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I absolutely loved this video! I agree with every word of John Seely Brown.
As human beings, we need people to know how to behave in our "human world", what is acceptable and what is not. To learn a language, we need to be surrounded by people in order to know how it works, to hear it and express our thoughts. We need interaction with people to learn anything.
So, what can we do better in schools today? I guess, a very big step towards bringing our students to success is implementing cooperative learning activities. Students learn from each other and they share their knowledge with their classmates. We need to create activities that are meaningful to them, that they can easily relate to. We need to foster their imagination and let them create, work with their imagination, play with knowledge, experiment.
Mr. Brown called it an "architectural studio". Students' work is made public, then it is criticized by peers and a "master". He mentioned something important at the end. He said that the identity is constructed on how students participated in the project, what they have done and how it was received by other members of peer-based learning community.

Computer class management

During my last practicum, I had a chance to observe a class given by my cooperating teacher in a computer lab. To my greatest surprise, it was not that big of a nightmare! The students knew what they were doing, no one was off task. They did have a lot of questions on how to find sources in English, but they were cool with the rest. This experience reassured me about bringing my future students to a computer lab.

I guess the most important things while in a lab are to be prepared (to get familiar with the program, anticipate the worst, have a plan B, etc), to stay calm and to ask students' help when needed (just because sometimes our students are more comfortable with computers than we are AND to make our students feel important). These are my initial rules.

One sure thing is that absence of lab experience should not be an obstacle for teachers to bring their students to a lab. We take risks, make lots of mistakes and learn.

Opensource Software

Before reading this article: http://www.computerlanguage.com/2020.pdf, I had no idea what "Opensource" meant. It is software that is open to everyone. Anyone can go and use it, and contribute when he feels like it. People are working voluntarily and are doing good for society.

In order to better understand what it is, I googled it! While reading on it, a question popped up "What is the difference between opensource software and free software?" I google it again and found a great line by Richard Stallman (I also googled him and according to Wikipedia he is "an American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer; founder of the Free Software Foundation"), who says the following: "free software is free as in speech, not as in beer." So, as I understand the word "free" in this term means both "zero cost" and "freedom". I still have lots to figure out and google... Oh, by the way, google is built on open source...

For my Computer Applications class, I used KompoZer to create my web folio, Blogger to blog and phpBB3 to communicate with my future colleagues. All this software is amazing and free of charge! I am impressed! Way to go!

Big Brother is watching me?

I have always been paranoid about posting information about myself online. However, today it is almost impossible not to. These days we spend a lot of time on our computers; the Internet has become an important part of our lives. Personally, I rarely speak to my friends by phone, I e-mail, message and facebook them instead and I see a great advantage of it!
While using the Internet, we have to be smart about what information we give away. I have always thought that the Big Brother is watching us. Just take Facebook for example. Just by visiting my profile, someone can know who I am, where I have been, whom I know. They can see all kinds of pictures, read some personal messages on my wall. When accepting a friend, I must confirm how I know him, where and how we met. Who needs all that information?

Response to "Pay Attention"

I really liked the video. Makes you think how advanced our children are and how technology can be used in order to teach them. Unfortunately, a lot of teachers see new technology as distractors during their classes and require cell phones and I-Pods to be off. By doing that, we don't realize that we are actually missing on opportunity to engage our students more in our classrooms.
Why don't we want our students to use these technologies, that they are so good at already, to learn something new? Is that because we don`t know how to use them properly? Are we afraid that our students are better at this than we are? Do we see technology the way children do? Students can teach their teachers! It is all about sharing knowledge, isn't it?

Imagine teaching Question formation and then, as a reinvestment activity, ask our students to sms 3 questions to people they know. And get bonus points if they get replies in English. This kind of activity will be more relavant to our students than "form 10 questions in your activity book". Can you imagine their faces when you ask them to turn their cell phones on and actually use them?
Check it out here:
http://www.proticblog.net/profs//index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=186&blogId=29

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