Arnotb TCI515 Developing Ethical Directions

It takes an entire village to raise a child is appropriate to invoke in this situation. All of the adults involved in a child's life are going to influence the ethical compass that the student views the world through. This compass will also be influenced heavily by the student's peer group/friends. Finding a way to engage the students in a discussion about digital ethics is important and challenging. The challenge for the adults is to engage the students at their level and get them to take the conversation seriously. With the middle school students I deal with they are pushing the boundaries of adult authority. It is a critical time to engage them in the conversations about digital ethics as they are gaining more access to technology and are trying to fit in socially. This need to fit in will lead some of them to make poor decisions regarding technology use.

The authors indicate that simply giving the students appropriate use policies is not enough. I would agree that they need more than just a set of guidelines. They also need to have clear boundaries as they will test the boundaries and often see what they can get away with. If we can have a couple activities in our classrooms that are followed up by the parents and others involved in their life than we might have a meaningful impact.

I think we all need to have a discussion about what is perceived as appropriate use of technology in the classroom. We also need to realize that what is appropriate is influenced by how comfortable we are with the technology being used. The use of PDA's and cell phones in classrooms are not allowed at this time but there may be appropriate uses for the students in the future. How can we work with the students so they don't have to "unplug" to be engaged in the lesson and make their education meaningful?

Arnotb TCI515 Lessons learned from web based project

Lately our curriculum provider has been posting instruction videos for the students on their website. I wanted to figure out what was involved in creating and posting a video on the web. So I brought my video camera to school and taped me going through a key problem after school. I found I had to change the lighting in the classroom and also change the background in my slide because the details were getting washed out in all the white coloring. After recording the video I transfered the information to a DVD like I use to do with soccer games and then copied the files from the DVD to my computer. When I looked at the files they did not seem to fit any file format I recognized. I then tried to import the files into Microsoft Movie Maker and they were not recognized there either. So I determined that I needed to get a different cable that would allow me to connect my camera directly to my computer.

Once I did this I was able to import the video into Microsoft Movie Maker and then upload it to Teacher Tube. When viewing the movie I think I would look at saving it in a lower speed connection format so the video would play without all the pauses for reloads. I had set the recording for a connection speed of DSL lines and would probably reduce it down to ISDN speeds.

After class I followed up on suggestions from a teacher at my school and one from our cohort to discover that I could record the work I do on the activeboard directly to a AVI file without the video camera. The next issue will be to test the sound recording ability to see if this will work effectively.

I will still need the video camera method for the videos I need for Procert so I am happy that I went through this process.

Here is a link to the video I posted on teacher tube. http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=42fbcd5c4eb73fe7dce0