Privacy and Filtering

Week 10

Contrast the issues of privacy and filtering when using the Web in the classroom. What are the responsibilities of a teacher in each of these areas?

First and foremost, when it comes to the area of privacy and schools, in no way should a teacher ever put a student’s name or picture on a webpage on the internet. This can put the child at harm for suspecting child molesters or for any persons who are looking to harm that child. There are also very strict guidelines set forth by the school in each district for what the teacher can also put on the school webpage, as well, and each teacher, if they choose to put something online, should be knowledgeable about these guidelines. If, for example, a teacher wanted to put a sample of a student’s writing online, as a guide on how to write a term paper, the teacher could omit the name and write “this is student A’s paper on how the mummification process in ancient Egypt was conducted.” Or if it was written by a group of students, the teacher could write “this is a step by step procedure by group C in first period on how to carefully weigh a small amount of unknown mass.” The point is that in no way should anyone on the site know who the teacher is talking about, or should there be pictures of the students on the page.

Filtering, on the other hand, is from the opposite spectrum. It is what the school wants to keep the students from gaining access to. Privacy can be seen as what we do not want other people to see at the school, filtering can be viewed as what we do not want our students at the school to see online. For instance, I would assume (and hope) that most, if not all schools in the U.S. would have some sort of adult filter on their school computers. This would mean that students on these computers would not be given access to adult sites. Other “harmful” sites could be gang, violence, drug, or crime related websites. We do not want our students to view these websites at all, much less at school. I know at my school, our school filter has Youtube and Myspace blocked. They cannot view these sites on any school computer.

The role of the teacher in both privacy and filtering is to keep the student safe. We as teachers need to keep students safe in privacy because we do not want strangers or deviants on the outside to gain information about our students inside our schools, and potentially harm them before or after school hours. With filtering, we can hopefully avoid some knowledge of heinous behavior at school through the use of the internet, and it is through the compliance of all the staff that this works. No plan is fool-proof, but we can take baby-steps in the right direction. Cyber-bullying has submerged as a new type of bullying recently. This is where people insult, bully, and heckle their classmates through instant messages, blogs, and personal websites at home. When students leave the classroom, school does not end for all classmates. Some of the children carry it home with them. With online access at home, some students can feel like they’re back at school again. But at school, we can try to make them feel safe while we’re there.

Streaming Media Week 9

What are streaming audio and streaming video? How have they altered the use of audio and video on the internet?

Streaming audio is a format of listening to sound clips from the internet that allow the audio to come in through a continuous flow or stream. Other forms of download such as WAV or MP3’s require one to download the entire sound clip first before allowing you to listen to the sound clip. With streaming audio, you can listen to the sound clip as it is coming in, and it does not permanently save to your computer. RealOne Player uses this technology, and you can listen to online concerts and some online radio stations as well. However, if your computer does not have RealOne player, you may have to download it before you can listen to the sound clips. Streaming audio is really a nice alternative to downloading an entire sound clip, because you do not have to wait for the entire file to download before listening to it. You can listen to it after a mere few seconds. For our class, our pod casts uses this streaming audio feature.

Similar to streaming audio is streaming video. Videos are nice because rather than just listening to sound, you can watch what is going on as well. However, the main thing that most people dislike with watching videos online is that they can take a long time to download, because the file sizes can be very large. With streaming video, you watch the video as it is downloading. There is no need to wait for the entire file to download to your computer before watching it. However, on the downside is that the videos can be somewhat choppy or fuzzy if there is a lot of people downloading from that site at the same time.

The ways that streaming audio and video have changed the ways that people use audio and video on the internet is that people no longer have to download music completely to listen to it or download an entire movie file. People can go to Yahoo music and listen to music online without downloading it to their computer (by paying for it legally, of course), or watch a music video online without having to download it to their computer. Educators can capitalize on this concept as well. They can go to educational sites and show educational videos to their students, and not have to spend class time waiting for the video to download, or spend their planning period trying to get the file clip to download to a CD or DVD. They can instantly show the file in class with little wait and show the students that day’s lesson from the internet.

Problem Solving Software vs. Brainstorming Tools. Week 8

What is problem solving software? Contrast it with brainstorming tools. How does each promote critical-thinking skills?

Problem solving software is a software program written to help students practice their problem solving skills. For instance, in the field of science, it could help a student formulate and test a hypothesis, and in the field of mathematics, it could help that same student find multi-step strategies to find solutions to complex word problems, correctly apply mathematical formulas, correctly identify and apply theories, rules and concepts to predict outcomes. In a psychology class, if a student were to study the aspects of behavior, they could then deduce what a person with X personality would do in situation Y. The benefit to problem solving software is that they help the student by allowing them to work out the problems physically and mentally, and thus they learn by doing. In math (since that is my field), students can test out relationships and see if they hold true for all values of x and y, and make a logical hypothesis for all cases. The problem solving software is good, since it is a multimedia program, and as we learned last week, today’s students are different from yesterday’s students, and need a wide array of constant stimuli to keep them entertained.

Brainstorming tools is a program to digitally connect two or more ideas and create connections between them. Some of them only use text, while other use clip arts and other forms of media. What usually happens is this: you start with one or two main ideas. Let us say we’re going to start with the idea of food. For the sake of argument, we are going to say there are two kinds of food, healthy and fast food. So, from the main idea of food, we branch off an idea bubble to healthy food, and an idea bubble to fast food. From the healthy food bubble, we then branch off to other forms of healthy food, such as organic, lean, low-fat, low-carb, low-calorie, etc. For fast food, we would then branch off some fast food choices, such as McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Arby’s, Taco Bell, etc. If we wanted to go into more detail, under McDonald’s, we could do another branch off and branch Big Mac, double cheeseburger, French fries, chicken Mcnuggets, and if we even wanted to go further than that, we could branch off from Big Mac and say hamburger patty, lettuce, bread, sauce, etc.

The way that problem solving software differs from brainstorming tools is that problem solving software builds the skills that a student needs to solve (perhaps) complex problems that they may encounter later in life, such as money matters or how to get around a certain situation. Brainstorming is, in simple terms, how two or more main ideas are connected, and finding the connections between the main ideas, and what sub-categories fall under each main idea. It does not involve any problem solving, except to figure out what sub-idea goes with what main idea. Each promotes critical thinking in that problem solving makes a student think really hard on trying to figure out different way to find a solution to one problem, and brainstorming requires a student to figure out what pieces of the puzzle go together. For instance, say we have a topic on the discussion of sea animals. And we talk about sea snakes. Will a third grader know that an eel is a fish, or will they think that an eel is a snake? What about a sea horse?

Today vs. Yesterday: Week 7

Using technology today: today’s students vs. yesterday’s students


What some of the first articles pointed out that we read were that people our age grew up in a completely different environment when it came to education than today’s young students. I completely agree with the statement when it says that older students today must have silence when they study, and cannot understand how some of the younger students can study with so much noise and music. I like to be immersed in complete silence when I do my reading and homework, and the slight distraction bothers me. Today’s students are growing up with more distractions around them. They have more electronics around the house than when we were their age. I did not have my first computer until I was a junior in college, yet many children now have computers and can use them even in pre-school or for elementary school. Some of the later articles said that email was the preferred way of communication between students and professors, but I am sure that if a high school student or an elementary school student was having problem with an assignment, he or she could easily send an email to their teacher and the teacher would quickly respond to that student.


Other ways that today’s students are different from traditional students are that traditional students go to college immediately graduating high school. In today’s world, sometimes that cannot happen. Money is a huge factor in college. Sometimes a student has to work a few years and save up finances to pay for a college education. Perhaps a child was born and they need to provide together for their child for a little bit before continuing their education. Maybe something happened in their family and the son needs to stay home and work and bring home some extra money to help the family out. Traditional students differ in the way that they immediately went to college after graduating from high school, and typically graduated in four years. Some went on to pursue a master’s degree, and a few more onto a Ph.D. Times have changed today that non-traditional students are becoming more and more of the norm and traditional students are becoming the non-traditional student.


I can, of course, only speak for myself when I say this, but this online course has really helped me this semester. I was a traditional student when I earned my bachelor’s degree, but took several years off, and am now earning my master’s. I currently teach, and I would find it extremely hard to attend a class every Wednesday night. Having a class online really helps me, since I do not have to turn in an assignment at the same time every week, and I can do it a few days early, or perhaps do it a day later the next week. However, to have an online class, there must be instruction. The instructor needs to know that her students understand the material. We must turn in our own work that the instructor can measure and that we can show our progress in the course. We must work in teams to help each other out. Educational material must be posted on the web for us to view, and we must be motivated to learn. More importantly, we must be able to see how we can imply this into our own classrooms.