternet.org/ACT Enrollment Planners Conference/2013/7/10/10-Things-to-Know-About-How-Teens-Use-Technology/ The articles that I have found are pretty much saying the same things. I have highlighted some of the things that I found to be important. According to Dr. Purcell, social networking growth has slowed down, but Twitter use is growing rapidly. Teens today compared to teens in the past are sharing more personal information online. Teens today do care about online privacy. As the other article I read, this presentation also says that most teens have Facebook on private and Twitter is public. Teens today take active steps to manage their online reputations. 58% of girls regret something they posted, 82% of girls delete people, and 67% of girls block people. Teens' parents are aware that content online can impact their teens' lives. 72% of parents are concerned about strangers online and 69% are concerned about online reputations. According to the presentation, most teens' educational environments include the use of at least some digital technologies. Cell phones are used more than tablets. 42% of teachers say that students use phones to look up information in class, 38% say that students take pictures or record video for class, and 18% say they use cell phones to upload school related content. The Internet has altered how teens do research. It equals googling- the students need to be taught to learn how to find the "good" material over the "not so good" material. According to some teachers, digital tools can help writing skills. It allows students to share their work with wider audiences. It encourages student creativity and greater collaboration. It also has negative effects as well. Students can take shortcuts, write too fast, be careless,or use poor spelling and grammar. Teachers are all not sure if digital natives. 11% of teachers agree that today's students are no different than previous generations. They just have different tools. There is a digital divide in education and technology. Teachers of highest and lowest income students are not on the same playing field. I see this in my school district. The schools on the southside do not have the same access to technology as the northside of the district and it shows on the tests! Very disturbing! 46 slides

9 Things You Need to Know About Teens, Technology,& Online Privacy

Lenhart, A. (2013). 9 Things You Need to Know About Teens, Technology & Online Privacy. [Powerpoint]. Retrieved from: http://www.pweinternet.org/2013/11/7/9-Things-You-Need-to-Know-About-Teens-Technology-and-Online-Privacy/ This powerpoint is like the other articles that I have looked at. It says that 95% of teens use the Internet. 74% are mobile Internet users, 37% own smart phones, 25% are cell mostly Internet users, and 24% use Twitter. According to this report, teens share more about themselves than adults do. 60% of teens have private Facebook accounts, 64% have public tweets. A typical teen has 300 Facebook friends. I can see how that is possible, because when I opened up my account for this class, there must have been at least 100 people pop up on my account. Those with 600 or more friends are more frequent users, have profiles on a wider range of other social media platforms, are more likely to be friends with teachers and coaches, and more likely to be friends with people they have not met in person. That last comment is very disturbing to me because there are too many things that can happen to teens when they friend people that they have never met. Of the teens who are concerned about privacy, 74% of teens have deleted people, 59% have deleted posts from the past, 53% have deleted comments form other people, 45% have removed their names from photos, 31% have deleted an entire profile,19% have posted items that they later regretted, and 9% of teens are very concerned that some of their information may be accessed by others. This presentation also talked about teens who asked other people for advice about privacy. It said that 70% of teens are asking peers and parents for advice on privacy. Of those 70%, 42% asked friends or peers, 41% asked parents, 37% asked a sibling or a cousin, 13% have gone to a website for advice, 9% have gone to a teacher, and 3% have gone to some other person or resource. It is so very refreshing to see that teens are going to others for advice and not doing it on their own. 12 slides

Teens and Mobile Apps Privacy

Madden, M., A. Lenhart, S. Cortesi, U. Gasser. (2013). Teens and Mobile Apps Privacy. [Report]. Retrieved from:http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Teens-and-Mobile-Apps-Privacy.aspx. The authors of this article did a good job of getting the information out to people about apps and privacy. In a survey of U.S. teens, 58% of teens have downloaded an app to a cell phone or tablet. 51% of teens avoid an app due to concerns about personal information getting out to others. 26% of teens have uninstalled an app because of personal information being shared unwillingly. 46% have just turned off the location trackers because of privacy issues and 59% of girls are more likely to disable location trackers than 37% of boys. 79% of boys compared to 62% of girls are more likely to download an app. 79% of teens living in wealthy neighborhoods are more likely to download apps compared to 60% of lower income teens. The majority of teens who choose free apps say it is because if they don't like it, they can be deleted without losing anything. 46% of teens have turned off the location tracker because they ae worried about people getting into their personal information. Of those 46%, 59% of girls turn off the location tracker compared to 37% of boys. Of the teens who are concerned about privacy, 70% of them have asked for advice from others. 50% of those asking for advice, turn off the trackers compared to 37% of teens who have not asked for advice. It seems to me that teens are concerned with privacy and I hope it is from the education of what can happen and it looks like they really do ask for advice from others, even if some of the teens do not follow the advice of others. I was not surprised to see that girls are more likely to be concerned about privacy than are boys. It is disturbing to me to see that as I have 2 boys of my own. Hopefully with more education we can get all teens to be worried about their privacy while on mobile apps. Report-20 pages

Thirteen Things to Know About Teens and Technology

13 Things to Know About Teens and Technology Rainie, L. (2014). 13 things to know about teens and technology. [Powerpoint]. Retrieved from the 29th Annual ACT Enrollment Planners Conference. Web site: http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/07/23/13-things-to-know-about-teens-and-technology/ Dr. Rainie does a great job within his slides to show how digital tools are changing the way teens are communicating. There is no rule book, no magic cure to make students change with the times but stay the same. Because they live in a "tech savvy" world, the way they gather information and present themselves is also changing. According to Dr. Rainie, about 81% of teens use social networking sites. I was also not surprised that 95% of teens have access to the internet. From another assignment that I did for class 54% of teens used Instagram, but in this presentation, it showed that 25% of the teens used Instagram. One thing that was kind of disturbing is the reference to information as a third skin and this idea that teens having a fifth lobe in conjunction with digital tools. It sounds like a sci-fi movie where people are mutating from some strange chemical. As a teacher, I was not that surprised that many of the teachers polled thought that the use of technology was beneficial, especially in researching skills however, teachers agreed that there were drawbacks such as students who were easily distracted with a short attention span. It is hard to walk in a classroom today and talk with teachers, without a reference being made about the attention span of our students. Either way our teens are saturated in digital tools,and the way we are teaching our students will change, and this can only lead to positive things. 55 pages/slides

screencasts

So many app tools to try and sooooo little time... So which apps do I think are helpful and a great resource for students?? How about Screencast-o-matic ? I could not use Screenr because I had an issue with Java. It said that my computer had the old version of Java and to update to the newer version. When I did that it kept saying that I still had the old version and I needed to install the newer version. Sooo, I gave up on that and went to Jing.
Screencast-o-matic was very easy to use.  I have never used these, but I liked screencast-o-matic.

Screenr  was not available because Java so I used Jing.  I liked Jing because it was easier for me to use.  I think I would like to use this for my bookclub.  They could make these screencasts to help classmates make comics to go with the books they read.


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