Reflections

Activity #9

a. This video is relevant to secondary English because it shows how the community of the internet has ingrained itself into our culture. This is a valuable resource for any student of English or anything else to have access to. When viewing this video from the perspective of a future teacher, it makes me interested in the idea of a virtual classroom. There are obviously many issues with that but online the mixture of: anonymity, physical distance, and rare & ephemeral dialogue creates the freedom for students to experience humanity without fear or anxiety. Students should be able to take advantage of the benefits of the online community when learning. The video also gave a good insight into the negative effects of television in our society.
b. Recognition in the video was describes by the one man in the clip as: cognition was seeing and learning something once and then when seeing it again or learning again it was recognition. The video talked about how the whatever generation was seen as narcissistic but that it was really a core ethic of our society. That the generation was searching for identity and recognition in a society that does not provide either, this they called the search for the authentic self. This was more about television and how it is a one way stream of information coming from one source. The video was concerned with how such a small population gets recognition and is able to provide input into the one way stream of information. So in the youtube community it is a two way stream of information and anyone can provide input or clarification.

Activity #8

I was most interested by the high school psychology webpage and tried to imitate the simplicity as much as possible. I saw that the teacher set it up to have links to all the lessons on the sidebar. If I had lessons to post I would set it up all on one page. I liked the teacher's idea of having all his information on one page. He had a picture of himself, the links to the lessons, and a paragraph about himself and his teaching philosophy. If I were to create my own classroom blog I would try to make it as simple as possible. In my blog I moved the blog list that was clogging up the right side of the page to the bottom and I tried to create a sidebar of links just like the psychology teacher did. I still need help editing my blog honestly. The idea of having all my personal information on one page with all the resources organized and linked to the sidebar is appealing because I want students to be able to find what I want them to and what they want to easily. I tried to simplify my page by moving the giant blog list to the bottom and freeing up some space to work on some links to useful sites.