Planning for Action

This week I have been working on my presentation for the upcoming community showcase on November 5th.  I am starting to struggle with how to get my project going.  I know that my topic is something I am passionate about but sharing my passion with the community is going to be hard for me because it is difficult to find a place to start.  My first quarter goals were to get my plans in motion for my project and I have done that in terms of knowing what I need to accomplish but I haven't put my plans into action yet. Have you ever had a moment when you don't know where to start because you had so many options?

Is technology going to conquer us?

In this blog post I want to talk about the effect technology has over us, especially younger people who have grown up in the digital era.  Technology has changed the way we communicate with everyone whether it be texting our family and friends or having a conversation with another person on social media.  I think younger people have an unhealthy addiction with their cellphones but I also think the dependence on technology and phones stretches across all age groups.  The stereotype that only young kids depend on their phones is very untrue.  Everyone that has a phone for a long period of time is going to feel dependent on it because of how fast and easy it is to communicate with the world.  Even though older people might be able to go longer without using their phone because they know what it's like to not have that access to the internet, after a while they would start to miss it too. For me personally, not having my phone when I'm not with friends can start to affect my mood because I feel alone and I don't have anyone to talk to.  Technology and constantly texting all the time does start to affect our social skills for sure.  Last year I hated talking to people on the phone because I was nervous about having to sustain a conversation with someone and not being able to think about what I wanted to say before I hit "send".  Even calling my extended family, people I have known my entire life, would make me nervous.  This year I have worked on this problem just by picking up the phone and calling my friends and family and talking to them more. I am a lot more comfortable talking on the phone than I used to be and I believe that as long as our society doesn't become so comfortable with being online all the time that we can't call someone on the phone, technology won't conquer us.  If we don't lose the face-to-face connection with people then technology can never conquer us.

Failure vs. Success

This week in class we talked about failure in school and personal life.  We watched a ted-talk by Carol Dweck and some of her points were grading with not yet instead of failure and having a growth-mindset.  Grading with not yet is supposed to be a way of saying "you didn't fail, you just aren't there yet. Keep trying." I really like this idea because everyone takes failure differently and some people give up when they consider themselves a failure. The idea of "not yet" would be an encouraging way to help students get through challenging obstacles.  Her other point was the growth-mindset.  A person with a growth-mindset looks at obstacles and is excited about facing them.  The last thing she said in her ted-talk that stuck out to me was that we should praise wisely.  Instead of praising inteligence or talent, praise effort.  This stuck out to me because it can be hard to watch someone be praised for something that is so easy for them and then no one praises or acknowledges your effort.  Some days when you are tired of facing challenges and you want to give up, you need that praise because it keeps you going.  The class discussions this week changed my views on failure vs. success in school and life because I realized how easy it is to give up and not want to face your obstacles, but having a growth-mindset helps you conquer your obstacles because you know you can improve and do better.

Twitter Chat Tutorial

On this upcoming Thursday, I am going to be involved in a twitter chat tutorial after school helping students and teachers learn how to be involved and host a twitter chat. A twitter chat is when a group of people get onto twitter and have a discussion about the topic of the host's choosing. Twitter chats are very easy to use and Twitter is a social app that allows everyone to communicate with each other without being in the same area, state, even country. I like that twitter makes it so easy to communicate with people who you would most likely not talk to in your everyday life. Twitter can also be used for educational purposes. If teachers were to hold twitter chats on a weekly or monthly basis, students can have discussions about the class whether it's for the lesson that they learned in class that day or a study session the night before a test. A group of students that have a twitter account can plan to get online at a certain time on a specific day. For example, a group can decide to get online and have a discussion at 7pm on Wednesday night. A downside to twitter chats is that you have to use a hashtag of your choice for others to see your tweet so if you forget to hashtag, no one will see your tweet unless they personally follow you on twitter. The other issue with hashtags is that if someone uses the same hashtag that is being used for your discussion, then your group will see their tweet. Other than hashtags, I think twitter chats are great to use personally and for school. I feel that having a twitter chat the night before a test to discuss things would be helpful to myself and other students and also if a student wasn't able to log into twitter at the time that was agreed, they can still search the hashtag later that night and read through the discussion on their own time. I believe that twitter chats will be very beneficial to not only my school, but schools all over the country.

Technology in the School System

Today I want to talk about education in the digital age and how it is going to be in the future.  My generation is the first generation to really be learning through technology.  When I was younger smartboards had just started to come out and they were being installed in schools.  I remember how excited my classmates and I were when we started using smartboards and everyone wanted to participate because we would get to go up to the board and write things.  That feeling of excitement to learn and participate in the class activities is how every student should feel about education.  I believe that technology really gives that to us because we are able to have more resources available to us.

Technology in the school system has come a long way but it still has a very long way to go.  At my school we have an ipad air for every student to use but many of the teachers prefer not to use them because they don't think that the ipads are helpful to the class.  The teachers have caught students playing games on the ipads and they take them away from students because they don't want us to be distracted.  It causes the teachers to not ever use the ipad in class and the whole class has to suffer the consequences of not being able to use their ipad because of the students who do play games.  My school has even resulted in taking away the app store from everyone's ipad and I really believe that this was the wrong approach because there is always going to be someone to figure out how to download apps onto their ipad and then everyone has them.  If schools are going to have technology available to students then they should give us full access to our resources because if they don't we are still restsricted to the apps they have us and it limits are creativity.  There are thousands of apps available on the app store and we have access to less than 200 apps.

  In the future, students will be able to do amazing things with the new technology that will be available for them to use but for right now I don't think technology in schools is being used to the best of it's ability.  As of right now many of the teachers are not used to the technology, schools are not willing to give the students full access to the ipads, and many schools don't even have the technology available to them.  I would prefer to either have all of our assignments on the ipad or have them all on paper.  To ask students to use the ipad for some classes and then never use it for other classes is too much in my  opinion. One of the reasons we started using ipads was because we wanted to limit the number of books students have to carry and the school also wanted to  limit the amount of bookwork we do. I still carry the same amount of books and binders in my backpack and in my opinion the amount of bookwork hasn't changed.  Hopefully technology will be better used in school systems after a few years have passed and schools know how to use it well.

Twitter Chat

Recently in class we have started talking about twitter chats.  Twitter chats are when a group of people use a hashtag to discuss a topic that someone has picked out.  A moderator can have a twitter chat on any topic that they would like and anyone can join.  If I was a moderator of a twitter chat I would probably want it to be about fashion and makeup and I would want to talk to other girls my age about the hot topics going on right now but if I were to make a twitter chat for my DigCit class, the topic would be along of the lines of bullying.  I wouldn't make my twitter chat about stopping bullying though because everyone already knows bullying is wrong.  Instead, I would want to ask questions about why people bully others and I would also ask if anyone has been the bully or has been bullied.  I think I would make it a survey type of twitter chat so I could get other people's feedback.  I've never understood why people are mean to others.  If I ever say something mean to someone it stays on my mind for what seems like forever and I can't imagine someone causing harm to someone else and thinking that it's okay.

I could use a twitter chat as part of my Genius hour project by creating a discussion about autism and start by asking people if they know of anyone who has autism spectrum disorder.  Twitter chats are an effective way of communicating with others because it is quick and easy.  As long as you use the hashtag that is provided, you can share your opinion with everyone that is in the discussion.  It is also effective because people that follow you will see your tweets and it could possibly spark their interest and make them want to join the chat.  The only problem that I see with twitter chats is that you only have 140 characters to type your opinion and if your comment requires more, than you have to either shorten your response or send it between two tweets.  Other than that, I really like the idea of twitter chats and I'm excited to participate in one.

Shark Tank

I presented my Shark Tank to the class and I also recieved a lot of good feedback.  Everyone had to present their idea the way contestants would present their ideas in the tv show. The Shark Tank process really helped clarify my Genius Time project because I didn't know where I wanted to go with my project and now I have a clearer vision of what I want to do.  At one point I was going to change my project from speaking about kids with autism to something along the lines of gay marriage and accepting people who are different than us but I quickly decided to stick to my topic of autism because I felt that it was more personal to me and therefore would be easier to talk about.  After researching my topic I learned some new statistics such that autism is the fastest growing developmental disorder in the U.S.  I wasn't aware that it affected so many children in the U.S. and that boys are five times as likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls are.  One of my goals for the near future is to find a mentor who knows a lot about autism and has experience working with kids who have autism spectrum disorder.