This blog is a Social INjustice!

The use of technology in a classroom where outside access is an issue could make instructing a class a little difficult. I would want to give every student an equal chance to do their assignments, but if those assignments require the use of technology that they can not access at home then some will be at a complete disadvantage or possibly won’t even be able to complete the assignment at all. While I think this is really unfair, I also think that’s how life is, unfair. Someone might not have the same easy accessibility as another, but there are usually many different methods and tactics to get a job done. Knowing and being able to get that task done in possibly an unconventional way in its own right is an excellent skill to possess.

I think avoiding the use of technology because all students won’t have the same kind of access is totally a disservice to the rest of a class. As the article had stated kids going to school now will most likely have jobs that will require the use of technology. If we as teachers omit technology from the classroom we will be leaving a large gap in their educations if the goal is to have our students become functional working adults. Without the knowledge and experience of using technology in the classroom we are only partially training and educating our students.

I think there are many ways in which we can increase the access of technology to students that may not have a ready availability to it. The simplest way I think is to give those students a guide or map of places near to them that can provide them with tools of technology. Libraries, community centers, college campuses, etc. could all provide free use of technology to some students that need those resources. Another method would be providing extra time to disadvantaged students during or after class to use the school’s technology. Although pretty generic I don’t think there is much I would ask of my students that these two solutions could not solve.

To think outside of the “box”, I might pursue some help from local businesses around the community. I know form experience that HP in Vancouver has been very gracious and has helped many schools by donating old computers and printers. I’m sure they could possibly be getting some tax breaks both I think in the end both parties end up winning. I’m not sure what kind of school policies or district policies you would have to go through but I’m sure many companies around our schools would be more then happy to provide the schools with technology or access to it.

The History of Legal Pad.....and PowerPoints

I thought all the presentations were really good. I think I enjoyed Marc’s the most, even though he probably went longer then he originally planed. I really enjoyed how was breaking down the swings and how and why spin was applied. Also I think I am now equipped with some more ammo to help me finally defeat my friend at tennis. Peter might actually have the upper hand in our next epic tennis match for the ages HAHAHAHHA!!!!!


Maybe I’m a freak, but when I am following a PowerPoint presentation I need some wordage on the slides so I can follow them. I think Maya and Justin’s presentations were both really awesome to watch, but I had a hard time staying with it because they were mostly all pictures and verbally talking about what the pictures where about. I loved the pictures and they were all awesome, but if I could had have one or two bullet points with each slide that would have rocked my socks off even harder.


I actually think my presentation rocked, so I wouldn’t change a single thing about it! But then again it totally needed some work, and I think after have the chance to see everyone else presentation I think I would add in some slides that are just pictures without much or any text. In my own presentation I think that might work perfectly in show some different types of stretches that I could actually teach to the class. And it could also be a pretty good opportunity to show how some of the differently rehab methods looked like and how they worked.


I really like the idea of using PowerPoint presentation in the classroom. Although it may be difficult to put it into a PE class I definitely would use it in a Health class. The pros of using PowerPoint are you can structure your lesson around it and that would help you stay in the flow of your lesson. It also helps students take notes on what you specifically want them to remember. All you have to do is bullet point the most important info and then they will know what they will need to know or be tested on. One con of using PowerPoint is as easily as it can help the flow of a lesson it can get off topic with a slide that provides no necessary info. You can have a great presentation until you get to a part where you have to much wording or something that doesn’t really belong and you whole presentation can get off track. I think its also important to balance a PowerPoint presentation with actual verbal or classroom discussion. If all you use is PowerPoint you will miss important discovery and understanding moments that are usually reserved in verbal discussion or something akin to that.

Short attention span....What???

Is educational technology shortening our students’ attention spans? Yes.....


Wait…what? Was I asked a question? I wasn’t paying attention. I absolutely think that that the availability and the use of some of the educational technology are shortening the attention spans of students. Kids already have a thousand things going through their minds before you introduce them to technology, and in the end something has got to give. Unfortunately as teachers we might see this in a shortened attention span.


I agree with David Marcovitz, that while yes, technology might be shortening attention spans; it does deserve a place in out schools. Does it necessarily mean we should have classes to prepare our students to sit through three hours of lecture without disengaging from the lecture material at all? No, but I think it is important that students have the ability to have some sort of attention span. It will eventually come back to haunt them in the future, if they don’t have a way to stay engaged in one or two tasks. My initial concern is how our students will handle a job interview. If they have been in a classroom or environment where having no requirements for paying attention, how will they act when in they are in an office interviewing for a job?

It’s nice to teacher our students it’s alright to be engaged in several things at once. And it might be nice to have that in a classroom every once in a while, but to omit or leave out the pure necessity to have a focused and engaged attention on a few things at a time could eventually harm our kids chances to succeed in the future. As with almost everything we must find a balance, of yes do a hundred things at a time and be happy and successful at that, but when that time comes be prepared to focus in on a single objective or task at hand.

Cyber-Bully

What is cyber-bullying? To my disappointment cyber-bullying is not the idea of making the quintessential 80’s movie bully, Billy Zabka, in to a cyborg/terminator type thing. Sadly it’s not Super Zabka, it is the use of the internet to humiliate and/or threaten others. I personal have no real experience with cyber-bullying, and in fact think it’s rather silly. I definitely see the harm in cyber-bulling when it gets to the level of stealing passwords and altering people’s internet profiles and belonging, but I think most of the rest of what falls under cyber-bulling is pretty minor. My personal feeling on the matter is, if you don’t like something or someone else comments, don’t listen or turn off your computer. Just walk away, who cares what someone else thinks or says about you, they are just words. If it ever escalates to a point of being physical or goes to an extreme well then it should be address with the aid of the law.

Schools are definitely handcuffed by the law and all of the legal issues when dealing with cyber-bulling. So much of cyber-bulling is done off-campus that schools have no real power to take action. Only when it gets to the level of disturbing class or the school environment can action be taken. And even when the school has taken action there is probably a good chance that the school or district could be sued.

I think the signs of a student being cyber-bullied for me will be really hard to spot. I understand the feeling of depression, anxiety, and nervousness, but really it’s on the internet and they’re just words. Use the block button, ignore it or just leave the site or web page. I can’t see how schools can really regulate what is happening off-campus. The only thing I really can think of is blocking most of the social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, on campus. In the point-counter-point article, I totally agree that having teacher or administers surfing sites for inappropriate material is more or less a complete waste of time. When need to be teaching not monitoring websites. Can we as teachers teach out students the dangers of cyber-bullying and what it is and how to avoid it? Absolutely, but I don’t see as our job to regulate what is being put on the internet.

In my class, I will be pre-emptive about cyber-bullying. If I use a website or a blog, I will tell my students what is and is not acceptable to say or write. If there is something that they don’t like, don’t look at it. If there someone that is giving them a hard time, block that user or report them for abusive behavior. If there is a need I can have private

Social Networking Bit

After googling my name I have found it very sad that I really don’t exist on the internet. The domain of “Peter Hays” is owned by several Ph. D’s, doctors and authors. The majority of information comes up about a Dr. Peter Hays Gries who has many published works about Chinese Nationalism and issues dealing with US-China relations. I found a few facebook references to my name, but I also try to keep my facebook page pretty clean and am pretty rigorous about keeping it that way. There was one page that was really me and it was some track and field data from high school. I had to go deep into the google search to find it but it was there, and if you don’t know what you are looking for it just looks like a bunch of names and numbers. http://www.watfxc.com/TF/State%20Page/4aboys.htm. Doing the pipl.com search, I felt a little more awkward that my name and address came up. I really have nothing to hide because I’m sure no one is out there looking for me, but I don’t feel all that comfortable with my home address out there for everybody to see.

Looking back at the searches that anyone with a computer and do, I do think I will either have to delete some of my social networking sites or rework them and edit out anything that might make me look bad as a teacher. I think it’s unfair as teachers out action might be view through a microscope by the community and held to higher standards, but I also understand the reasoning behind that. AS teachers were have taken the responsibility of teaching young people, and while our goals and lessons plans lay in a certain field, kid are smart enough and will pick up on others things we may or may not do. So it is important, and maybe no fair, that we are extra aware of the things we say and do, whether its in the classroom or not.

The whole article about social-networking and teachers was pretty interesting, although it sounded a little dated. Its amazing how short 2 years is and how fast and how much technology can change in that amount of time. What was most interesting were how many cases of teachers being fired over something seen on a social-networking site, and then having those teachers turn around and suing the school district that had fired them. To me it seems like a lose-lose situation. The school loses a teacher and loses a lawsuit, and the teacher loses their job and livelihood and most likely has a big red-flag attached to their name going forward.

Before this class started, I began to protect myself from the possible dangers of private information on social-networking sites going public. Yes I was young and dumb once (maybe I still a little dumb), and yes there are some things I wish would not have found there way onto the internet, but those things are in the past now. I can’t change them, and I’m not really sure that I would, but they don’t necessarily represent the person I am today, and so they find a private place with me and not on any social-networking sites. And then there is the notion of common sense, just don’t be stupid and protect yourself.

Digital Status

Am I a digital native, immigrant or alien? This is a pretty interesting question, one in which I think I fall in between native and immigrant. I’ve spent many hours playing video games, watching TV and movies, surfing the internet and so on, which makes me think I am pretty native to the language of technology. In fact 10,000 hours playing video games and 20,000 hours watching TV seems a little low to me. I do take a little pride in how much of video game/TV/movie nerd I am. But on the flip side I have worked with others, who far surpass me in my uses of technology. For example I have a few friends that have had their own blogs for years, while I have refused to create one for myself (not because I don’t know how to make one, but rather I think I have very few things that important enough to talk about and it seems like a lot of work!)

I have had a surprisingly large amount of technology use in the classroom. In high school both my parents worked at Hewlett Packard, and so I was fortunate to have a lot of technology at home, which I thought meant I was good with computers. I later found out that there were kids that had may more experience and drive to use technology. I learned this my sophomore year in high school when I enrolled in a computer technology class with my friend. It was a start-up program, and my class was one of the first classes to be involved in the program. We were given tasks such as building a computer, writing a web page in html, setting up a school webpage and setting up a school-wide network. I could not handle all the work and it far exceeded my capabilities so the next quarter I decided not to take the next computer technology class.

Able to avoid a lot of super technology through the rest of high school I was put right back on top of the techno world when I entered college. Not that I enrolled in any computer science classes or tech classes, but I was luck enough to be on a very wired campus during the height of programs like Napster and networking games like Counter Strike. Actually Western Washington bragged that they were the “most wired” campus, and I was there to be apart of it. The technology I had in college was awesome, but it mostly all used for NOT doing work. I remember downloading gads of music and burning CDs when I should have been studying. I remember the creation of Myspace and Facebook, and consequently dinking around on those two sites instead of writing papers. In the end I wasted a lot of time on technology, but it also provide some avenues of faster acquirement of facts and data, being able to get journal articles over the computer and much more educational purposes. It was my lack of judgment which led me to doing epically long internet quiz and surveys which had no educational uses.

Reading the article by Marc Prensky has changed my mind a little bit about technology as a teaching device. As a PE and Health teacher I originally couldn’t think of many ways my students could use technology in or for class, but the second article had a really cool example of how it could be apply to health. I thought you could only be physically healthy by doing physical activities, but with the results Click Health came up with I think I understand that playing certain video games can help kids with self-efficacy. This in turn can help them monitor things like self-health and what their bodies are doing. The technology is not replacing exercise, it is aiding it. Although I have been pretty anti-blogging, I do see the benefits of having a website or blog, where I can keep my class up-to-date about assignments or projects that are due. I can also see it as a good place to have other helpful websites where they can find more detailed information about subjects I wasn’t able to fully cover in class. In the end I understand tailoring my lesson plans around how my students learn is just one more way of reaching them. If I allow them to use their smart-phones to do some research, well then smart-phone it up!

Introduction

My name is Peter Hays. I am 28 years old and I live in Vancouver Washington. I earned my B.S. from Western Washington University in Exercise Science and Sports Psychology in 2005. I have been coaching track and field for the past 7 years, 3 years at the collegiate level and 4 at the high school level.

I am hoping to teach high school PE and Health. I would prefer to teach strength training and conditioning, as I was a personal trainer for almost a year. As a coach I also enjoy the psychological part of sports and competition and how that effects a person's performance.

My favorite animals are ducks. I love their group/family dynamic, their migrations patterns, how move in a out of water and how delicious they taste! (Peking Duck is possible the best thing ever!)